Bent Metal Kisses

“Jane?” Sophie sat down next to me. “Mom’s been out all night again.” She sniffled, her head fell forward. I put my arm around her and hugged her to me.

“I’m so sorry, Soph. I won’t leave you like that again. Did you stay at Aunt Nancy’s?” She nodded.

“I thought mom would be home by now. If not her, then you for sure.”

“Come on, we’re calling Gram.” I pulled her up with me and led her by the arm to the phone. An answering machine greeted me.

“Gram, it’s Jane and Sophie. You have to come home. You have to do something. Mom’s bad.”

“Come home, Gram!” Sophie yelled.

“Don’t call back, just get here as soon as you can.” I hung up the phone. Raelyn was screaming from the floor, still in her car seat. I picked her up. Her heart was beating fast and hard against me. I pressed her closer and rocked her. I looked down at Sophie and noticed she was crying too. I took them both into our bedroom and shut the door. I made a bed of blankets for us on the floor and lay down. Raelyn, snug between Sophie and me, smiled with gleaming, wet eyes. We didn’t talk, just held still. We were waiting. I counted in my mind how long it would take for Gram to get home from wherever she was, hear our message, and drive the three hours to pick us up and take us back with her. Wisconsin. The only place in the world I wanted to be.

My thoughts traveled then. From the park where I met Jamie to my Gram’s hands shuffling the deck of Uno cards. From the age of the milk in the fridge to my kindergarten teacher’s hairdo. From Mrs. Dalby, the way her mouth is shaped, to paper clips to cotton balls to the Great Lakes and Canada back to Wisconsin to settle finally on Stacy. There was insatiableness to thoughts of her. Her face was tattooed in my mind’s eye, my mind’s stomach, grumbling to feed this new and growing appetite. I fell asleep holding those thoughts in my mind. When Monday came and I was getting ready for school, they were still there.

There was an area out in front of school property where kids assembled each morning to talk and smoke, hang out, and look cool. Stacy was there among them most days. I braced myself before rounding the corner to where she was, where I knew she would be. I slowed, hesitated, leaned against the brick wall, filled my lungs, straightened my spine, and went.
All the people standing around her, smoking cigarettes, somehow resembled a Greek tragedy chorus. Their inhaling and exhaling punctuated with thinly nebulous smoke tendrils riding the air with breath and moisture, dust and odor, expressing a collective mental state of awkwardness, discord―a dull lowering pang, like a pinched nerve or a pulled muscle, an ankle blister rubbing against the tough leather edge of my boot.

She looked at me. The intense look in her eyes felt painful, like rabid snarling dogs, snorting and spitting and insisting that I bleed. The whole scene dried my mouth. I strode by, unaffected, indifferent, nodding casually, bleeding.

I went directly to the bathroom and locked myself in a stall, breathing heavily, a thin film of cold sweat on my forehead. Something inside twisted up and ached; each breath stabbed the spot gently, driving it deeper into my chest. I lowered my head and planted my palms against the sides of the stall.

Footsteps. Someone had walked in. I leaned down to see the shoes and recognized the heavy-soled black boots similar to mine, the kind that looked especially hot with the catholic school uniforms we had to wear.

“Jane.”

I held my breath.

“I know you’re in here.”

“Give me a little time.” I struggled to keep my voice even.

“You have study hall now, right?” Her voice sounded normal, even excited. No trace of the shame or anger it held the last time I heard it.

“After homeroom, yes,” I said, flushing the toilet, straightening my jacket, preparing to face her.

“Forget homeroom; let’s go.”

“Where?”

“You trust me?”

I opened the stall door and stepped out. She was standing closer than I expected, a sly, closed-lipped smirk on her face.

“Not really, no.”

She laughed, open mouthed. She ran her fingers through her hair and smiled wide. One of her two front teeth was slightly longer than the other, something I had noticed for the first time at the coffee shop. Without realizing it, I was smiling back, nodding yes.

She grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the restroom and out of the building. We walked to the bus stop and found a bus waiting there. She stepped on ahead of me and paid both fares. She sat in a single chair along the side of the bus and I took the seat behind her. We exited some time later at the far north end of the city on Western Avenue. There was nobody around. The shops were either boarded up or closed, the buildings empty. She started walking toward a large lot filled with crashed, junked cars and trucks. I looked up at the sign on the warehouse building next to it: “Brown’s Auto Construction.”

