Read Kissing in America for Free Online Page B

was in a European wilderness preserve and hopefully had been eaten by bears. “Why did he drive me home if he doesn’t like me?”
    â€œBecause he wanted to show you his liquid velvet eyes and his manroot.”
    â€œHa ha ha. Funny.”
    â€œBecause he can’t stand the thought of you waiting, cold and alone, on a subway platform. He’s a genuinely good guy.”
    â€œBut he said ‘I missed seeing you.’”
    â€œHe could’ve meant it as a friend.” She paused. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”
    â€œI’m not getting my hopes up.” Friends . Friends was good. Friends was great.
    Except we weren’t exactly friends , not like any friends I’d ever had. It didn’t feel like friends when he stared at me, or the way he said my name sometimes, Eva-a , a little too slowly, a little sarcastically. Or that electric feeling between us, like we were always balancing on a high wire.
    Maybe I was imagining the whole thing. Maybe it was just limbic resonance. During the school day he was with the swim team crowd and the seniors, a distance so far it could’ve been another country. Maybe we were a different type of friends: Friendish. Friendesque. Someone needed to invent a word for it.
    The next Friday morning I felt hyperawake, the afternoon lying ahead like an unopened present.
    Then came lunchtime.
    â€œWhat are you staring at?” Annie asked me, and followed my gaze. “Uh-oh,” she said. “Gia’s back.”
    I felt this crumpling inside. At tutoring, Will explained that Gia’s parents changed their minds. They didn’t want her missing so much school. (A rumor I’d heard that afternoon told a different story: she’d been fired from her modeling job for getting drunk. I didn’t ask him about that.) When she picked him up that afternoon, her legs seemed to have grown even longer, her hair thicker and shinier. Her eyebrows looked like skinny black licorice.
    I blinked back tears the whole subway ride home, wishing I was in the van with him. I felt this huge ball of shame in my stomach, too, at this crush that never seemed to go away. At all this doomed yearning and useless hope. What a waste. “Pour all that energy into school,” Annie said when I called her that night. “That will help you forget about him a little.”
    It didn’t help. I had a stomach bug day the next Friday, and the Friday after that. I knew I had to stuff the crush away again, to stop it from growing and flowering. I thought about quitting tutoring, but Annie said that was a mistake—I needed a good recommendation from Mrs. Peech for college. Anyway, quitting tutoring probably wouldn’t make adifference—whether I tutored him or not, the crush still simmered beneath everything, like a fluish misery.
    â€œJust wait till summer,” Annie said. She’d heard a rumor that Gia was going to Greenland over the summer. “It’ll be different then,” she said. Lulu agreed with the wait-till-summer plan. “See what happens,” she said. “Let the feelings be there, without judging them. Everything is always changing. This will change, too.”
    Will started his final term paper, and the warm weather arrived early—the school yard sprang alive with Frisbees and thumping basketballs and backpacks on the ground like colorful sleeping cats. One afternoon, he came to the north tower holding a letter. He’d gotten accepted to UC–Santa Cruz, his first choice, with a scholarship.
    Will took off his cowboy hat. As the moon rose into a perfect crescent in the indigo sky, he told her, “I know everybody supposes I’ll head off to Santa Cruz, but I ain’t goin’. I’m stayin’ here with you, Miss Eva. Now get over here and lie down with me by the creek on this bed of moss.”
    Our friendish friendship continued but the crush never disappeared. It just