Kissing Kate Read online

  CHAPTER 2

  “BETH!” I CALLED. “ BREAKFAST! ” I felt conspicuous with my bandaged finger, but at least I’d stopped crying. I passed Jerry his bagel, then plucked Beth’s from the toaster and dropped it on a plate.

  “Thanks,” Jerry said. He put down the paper.

  “You going in today?” I asked. Jerry used to work the grave-yard shift at the city waste-treatment facility, but he gave that up, along with his trailer and his vintage Harley-Davidson, when he came to live with us. Now he managed a plant nursery over by Chastain Park, and he often worked on weekends.

  “Yeah. Sophie’s trying her hand at the cash register, so I need to be there to supervise. You want to come? Got some new saplings that need to be potted.”

  “Can’t. I’m getting my hair cut.” I craned my head toward the door. “Be-eth!”

  She pounded down the stairs and dropped into her seat. She reached for the jar of jam. “Hey, Lissa,” she said, “I want to go to the mall with Nikki. Can you drop us off?”

  “I guess,” I said. “But we need to leave soon.”

  “Okay. Nikki’s cousin Vanessa might come, too. She just moved here from North Carolina, and she’s going to be in my homeroom at school.”

  “Well, you be nice to her,” Jerry said. He took a sip of coffee. “I’m sure she’d appreciate a friend.”

  “Nikki says she was the most popular girl in her class where she used to live. She has a tattoo.”

  “A tattoo?”

  “Uh-huh, a daisy. I’m going to get one, too.”

  “Beth—” Jerry said. He turned to me for help.

  “They come in a package for about two bucks,” I said. “You press them onto your skin and they wash off after a couple of days. They’re like stickers.”

  “They’re not like stickers,” Beth said. “Anyway, when I’m older I’m going to get a real one, like Kate’s.”

  Jerry lowered his cup. “Kate has a tattoo? A real one?”

  I glared at Beth. “No.”

  “She does so. On her ankle, a little purple moon.”

  I could feel Jerry’s look, but I didn’t respond.

  Too late, Beth realized she’d messed up. “Oh. But maybe that was someone else. I think I got confused.”

  I ignored her. By now my bagel was cold, and I pushed it away. “So Sophie’s working out?” I asked Jerry.

  His brow cleared. “Yeah. So far, so good. She’s a chatter-box, though—I’ll tell you that.”

  Sophie was Jerry’s new floor clerk, and she was nice in a goofy, overbearing kind of way. She had to be in her late thirties, yet she still wore ceramic earrings shaped like cats and hearts and question marks, and her tennis shoes were red with sparkly gold laces. And Jerry was right: she was definitely a talker. The day I met her she went on for twenty minutes about her gray-and-white-striped kitten, which she’d rescued from the pound the week before. “I named him Q.T.,” she told me. “As in the initials.” She waited for me to get it. “Q.T., because he’s such a cutie pie. Isn’t that a hoot?”

  “Well, good,” I said now. “You need someone to make the customers feel welcome.”

  “Maybe.” He downed the last of his coffee. “So how is Kate? She hasn’t been around much these days.”

  I took my dishes to the sink. “She’s been busy.”

  “Busy? I thought you two were glued together at the hip.”

  “She’s got her gymnastics meets. You know. And school’s been kind of overwhelming, even though the semester just started. Fall semester, junior year—it’s when all the teachers start piling on the work. They say it’s to get us ready for college. Anyway, it’s just been really busy for everyone.”

  “Huh,” Jerry said. “Sounds like it.” He pushed his chair out from the table and returned to his paper.

  Beth brought up her plate and rinsed it off. “Maybe you could ask her to go with us to the mall,” she said softly.

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “I said no, Beth.” I yanked open the dishwasher. “Go call Nikki. If she’s going with you, she needs to get ready. I’m leaving in half an hour.”

  Upstairs in my room, I flopped onto my bed and stared at the ceiling. Why had I treated Beth like such a jerk for mentioning Kate’s tattoo? It wasn’t my job to protect Kate, and even if it were, she hardly needed protection from Jerry. It wasn’t like he was going to call her parents or anything. Anyway, it had been almost a month since she’d gotten it. Surely they’d noticed by now.