“It’s my uncle’s car shop. They’re closed on Sundays and Mondays.” I continued following her into the lot. We made our way deep in among the auto corpses to a small clearing between one very old green pickup truck with a smashed windshield and a concrete-block wall. She stopped and looked at me.

“You’re so intense,” I said, shaking my head.

“What? I didn’t say anything,” she smiled.

“Exactly. Why don’t you say something, do something…”

She laughed softly. “If you only knew what I want to do…”
I walked to the truck, my neck and face burning, put a shaky palm to the bent metal hood. I felt her behind me and turned. I stared at her, releasing whatever inhibitions I had been harboring, determined to match her, to top her. She gazed back. We stood there in silence, our unbroken stare like a magnet, pulling us closer together. Her face was centimeters from mine; I closed my eyes, leaned my forehead against hers.

“Open your eyes,” she whispered. I opened my eyes.

“One eye,” she said, and I saw what she meant. From that angle, with my forehead resting against hers, her eyes came together into one epic marbled-gray eye staring back at me. I laughed, falling forward into her. She fell back against the truck and put her arms around my waist, laughing and pulling me closer. We were both in hysterics then, fed by the tension. My stomach tightened with silent laughter, doubled and breathless, my head on her shoulder. Slowly the laughter subsided, leaving us again in silence.

She leaned against the side of the truck; I was pressed against her, her arms tight around my waist. I lifted my face to hers, so close that my lips brushed against her cheek, her chin, her mouth, activating a latent ache in the center of my chest to jump and whirl, rushing up, down, inside my tube throat, battering lightly my cage of ribs. Suspended there with our mouths barely touching, our lips lightly brushing together, I leaned back slightly, focused on her slender sloping neck, traced it with my finger, brought it to my mouth, tasted its warm sweetness on my tongue, orange peels mixed with roses and honey. Her skin prickled under my mouth, her breath in my ear entering my body; transforming it to a parallel series of minute channels, traveling dark and light striations of muscle and tissue through my legs, out the top of my head and hands and mouth all at once. My mouth, unhurried, ascended her neck, the ledge of jaw, the supple curve of cheek, connecting with her breath, shallow, swift little puffs for air. She was silent, motionless. The kiss: deep and hungry, inner oceans thrashing and roaring like mass applause, cheering us on from everywhere, a raging river, spraying billions of awards of white water to splash their wet approval on everything firm, like pure, glueless stickers, liquids hitting solids with a hiss.

Her body firmly against mine. Her breath hot, anxious. My mouth open, accepting, soft, moving. I closed my eyes and leaned all my weight against her, held her face in my hands, opened wider, pressed my pelvis against hers. Her hands slipped beneath my shirt and across my back, pulling me tight against her, pressing back with her hips. The space around us spread, dispersed, as the space between us disappeared.

Back at school, we walked side by side to the principal’s office. Having passed much more of the day than first period making out in the car graveyard, we didn’t know what else to do but tell the truth. Neither of us had so blatantly skipped school before, and this was high school, which made things seem much more serious. I didn’t care what would happen. I had never felt so happy, giddy, intoxicated. Stacy, with a smile on her face and the same faraway look in her eyes, didn’t seem to care either. We walked into the office and approached the secretary, Mrs. Nash.

“What can I do for you, girls?” she asked skeptically, seeing our exceedingly happy faces stroll in.

“We’re just getting here for the day,” Stacy said, still smiling.
“You have notes from your parents?”

“No,” Stacy replied, unashamed.

Mrs. Nash looked at me, eyebrows narrowed, contempt in her eyes. I shook my head and tried to look sullen.

“So you are admitting that you skipped almost the entire day of school?”

“Yes, Mrs. Nash, that’s right. We did skip almost the whole day of school.” Stacy laughed as she said it. Any trace of kindness immediately drained from Mrs. Nash’s face.

“Smart ass, you are. Have a seat. Both of you.” She tilted her furrowed brow toward the principal’s office and picked up her phone. We sat, stifled laughter, leaned against one another, a wall of crossed arms, bowed heads, and red faces.

“Ladies, come right in,” Father John said. He was the head principal of the school; we had expected only to deal with his assistant. Stacy’s sense of humor about the situation we were in suddenly subsided and gave way to fear. On the way into the office, I nudged her gently with my elbow and she shot a fearful glance at me, moved away.

“Stacy, I’m surprised to see you in here. Skipping school? And so smug? Where, may I ask, have you been all day? Your father will want to know when I call him in five minutes.”

