Lucky Caller(36)

“Good,” he replied, unwrapping aluminum foil from a sandwich. He glanced over at me, eyebrows flicking up a little in a way that said, This is weird, right? Jamie and I were friends, but he and Alexis weren’t.

“Hey, do you know Kieran Cooke?” Alexis asked, as if this was not weird at all. “He’s in your homeroom, right?”

“He is, and no, not really.”

“You don’t know anything about his girlfriend at Yeatman, do you? The one on the debate team?”

“You seem like you know more about her than I do,” Jamie replied simply.

“She definitely exists, though,” Alexis said—not a question but a statement seeking confirmation.

Jamie was good-natured as always, but under the table his leg bounced up and down. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”

Alexis cut a look over at Natalie Fisher, seated to my left.

“See, I just don’t think Kieran’s a good Kiss Cam candidate, Nat.”

“Sorry?” Jamie said.

“Nothing,” Alexis replied, and a couple of the other girls at our table giggled.

I had felt supremely uncomfortable during this exchange, except for the fact that every time Jamie bounced his knee, his leg brushed against mine, and somehow that single, fleeting point of contact made me feel like there was molten hot lava at my core, radiating outward.

They had gone on talking about something else, and Jamie ate his sandwich and jiggled his leg and then the warning bell rang, signaling the end of lunch and the end of any more possible discussion of the Kieran Cooke strategy.

Jamie only asked me when we got off the bus at the Eastman that afternoon. We had spent the ride debating a hypothetical: Would you rather have a hit song that everyone knows but most people hate, or an album that a few people love but most people haven’t heard of? “Hey, what was Alexis talking about at lunch? What’s Kiss Cam?” A pause. “Besides that thing at basketball games. I figure they’re not, like, taking Kieran to a game just for that.”

“It’s a game Alexis invented,” I said, and for some reason I felt really embarrassed saying it out loud.

“What kind of game?”

“A kissing game. Sometimes they’ll play it at free period or lunch or whatever. She’ll, like, hold her hands up”—I made a rectangle with my fingers, held it in front of me, and scanned around like a camera panning across a crowd—“and pick someone random, and you have to go kiss them.”

Jamie didn’t speak, frowning down at the ground as we reached the front of the Eastman.

“Or, you know, get them to kiss you,” I added. “But you don’t just do it without their permission, that would be bad.”

“Sounds kinda bad anyway,” Jamie said. “Like kinda mean, right?”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Just, like … the idea of kissing someone because someone else told you to. How is that supposed to make the other person feel?”

“Happy that they get kissed, I guess?” It came out sounding defensive, and I had no idea why. Alexis wasn’t mean. She was just … her. “Or they don’t kiss you if they don’t want to. You can ask or whatever, but it doesn’t mean they have to say yes. And sometimes she does research, you know, like with Kieran. She wouldn’t pick him for Nat if he had a girlfriend.”

Jamie just nodded, but didn’t speak further.

Right now, back in the hallway at Meridian North with Alexis’s brother’s tape player in my pocket, I wondered if Alexis ever thought of Kiss Cam anymore. She’d had a boyfriend for the past couple of years, but they had broken up at the beginning of senior year. What would she do if I held up my hands, scanned the hall, and picked someone? Knowing Alexis, she’d probably go right up and see if they wanted to kiss her. She was fearless sometimes. But it wasn’t just fearlessness—it was a disregard for consequences that I both envied and disparaged.

She smiled at me now, gestured to my coat pocket where I’d crammed the tape player. “Hope that does the trick for whatever weird retro thing you’ve got going. It might need batteries, though.”

“Got it. Thanks.”





33.


THAT NIGHT, I CLOSED MYSELF in our room and popped Conrad and Mickey: The Supercut into the tape player, plugged in my headphones, and pressed play.

It took me … a while to realize the tape needed to be rewound. But once I figured that out, a voice—familiar but slightly altered—filtered through. It was my dad.

“This is Z 99-5, and we’ve got someone on the line here … What’s her name, Producer Shoebox?”

“Michelle.”

“Okay, Michelle. Are you there? What’s up? Or should I say, wazzup?”

[chorus of wazzups]

“Don’t do that,” the caller said. “No one likes that. Everyone is sick of it.”

“So did you call just to give us feedback, Michelle?”

“I’m calling because we’ve got beef.”

“You and me?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, Conrad, maybe Michelle wants some of your beeeeeef.” [siren sound] [cash register sound] [woman moaning]

“No one likes you either, Producer Shoebox. Okay? I listen to this show every day, and no one likes you, just so you know.”