  “A tattoo?” I’d exclaimed when Kate first suggested it. We were sitting in a booth at McDonald’s, and I looked at her over the top of my Coke. “Kate.”

  “What’s wrong with a tattoo? I’ll get a cute one, not ‘I Love Mother’ stenciled across my biceps.” She laughed. “God, wouldn’t she love that.”

  I’d smiled. Kate’s mom already hated the fact that we didn’t dress more like “ladies.” “You two have such darling figures,” she chided. “You need to accentuate them. Boys like to see a girl’s curves.”

  “You have to come with me or I’ll wimp out,” Kate said, slapping some money on the table and standing up. “I need you, Lissa.”

  At the tattoo parlor—“Tattoo U” it was called—Kate got nervous and clutched my arm. “What if it hurts?” she whispered as a man named Big Joe readied the needle.

  “What if you get gangrene?” I whispered back.

  She drove her elbow into my side.

  “Ready?” said Big Joe. He wore a cracked leather jacket, and he had thick lines of oil, or maybe dye, under his fingernails. His stomach hung over his jeans like a sack of flour.

  Kate sat down across from him. “It won’t hurt, will it?”

  “Hell, no. No more’n a bee sting. You ever been stung by a bee?”

  Kate nodded.

  Big Joe cackled. “Hurts, don’t it?”

  Kate’s eyes flew to me, and I lifted my shoulders.

  Big Joe had her prop her ankle on a stool so he could stencil the outline of the tattoo. “A snake, right? Heh. Just kidding.” He switched on the tattoo machine, Kate turned pale, and fifteen minutes later it was done. Big Joe taped a gauze pad over Kate’s ankle and wiped his hands on his jeans.

  “Leave this bandage on till the next time you take a shower,” he instructed. “Then turn the water up hot—hot as you can stand it—and let the bandage soak off. The hot water’ll soak the plasma out of your skin, too, make it heal up quicker.” He gave her a tube of antibiotic. “You’ll want to smear on some of this ointment every day for two to three days. After that, switch to plain lotion. No aloe vera or any of that scented crap. Any questions?”

  Kate stood up. She was still a little shaky, but the color was coming back to her cheeks. “How long will it take to heal?”

  “Two to three weeks, unless I screwed up.” He slapped his leg. “That’ll be forty dollars, no out-of-state checks.”

  Afterward, we went to Baskin-Robbins to celebrate. “You’re amazing,” I told Kate as she slid in beside me in the booth.

  “I thought I was going to faint. I didn’t know it would bleed so much. Did you?”

  I shook my head. “I guess I thought it was more like getting your ears pierced.”

  “Yeah. Remind me to put on socks when I go home, so Mom won’t see the bandage.”

  I slurped my milk shake. “So. What about Big Joe? Pretty hot, huh?”

  “Omigod. Did you see that he does body piercings, too?”

  “You’re tempted, aren’t you?”

  She snorted, then leaned against me and put her head on my shoulder. “Hey, thanks for going with me.”

  “No problem.” I could smell her shampoo. Paul Mitchell, the kind that smelled like coconut.

  Nikki’s cousin Vanessa did want to go to the mall, which meant that all four of us—me, Beth, Nikki, and Vanessa—were crammed into the front seat of my Nissan pickup. It was an ’86, it had over two hundred thousand miles on it, and the first thing Vanessa said when she cl
imbed in was, “Is this your uncle’s truck? Nikki said you live with your uncle and that he’s really old and weird. Is this what he drives?”

  “Nope, it’s mine,” I said. “I bought it myself.”

  “My uncle is not weird,” Beth said, kicking Nikki’s foot. “And he’s not that old. He’s forty-two.”

  “Is that how old this truck is?” asked Vanessa. She scanned the dashboard. “Where’s the CD player? Where’s the radio?”

  I backed out of Nikki’s driveway. “Nikki and Vanessa, you two need to share the side seat belt. And Beth, you need to put on the one in the middle. You know that.”

  Vanessa whispered something in Nikki’s ear about the truck smelling like pepperoni, and the two of them cracked up. Beth eyed me reproachfully as she buckled up.

  “My friend in Raleigh?” Vanessa said. “Her big sister drives a red Miata. It’s adorable. That’s what I’m going to get when I turn sixteen.”