“Please, don’t call him, Father John.” Stacy looked near tears.

“There is no question. He will be called. What I say to him depends on you now. Will you choose to be truthful with me, or will you choose to lie?

Stacy looked down, her face even redder, she opened her mouth.

“It was my idea, Father,” I said.

He turned to me, eyebrows raised.

“Was it? And who might you be?” He picked up a paper on his desk, lifted a pair of reading glasses daintily to his face, leaned forward, and peered at the paper.

“Jane Morrow.” He said nothing while he silently read whatever was on the paper.

“Ah. You’re not supposed to be here, Jane. Are you?” He looked up at me, lowered his glasses.

“I’m not sure what you mean, Father.”

“Well I think you do, after all. Students at Northside Catholic Acadamy come from other private academies, not from public schools. Seems someone has pulled strings, so to speak. It takes much more than good grades to get into my learning institution, Ms. Morrow.”

I looked at my hands in my lap, straightened my spine. I felt Stacy’s eyes on my face. I shifted in my seat.

“I think you will find that it will take very little for those strings to be broken,” he said, sitting back in his chair and folding the glasses carefully before placing them on the desk and folding his hands atop the paper with all of the information about me. I looked at his glasses and wanted to smash them.

“One more infraction, regardless of its degree of seriousness, and you, along with your sister, Sophie, will be out. Do I make myself clear?”

I nodded.

“You will serve a week of detention for today’s escapade. In addition, you will write a letter of apology to the teacher of each class you skipped as well as each of Ms. Wool’s teachers.”

My head shot up, my mouth dropped open. I stared at him, horrified.

“You chose to take responsibility, Ms. Morrow. And so you will. You are dismissed.” He stood up.

I walked away from her. I felt her steps quicken to catch up. I started running.

“Jane!” she called after me, running now too.

I stopped and whirled on her. She bumped right into me and I pushed her back. She stumbled to keep from falling and looked at me, shocked.

“What do you want from me?” I snapped, more as a statement than a question.

“I’m afraid, Jane.” Her voice was faint and forceful at once, as robust as it was delicate.

“What are you afraid of?”

“My Dad. Everybody. You.” She pushed her hair back with the palm of her hand. The collar of her shirt was askew; we had buttoned it back up unevenly.

“Everybody’s afraid, Stacy.”

“You’re not afraid of anything. I’m a mess.” She looked quickly down, but before she did her glance was deep and fervent. She was a particularly beautiful mess. Pockets of blackness and bowls of light, contrasting both in color and in meaning, stunning to witness.

“The only difference between you and me is that I don’t let my fear stop me.”

“My mom died. All I have is my dad,” she said, with a pleading sort of tone. There it was. This was the something more to her I had noticed but wondered about. It was what I had carried, unburdened now in the wake of it―that aching, world-weary personal loss, loss of person. And in no time, as if all the fire engines and ambulances in the world were streaking there, I rushed in to save her, or to be saved. I took her hand in mine. Something of the light, odd touch of her fingers wrapping themselves between mine breathed through established lines, stiff and rigid as they were, though with a freshness and weight lacking in the usual sensual whimsies. Her fingers shocked my center, yet I found them gentle, totally clear in their meaning on the most casual first touch, and shocking only in the sense that they were so original. The true thing, finally unaccountable and yet unmistakable.

“My dad would never understand how I feel about you. The world will never understand,” she said, dropping her hand away.

“I don’t understand,” I said, taking a step closer.

“Don’t you?” she whispered on my lips like a kiss.

I turned to walk away, not wanting to give in at that moment.

“Jane, just think about it. I’m sorry about what happened and I will make it up to you. Meet me at the old green truck on Saturday at noon.”

Dumb Girl

When I started 11th grade, I was reunited with Stacy. She sat in front of me in homeroom. I found her presence to be wholly distracting. Her blond hair curled soft against her shoulders and the clean, flowery scent of her shampoo lingered around her like a halo. When she walked into the room for the first time and looked around, she caught me already staring at her and her cheeks turned a redder pink. She looked fearful; she bit her lip, her eyes widened, but she smiled and walked toward me. She whispered “hi” and took the seat in front of me. The room changed. Books opened. The black letters before me turned into ants and walked away in wavering lines. Free at last, the white pages became fluttering moths. I thought about all the letters I had written to her. What was I thinking? When class ended, she turned.

“Hi, Jane,” she said.

“Hi.”

“Want to sleep over this weekend?”

“Sure!”

