Now Is Not the Time to Panic(8)

“I’m sorry I didn’t ask first,” I said, now very embarrassed. “I just, I don’t know, wanted to finally do it. So it wouldn’t be so scary. So I could move on and be normal.”

Zeke didn’t say anything. I thought he might kiss me for real, not for art but for real. But he didn’t. He smiled, sheepish, like he couldn’t control his mouth, and then said, “This could be fun.”

I thought he was talking about kissing but realized he was looking at the copier. “We could do something weird with this,” he went on.

“Weird,” I said, like it was a magic word, like all I had to do was say it out loud and my world would change.





Four


I DON’T THINK EITHER ONE OF US UNDERSTOOD HOW HARD IT was to create something good. We were smart kids, made excellent grades. Our teachers thought we were gifted because we could read and write at a slightly elevated level, because if we were gifted, then they weren’t wasting their lives teaching burnouts. Well, Zeke really was gifted, I think. He went to some fancy private school in Memphis, where they wore uniforms, where there was an actual class on sequential art and you could take it for actual credit. But that summer, away from school and classes and teachers, we were on our own, unsupervised, and we realized that we didn’t know what we were doing.

So for the next week, we sat at the table in my kitchen, drinking flavored instant coffee, and he drew his comics and I wrote my weird girl detective novel in my notebook, and occasionally we would brush our legs against each other, the slightest friction making my armpits sweat like crazy. We were sixteen. How did you prevent your life from turning into something so boring that no one wanted to know about it? How did you make yourself special?

We made collages from my mom’s old issues of Glamour, cutting out the mouths of every model, their pearly white teeth and plump lips. I couldn’t figure out what was creepier, the pile of mouths or all the discarded pictures of these beautiful women, jagged holes where their mouths had once been. We cut out the word beauty every time we saw it, until we’d covered a whole page with the word, until it looked like a different language, unrecognizable to us. We took all the sample strips of perfume, twenty or thirty of them with names like Fahrenheit 180 and Ransom, and rubbed them on our wrists until the combined smell became so overwhelming that we got sick. But I’d hold my arm out and Zeke would take it like it was a precious artifact from a museum. And he’d sniff and sniff, and I’d pray that he couldn’t smell me, what was underneath all that perfume, because I knew it would smell so desperate, so lonely.

And we’d kiss. It was the strangest kind of kissing, where our lips would touch and then lock onto each other for ten minutes at a time, but the rest of our bodies barely even touched. It would have been so much easier to just have sex, to get it over with, but I was terrified of getting pregnant, of getting some disease. I was terrified of what my body might do under those circumstances, what his would do. So we stayed fully clothed, hands at our sides, sucking on our faces until our mouths were red and angry. He tasted like celery, like rabbit food, every single time, and I loved it. I was afraid to ask him what I tasted like.

And then, one time, while we were sitting on the couch in the living room, making out, my mom unlocked the front door and walked into the house. “Whoa,” she said when she saw us, an actual sucking sound made when we pulled apart, scrambling to opposite sides of the couch. She smiled, trying not to laugh. Zeke had taken out his Velcro wallet and was inspecting his library card, like it was very important to make sure that he still had it. I just sat there, looking down at my feet, my lips tingling.

“Well . . . hello,” my mom said. “Who is this young man?”

“This is Zeke,” I finally said, my face burning red with embarrassment. “He’s new in town.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” my mom said, nodding. “Hey, Zeke.”

“Hello, Mrs. . . . um . . . Hey there,” he said. “I don’t know Frankie’s last name.”

“Well, her last name is different from mine anyways,” she said. “You can call me Carrie, though.”

“Hello, Carrie,” he said. He was still holding that library card, like maybe my mom was going to ask for it.

“We’ve been hanging out,” I said. “Zeke is an artist.”

“Okay, cool,” my mom said, still nodding, trying to figure out what in the world I was doing with a boy in the house, because I had never even been on a date, had not, to her knowledge, spoken to a boy in years.

“I draw,” Zeke said.

“So you guys have just made this little artist colony here in the house while everybody else is away?” she asked.

“Kind of?” I said.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Zeke. Frankie has not told me a thing about you, but you are welcome to come over anytime. In fact, would you like to have dinner with us tonight? I’d love to hear your story.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Zeke replied, looking over at me. “I mean, I guess I could ask my mom if it’s okay.”

“Sure thing,” my mom said. “If she wants to talk to me, I’m happy to vouch for Frankie. I mean, I’m sure you told your mom about this cool new friend that you’ve met. I’m sure you’d tell your mom something important like that.”