  “Me, too,” Nikki chimed.

  “Not me,” Beth said. “I’m going to get a BMW convertible.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. In Buckhead, the part of Atlanta we lived in, practically everyone drove expensive cars: Mercedes, BMWs, Saabs. That was one reason I loved my beat-up old pickup, even if it did smell like pepperoni. And actually, it wasn’t pepperoni. It was sausage. On Saturday nights I worked for Entrées on Trays, a catering service that did deliveries for a handful of different restaurants, and last week I’d picked up five orders of cannelloni from The Mad Italian. The smell did kind of linger, but I didn’t care. I thought Beth didn’t either.

  “Hey, Vanessa,” I said, “Beth says you just moved here from North Carolina. What do you think of Atlanta so far?” I wouldn’t have asked, except I thought I should give her another chance. After all, she was just a kid.

  “Tacky,” she said. “It’s like the tackiest place ever—that’s what my mom says. When we were driving here from Raleigh, we passed a huge water tower shaped like a butt.”

  Nikki and Beth giggled.

  “It’s not a butt,” I said. “It’s a giant peach. Anyway, the water tower you’re talking about is in South Carolina, not Georgia.”

  “Whatever. It looked like a humongous butt.”

  I shut up for the rest of the ride. Vanessa entertained Nikki and Beth by describing, in detail, a book she’d gotten for her birthday called How to Upscale Your Image. “There’s an entire chapter just about lipstick,” she said at one point. “Like how it’s really important to keep your lips moisturized, so you can apply your lipstick in an even coat. Of course, I don’t have to wear lipstick if I don’t want to, because I already have natural lip color. Not many people do.”

  I must have groaned, because Beth glared at me before turning to Vanessa and asking, “What about me? Do I have natural lip color?”

  Vanessa squinted. “Maybe if you chewed on them a little.”

  “Beth, you do not need to chew on your lips,” I said. “They’re fine.” I wanted to tell them that none of them needed to wear makeup, period. They were in the fifth grade, for christsake. But they’d moved from lipstick to eye shadow, and Beth nodded as Vanessa explained how to make close-set eyes appear farther apart by applying dark shadow to the outer corner of each lid.

  Then I started thinking, hell, maybe I should be the one paying attention. With Kate, I never worried about how I looked. It wasn’t important, and besides, she was beautiful enough for both of us. People treated me differently when I was with her, as if some of her spark rubbed off on me. Cuteness by association.

  “And if your skin tone is uneven—see how Lissa’s face is all blotchy?—well, that’s when you’d use base. No offense, Lissa.”

  I dropped off Beth and her friends at the mall and told them to meet me at Chick-fil-A at two o’clock. I parked my truck and walked across the street to Cost Cutters, where I had an 11:00 appointment. I’d planned on simply getting a back-to-school trim, but now, after listening to Vanessa for the entire car ride, I found myself considering something more drastic. Maybe short hair would look good on me. Something soft around my face, maybe some layers . . .

  Wait. I was letting a ten-year-old influence how I cut my hair? I’d worn my hair the same way for the last three years— shoulder length, the ends slightly turned under—and except for a disastrous attempt to grow out my bangs, I’d liked it just fine.

  I wondered what Kate would say if I cut it short. Kate had great hair: blond and thick and really soft, not coarse like mine. She used to get me to play with it when I spent the night at her house. She’d put her head in my lap while we watched TV, then close her eyes while I ran my fingers over her scalp.

  Last summer we put lemon juice on our hair to add highlights, and afterward, when she stood in the sun, the strands around Kate’s face glowed like gold. My hair turned kind of orange-y.

  “Auburn,” Kate said.

  “Yeah, right,” I responded.

  Now my hair was back to its usual dull brown, and the more I thought about it, the more I decided that a short haircut was just the thing to get me out of this rut. What kind of wimp was I if I couldn’t take a risk?

  “I need a change,” I told the stylist, whose name was Marcia. “Something kind of feathered around my face? Well, no, not feathered, exactly, but—”

  “Something classy,” Marcia said. She ran her fingers through my hair, lifting it in her hands as if weighing it. “A wedge. An asymmetrical wedge.”

