Blind Kiss(4)

He started the engine as I stood there, waiting for him to leave.

“We’ll talk on the phone or email or something, okay?”

“Okay,” I told him.

He swallowed nervously. Looking up at me from the car window, he said, “I wish it were you, Penny.”

That was my bow. He knew I needed it, good or bad—no matter what feelings it shook loose from our long and complicated history together.





2. Fourteen Years Ago


PENNY

If you had asked me, at the age of sixteen, if I saw myself living at home at twenty-one, I would’ve laughed in your face. Yet here I was, at the beginning of my senior year of college, still waking up in my childhood bed and having breakfast with my parents and little sister, Kiki, every morning.

I had spent my entire life in this house. My dad was a microbiologist at a pharmaceutical company in Fort Collins, which paid just enough to send me to college but not enough for me to live in the lap of luxury in my own apartment, according to my practical father. We live five minutes away from Colorado State—and you have a perfectly good bed here. He wasn’t wrong, but still—it put a major damper on my social life.

My mom’s job was doting on Kiki. My sister was twelve years younger than me—definitely an oops baby. Even though my parents had always wanted a second child, they had given up all hope after ten years of trying, and then, “Oops! Here comes Kiki.” Where I was dark-haired and olive-skinned, like my dad, Kiki was blond and fair-skinned, like my mom. I always thought my mom liked Kiki better because of that.

Keeks had been on the pageant circuit ever since she was a baby, so the poor kid acted like a trained Pomeranian. Though I had nothing against pageants, I couldn’t understand why my mother was so determined to be a stage mom to my little sister when I was practically begging her to come to my ballet recitals. Mom had been a beauty queen when she was younger, but still . . . it never made sense to me why she couldn’t relate to ballet, too.

We ate breakfast together every morning in the kitchen, at the round wooden table, on country-style chairs. Dad would read the paper, Kiki would do her voice exercises, and Mom would cook and serve us, wearing the same apron she’d had since I was born. I would just sit there and wonder how I’d spent my entire life in the same city but had no social life to show for it.

“Why don’t you get involved in a school club or a sorority?” Mom asked as she slid runny eggs onto my plate. I grimaced. She was a terrible cook. I mean, how can you fuck up eggs? Especially when you make them three times a week?

“I have dance rehearsals every day, Mom. And right now, that’s enough.” I lied. It definitely wasn’t enough, but who was going to pledge a sorority as a senior?

“Well, why aren’t you friends with any of the girls in your program?”

I threw a look at Dad, but he ignored the conversation and instead shuffled through his newspaper quietly as Kiki continued trying to improve her vocal range.

I didn’t want to answer my mother’s question. The truth was that the girls in the program were absurdly competitive, and few of us had formed honest friendships. If I had said that, my mother would have come back with “Well, you chose dance as a major.” She liked to remind me of that fact, as if it were the worst decision of my life. We all knew I would’ve been at Juilliard or in a dance company by now if I really had the chops. But I loved dancing. I wanted to build my life around it, in any way I could.

All my high school friends had gone off to college in other cities, other states, and other countries, but I was stuck here, floundering on the Fort Collins social scene. I hadn’t had a boyfriend since high school, and aside from a few one-night stands my freshman and sophomore years, I’d been dateless. I needed to find something to do outside of school and dance. I needed to make friends and I knew it. But it was hard as a commuter, and as a senior. Everyone had already found their cliques long ago.

My sister’s voice was getting higher and higher. “God, shut up, Kiki, please! Mom and I are trying to talk.”

“Don’t be rude to your sister,” Mom snapped. “She has a pageant this weekend. She needs to prep for it.”

Kiki looked over at me like I was an alien. I pushed my eggs around the cobalt-blue plate.

My father looked at me over his specs. “Sweet Pea, clean your plate,” he said quietly. “It’s not that much food.”

Dancing was my life, but the rigor had taken its toll. There was pressure to be both skinny and strong, and I was always confused about what size I should be. I was definitely not the skinniest, and I wondered if that’s what had kept me from being an elite dancer.

While taking the tiniest nibbles of gross, slimy eggs to appease my father, I asked Kiki, “Do you even like being in beauty pageants?”

She smiled one of her sparkle-toothed smiles. “Of course I do.” I smiled weakly back at her. Poor thing.

“You’d think the people of Colorado would have learned their lesson by now,” I said.

My dad shot me a look of warning.

“What?” Mom said, wide-eyed.

“Mom, come on. You parade her around like she’s a miniature adult. Did you actually bleach her hair?” My mother glared at me. “This is JonBenét-level insanity.”

She turned her back on us and walked across the kitchen, dumping the frying pan into the stainless steel sink with a clang. She stormed into the living room, sniffling, as my dad glared angrily at me.