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.”