  I should have known right then that I was making a mistake. I should have gotten up and run. “No, um, that’s not really what I—”

  “Oh, honey, it’ll be perfect.” She leaned closer and pressed her hands against my cheeks. “You have an oval-shaped face. See? You need something perky and full to bring out your eyes. Do you ever wear eyeliner?”

  “Well, no, not usually. Eyeliner kind of scares me. I don’t like touching my eyeballs, and I don’t think—”

  “You should consider wearing eyeliner, hon. You have lovely eyes.” She patted my shoulders and straightened up. “All right. Let’s get this show on the road!”

  I didn’t end up with an asymmetrical wedge, thank God, but it couldn’t have been much worse if I had. I finally convinced Marcia that I didn’t want to go super, super short, and so she chopped off my hair at this awful mid-cheek length that made me look like an Eastern European refugee. It was just short enough that I couldn’t tuck it behind my ears without it falling in my face, and just long enough that it wouldn’t stay in place if I raked it back with my fingers. In fact, if I’d gotten a super-short haircut and had been trying to grow it out for a couple of months, this is how it would look. I had gotten my hair cut in an awkward, growing-out stage. I had paid to get my hair cut in an awkward, growing-out stage. I even left Marcia a tip.

  “What did you do to your hair?” Vanessa said when I arrived at Chick-fil-A.

  “I cut it,” I said. I resisted the urge to try to push it behind my ears.

  “Well, duh,” Vanessa said. “But why? Are you going to go to school like that?”

  Beth looked mortified. She busied herself gathering their empty cups and refused to meet my eyes.

  On the drive home, while Beth, Nikki, and Vanessa tried out each other’s new lip balms, I mentally rehearsed my rules for future living. Never make a major hair change without thinking about it for at least a day. Never make a major hair change at Cost Cutters. And regardless of how horrible life is, don’t think a new look will solve the problem.

  CHAPTER 3

  I DROVE AROUND FOR A WHILE after dropping off Beth and her friends. I wasn’t due at work for a couple more hours, but I didn’t feel like hanging out at home. I turned right, and then left, and then left again, and before I knew it I was parked down the street from Kate’s house, staring at her window from the front seat. I knew she wasn’t there—her Jeep wasn’t in the driveway—but I didn’t care. I’d been thinking about her all day; at least this way I had something to focus on.

  What I’d been turn
ing over in my head was the fact that just because the two of us kissed, it didn’t have to mean anything. Friends did that kind of stuff sometimes. Not to the extent that we did, maybe, but girls at school walked around with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders, and I’d seen guys on the football team slap each other on the butt more times than I wanted to count. Plus, Kate was a very physical person to begin with—that’s just the way she was. She used to clutch my arm in the theater when we watched scary movies, and if my shirt tag was ever sticking out or my collar was messed up, she’d reach over and fix it without giving it a second thought.

  It actually took me a while to get used to how touch-y she was, back when we first started hanging out. Jerry wasn’t much of a hugger, even when he first moved in, and by the time I was in junior high, he’d pretty much stopped touching me altogether. So the first time Kate hugged me—it was after she got an A- on a science test that I’d helped her study for—I stiffened without meaning to.

  “What?” Kate said, pulling away. “You act like I’m your Great-Aunt Lucy or something.”

  “I don’t have a Great-Aunt Lucy,” I said.

  “You know what I mean. Do I have peanut-butter breath? Is that it?” She cupped her hand around her mouth and exhaled.

  “No, it’s just . . .” I shrugged. “I guess it’s been a long time since someone’s touched me.” I realized how weird that sounded, and I blushed.

  “Oh. Does it bother you? I mean, should I not hug you?”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “Good,” Kate said. “Touching is good.”

  I wondered if she remembered saying that. I wondered, if I brought it up, if she’d deny it. But that’s what I wanted to tell her, that one person touching another person was perfectly normal. It’s just that we’d been drinking that night at Rob’s—she’d been drinking, anyway—and so things went further than they should have.

  I thought of her hand on my skin, under my shirt. The surprise of it, my sharp intake of breath. My pulse quickened now in the truck, and I shoved the memory away. For several minutes I held myself still—eyes closed, head back against the seat. Then a car drove by, and I jerked to attention.