A long, awkward silence followed. Then she said: “Great!” And again she turned red.

When Friday finally came, I was already packed and ready to go home with her from school. We met after 9th period and walked together to the El, then took it to the Fullerton stop near her neighborhood and walked toward her house. We didn’t know what else to do, so we stopped at a coffee shop on the way and sat at a table, facing one another and sipping hot chocolate from big mugs. We talked, then sat long after there was nothing left to talk about, as if staring at each other for hours on end without talking was something normal for two teenaged girls who were friends.

That night we slept with our bodies locked together under the quilts like two pale plants with leaves folded around them, defenseless, as egoless as vegetables. When we turned over in bed, it was as if a small breeze had stirred us and not the act of human volition. I don’t remember sleeping, only listening to my beating heart, feeling the way the hairs on my arms stood on end like exposed nerve endings. Each one pulsed, it seemed, as if it had lungs and heart and blood vessels.

The next morning I woke up alone. I thought my sleepy brain made the room seem different, but then I remembered. I sat up and looked around. Stacy sat in a chair across the room looking at me. She was showered and dressed and writing in her journal; her face looked upset.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“Nothing’s wrong, Jane,” she said, her tone clipped. “I have a lot of homework to do and you should really just get going now.” I stared for a moment unable to say anything. The night before felt like a dream, the way we sat and stared at each other at that coffee shop. I thought I remembered touching her face with my fingers, even tracing the outline of her lips, thinking how beautiful she was, or did I whisper it out loud? I suddenly felt ashamed and embarrassed. I felt a knot forming in my chest; tears burned behind my eyes. I choked it down, threw off the covers, and quickly changed into my clothes. I left her house without another word. During the ride home, shame and embarrassment over my feelings burned in my gut, or rather, for expressing those feelings so freely, leaving myself open to be drawn upon and shot down, defenseless.

On arriving home, I found Jamie waiting on my front steps, tears running openly across the plains and valleys of his face, his deep eyes black with anguish.

“Jamie, what’s going on?” I asked while rushing to his side. He looked at the ground and opened his mouth then shut it, tears spilling wildly with the effort to speak. I sat beside him and put my arm around his shoulders. He stiffened and then relaxed, cloaked his naked face in the wideness of his pink palms, the length of his fingers extending toward the top of his head, and shook. I didn’t know for several moments that he was quietly sobbing until streams of tears made their way through the betweens of his fingers like gutters, pouring through and down, dripping and congealing in the dust below.

We sat for a long while, my arm around his shuddering shoulders, tears spilling through his thick fingers. Eventually his body quieted and his hands dried. I asked again.

“What happened?” He stared forward blankly for a full minute before he answered.

“My dad. He’s not my dad,” he said dully. I listened to his ragged breathing, the sounds of leaves rustling in the wind, birds and their languages. I wasn’t surprised.

“He went to prison for assault before I was born. He was locked up for over a year, I guess. My mom had another man even before he went away. She had me with ‘im soon as my dad was locked up. I mean, not my dad, you know—” I nodded.

“So my real dad, he was a union laborer in Iowa. My mom met him on the job; she was a secretary for a union organizer back then. She started up with ‘im. He took off when he found out she was pregnant. She had me and told my dad she found me in a basket on the front porch, you know.” I nodded. I gripped his shoulder with my hand.

“How did you find out?” I asked after he was silent for a minute.

Tears started leaking from his eyes again. He took in a deep breath and answered: “I caught ‘im on top of Heather. Mom wasn’t home. I found them in her room, neither of ‘em with any clothes on, him on top of her…” He started crying harder again. I grasped his shoulder and pulled him closer.

“I ran in there and punched the back of ‘is head hard as I could. He fell off ‘er and jumped up, came at me. I picked up a chair and swung it at ‘im. It caught ‘im in the face and he went down. His face was all gashed open and bleeding. He was knocked out. Heather was screaming ‘NO, NO, DON’T HURT MY DADDY’” He started crying in his hands again. He yelled out what Heather had screamed and its echo reverberated against the neighboring houses. Sophie came outside.

“Jane?” she said quietly.

“Go back inside, Soph. I’ll be right there,” I said.

“Where were you all night?” she asked quietly. “Mom never came home; I had to call Aunt Nancy.” Anger shot through my body and my fists involuntarily clenched. I had told my mom I would be sleeping over at Stacy’s and asked her to be home. Jamie raised his wet face from his hands and looked at me, his eyes echoing her question.

