Just Like Home(37)
“Come here,” he’d said, and his voice was so loud and imperious that even then, Vera knew that he was nervous.
“You’re not the boss of me,” she’d snapped. But she let her foot drag along the ground anyway as her bike coasted closer to where Brandon was standing, and when she reached him she put her heel down, grinding to a final stop. “What is it? Why are we stopping?”
Brandon cleared his throat and wiped his palms on his jeans. They left dark tracks on the denim. “I have to tell you something,” he said. “I don’t like you. I mean, I like you, but I don’t … like-like you.”
Vera was upset by this in a way she didn’t really understand. She wanted to laugh in Brandon’s face, but she also wanted to kick him hard in the stomach, and she also, a little bit, wanted to cry. In the end, she didn’t do any of those things. “So?”
“So, I had to tell you that first.” Brandon stepped toward her with a frown of fierce determination. “Now, I’m going to kiss you.”
This time Vera did laugh, a high surprised yelp of laughter that made her wobble on her bike. She put the kickstand down, but did not climb down off the seat.
“Don’t laugh!” Brandon’s face fell. “I’m going to kiss you because we should just do it, right? Everyone thinks we’re a … a thing, and anyway I know you want to try it.”
Vera did not want to try it. Or at least, she’d never wanted to before. But now Brandon was offering, and she wasn’t sure. Did she want to try it? Had she always? Would she ever?
“Okay,” she said, and she tightened her grip on the handlebars of her bike, and she closed her eyes, and she leaned forward just a little, not enough to tip over but enough to put her face into the part of the air where a kiss might happen.
After a few seconds, something soft and very wet brushed her mouth. She startled and her eyes flashed open and there was Brandon’s face, too close to hers, so close that she could see the pale veins in his closed eyelids, and that soft wet thing was his lips on hers. She moved her mouth a little, pursing her lips out toward his, and Brandon exhaled through his nose and his breath was warm on her cheek.
Vera didn’t know when this was supposed to be over. She smacked her lips together to make a kiss-noise and then pulled her head back. Brandon’s eyes fluttered open, and they looked at each other knowing that they were somehow different now than they had been before.
“Wow,” Brandon whispered. Vera did not know what he was saying ‘wow’ about. “Can we do it again?”
“No,” Vera said, loud and fast, before she even knew she was going to say it. She pushed off and wheeled her bike around and then she was riding away, pumping her legs hard, letting her bike wobble from side to side. Brandon was calling her name and his voice was getting closer, and then he’d caught up to her and they were riding together fast the way they had been before he decided he wanted to kiss her.
“Are you okay?” he called out over the sound of their tires spinning. “What’s wrong!”
“Nothing,” Vera called back. “I just think I don’t like kissing!”
Brandon didn’t say anything for a while. They reached Vera’s street and slowed down to avoid getting yelled at by adults who couldn’t seem to mind their own business. Vera took her feet off the pedals and coasted with her legs stretched out straight, not looking at Brandon, hoping that he would let her forget the whole thing.
Because she wasn’t looking at him, she didn’t see what his face was doing when he swerved toward her. She couldn’t know what he was feeling when he kicked his leg out toward her, knocking her down. All she knew was that one moment she was on her bike and the next she was on Jan Haverbrook’s lawn, sprawled headlong in the grass with a ringing in her ears and no air in her lungs.
She turned over and there was Brandon at the curb, straddling his bike and glaring at her with a tender kind of fury she didn’t recognize. It was uncanny, seeing this completely new emotion on his face.
It made her feel unaccountably hungry.
“Fuck you,” he said. She could tell from the way he said it that he’d been practicing in his head. “I didn’t want to kiss you anyway. You’re ugly, and anyway I told you I don’t like you like that.”
Vera tried to answer but her lip was burning and when she opened her mouth she felt a gout of warmth run down her chin. She slapped her hand to her face and felt the warm tickle of blood running down the back of her knuckles. “Ugh,” she said. The sound came out of her bubbly and thick.
Brandon looked like he was going to spit, or maybe cry. But instead of doing either of those, he added, “You know what, Vera? My mom says that your mom’s a loser to believe your dad’s out sugaring in the summertime. Nobody sugars once it gets above freezing at night. She says”—he gave a wet sniff—“she says he’s off having an affair and he probably has a whole other family somewhere because you and your mom suck so bad. I bet that’s what he keeps down in that creepy basement you’re too scared to go in,” he added, his eyes bright with cruel inspiration. “I bet it’s pictures of his real family that he loves more than you.”
His eyes were shining. He wouldn’t look at Vera anymore. And then he rode his bike away, and now Vera is sitting here on the curb in front of Jan Haverbrook’s house, letting her blood stain the pavement.