“I stayed overnight with a friend,” I told them both. “Now go inside, Soph. I’ll be in soon.” She walked back in the house and closed the door. I looked at Jamie. He looked at his shoes, kicked some gravel, and started talking again.

“I didn’t know what else to do so I called 911. I told them my dad was raping my sister then came after me and I hit ‘im in the head with a chair and knocked ‘im out cold.

They told me to stay put. The next second they were just coming through the door. No knock, no warning. They appeared. They took my dad away in an ambulance and they called my mom home from work.”

He was looking down. I could see puffy swells beneath his eyes. I knew he was ashamed to lift his face, to cry. I crouched before him and placed my palm awkwardly against his cheek. He looked up at me. His pain was palpable. Tears rose and spilled on my face and I quickly embraced him. He leaned against me and wept freely. I held onto him, my arms wrapped around his shoulders and my hands grasped at his back. I felt a fierce love and loyalty for him mixed with sharp hatred for the criminal he had mistaken for a father. I wanted only to remove the pain from his body and absorb it into me. He was as close to me as a real brother and he was the only person in the world who really knew me, the only one who cared to know me.

I cried. I cried for him, the love and the hate, the anger. I cried for me and for Sophie and Raelyn. I cried for Stacy. My eyes turned to great lakes, hot tears poured from them as if driven from the soles of my feet up through my legs, traveling dark and light striations of muscle and vein, building and gaining strength, drowning out all feeling and knowing, leveling all in its path. I might have continued on this way for fifteen minutes or more but I can’t be sure. Time grows slippery and stretchy sometimes. Jamie stopped crying, his body still and his arms firmly surrounding me.

I had collapsed during my fit onto him, and was sitting on his lap, crumpled against his chest. He loosened his hold and leaned back. Bracing me up with one arm he used his free hand to wipe my tears. He wiped them gently; his calloused fingers scraping the delicate, wet skin of my face lightly, tickling me. I giggled through tears and batted his fingers away. He held my face in his hand and gazed at me. I closed my eyes because looking at him felt too intense. His lips pressed against mine, which were wet from tears, and held still there for several moments. I thought nothing of it initially; it seemed quite natural to me. Then I sensed a shift in him, a sort of eagerness. He pulled me into him and pressed his lips harder against mine.

I began pulling away when his mouth opened and his tongue probed against my sealed lips searching for an entryway. I turned my face and pushed away from him, struggling to untangle my legs from his and stand up. I looked down at him and he dropped his head.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s OK.”

“It’s obviously not OK,” he said angrily, looking up at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. He softened.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you differently than you love me,” he said.

I looked away from him and sat back down beside him. His yellow Cheerios t-shirt was wrinkled from where I had bunched it in my hands and large dark wet spots from my tears littered the front and top of its shoulder. His shoulders were broad and his back was strong. His face was sweet yet handsome, lean and friendly. His eyes were deep brown and glittery. He was beautiful and he was my best friend. I felt that I should feel the same way about him that he felt about me, but I knew that I didn’t.

“Where were you last night?”

“I was with Stacy.”

“Do you love her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you wish she would kiss you like I just tried to?”

“No, I― yes.”

“Yes?”

“No.”

“Which is it?”

“I don’t know.”

He shook his head and looked away. He kicked the dirt and stood up. He took three steps away and turned around. He took one step toward me and stopped.

“I think you do know. I think you want her to. I think you’re gay.”

“Don’t be mad.”

“Why, am I right?”

“Yeah, I think you are.”

“Are you serious? Are you sure?”

“I would be in love with you if I weren’t.” A swift breeze blew my hair into my face.

“That doesn’t help me.”

“I’m sorry.”

He softened again. He sat down beside me and put his arm around my shoulder. I leaned my head against him and sighed.

“So what happened then?”

“What? When?”

“Last night is when.”

“Oh, nothing happened. I don’t even know what’s going on. I don’t think she feels the way I feel.”


“Well, she’s dumb then,” he said. I laughed and hugged him. He pushed me back, stood up.

“I feel like a jerk,” I said. He wiped his palms on his thighs. He didn’t look at me.

“She’s dumb,” he said, a slight, crooked smile on his face. He walked away. I stood, moved to go after him, stopped, sat back down. Dust plumed from the gravel where his white converse high-tops fell. I stared after him until he disappeared. I was fixed to the spot, unable to move or breathe. A car rumbled by as if in slow motion. The door behind me slammed.