KISS
By: Presley Thomas
Tags: Coming Of Age, Fiction, Queer

Photo by anne-marie robert on Unsplash

​The first boy I ever kissed was a jerk. I knew he was a jerk, but I still kissed him. I liked it, he knew I liked it, wanted it even, and he knew I never expected it — that, I think, was the problem. And, still, I was smiling when I walked out of the cab of his truck, my red hair blazing in his headlights as I walked back to my car.

​I am not pretty. I am less than plain. Ugly is not a harsh word — it’s just not the right one. All the freckles on my face stare out like many eyes, brighter and more interesting than my real ones that look in two different directions.

​My only distinguishing feature is my bright red hair. A flaming head coming down the hallway in high school attached to my short, squash-like body. Some girls are flowers; I am a vegetable.

​We met at church. The youth group met on Wednesday nights. Devin was Catholic, but he came the Baptist church because that’s where all his friends went. He came to see them, not Jesus. Not like he was sitting next to anyone or anything, but he could totally sit next to everyone if he wanted to. He is omnipresent, after all.

​Devin never raised his hands when we worshipped. Not even during “Jesus is my Significant Other” like all the other kids did (I mean, yeah, It weirded out some of the guys a bit, but it’s the son of God, after all). It’s not like he didn’t know the words either. We sang, “I love you Jesus,” a million times in the chorus.

​Plus, most of the lyrics were projected onto the screen at the front anyway in white text and moving pictures: an oceanfront with crashing waves, a hummingbird siphoning nectar from a flower, and a yawning lion for “Look! God Made Me!” and three crosses on a hill with shifting shadows as the sun moved across it and we sang, “I want to be a Piece of Sunshine on the Cross”.

​Devin did raise his hands once. It wasn’t during a song, but after. We had just finished our last song and Pastor Childman, the youth minister, had brought out his t-shirt cannon and was about to shoot one of his “Jesus is cool, no really” t-shirts out into the crowd.

​I still had my eyes closed from the last song, praying, but I heard people screaming in excitement, and a rough knuckle sweep across my raised hand as he got to his feet. It was, to put it mildly, one of the best moments of my life.

Devin was a not very attractive boy, and I was a not very attractive girl. His nose announced his presence before any words could, but he ran track and that was something. He had a lean body and a face relatively free of pimples.

​“It’s the sweat from running,” he would say in one of our small conversations before worship started, “It cleans out my pores.”

Running seemed cured all ills: Running and water and electrolyte — all good things, I think. Whenever he said electrolytes I always imagined him drinking a jar full of fireflies and watching them go down his throat, faint lights twinkling through his esophagus in the dusk of his evening run. I never ran with him, but I met him on my walks (the one physical thing I did do). He ran past me and I waved. We lived on the same road, and it was a simple gesture, but he became more of a fixture at our house later when my brother joined him. They became good friends when he joined the track team. They ran together on most days — two skinny beanpoles running down the side of the road.

​When he came through the door to meet him we always hugged. I told them to be careful and wear reflective clothing since it was usually close to dark. After all, I would say, I only have one brother.

​They usually ignored my advice. One time I found a roll of glitter pony stickers at Mom’s store and stuck a few of them to the back of their calves before they left. When they peeled them off later it ripped at their leg hairs.

​“Never again, Farrah,” my brother said.

​“Yes, please don’t,” Devin added as they both put them in my hand to throw away, and went upstairs to take turns at the shower.

​I paid special attention to the transaction. I threw Nathan’s away, but kept Devin’s closed in my palm till I got to my room. The hairs caught in the used stickiness formed constellations. My mind formed shapes: a hand mirror, a dog, a heart.

​Mom’s store is just a collection of unwanted things. Every Saturday we would go to the warehouse and loaded our rented truck bed with surplus items from more impressive brand name stores — ones you may have actually heard of — not Farran’s. It’s a name Mom and Dad came up with fitting the only objects or affection they could both agree on in a single word. A bastardization of our names, much like our births.

​I remember being in our parent’s wedding. I was six years old and the flower girl. Nathan was four and the ring bearer. He them asked if he could wear a bear costume, and insisted on being called the ring bear-grrr. Dad gave a little and let him wear a bear hoodie with his tux and a little black paint on his nose. In the video Nathan won’t stop playing with the half-round ears sprouting from the top of his head.

​Some Saturdays were better than others: new tires or motor oil for the car set, or sheets with high thread counts, or an ungodly amount of PEZ dispensers in the shape of wicked clowns. Inventory was awkward since we couldn’t count on the same type of product from month to month. Numbers always changed, and so did the objects those numbers were attached to.

​I worked the front two or three times a week, and Nathan took inventory in the back most days a few hours after school barring practice or a track meet. Ever since Dad died in the car accident when Nathan was nine it’s been a more solitary effort. His memory still lives in the old radio they listened to on those afternoons. It used to be country, but Nathan’s taste turned to harder beats in the last six years: driving bass, moody vocals, and electric guitar.

​Devin would come help too if there wasn’t a track meet or orthodontist appointment. The second became more frequent when he got braces to help straighten his teeth set like a forest growing on top of each other in his mouth. I liked to watch his bedazzled molars glint in the fluorescent lighting as he smiled and said hello before he went through the heavy doors to the stockroom.

​On Wednesday nights I would come and get them so we could get to youth group on time. The door to the stockroom always seemed to be locked. When I put my ear to the door I heard the music from the old radio mixed with sucking sounds from the shop vac.

​“Nathan, Devin, time to go,” I yelled through the locked door after jiggling the handle uselessly. The noise stopped and Nathan responded.

​“We’ll be right out, Sis. Can you grab a Bible from the book aisle I can bring? I left mine at home.”

​“In his other pants,” Nathan said laughing, the sound of metal jangling through the door, the rectangular frame and tongue of a belt clicking together. I had found Devin’s belt lying on the floor in the stockroom before, and once in Nathan’s bedroom. Both times they said it was used to leverage a heavy object: a box in the stockroom, the dresser in his room — moved strangely across the entrance like they were blocking entrance to a man with an ax or flesh eating zombies.

​They always came out sweaty, disheveled, clothes out of place, being pulled by the corners of heavy boxes as they moved them onto the floor to count the objects inside. I imagined them building forts out of some of the lighter boxes, playing like children, but still get their work done, I hoped.

​“We’ll be right out,” Devin repeated

​“Well, hurry up or we’ll be late. You’re lucky my Bible’s already in my backpack so we don’t have to go back home.”

​Pastor Childman’s sermon that night was about sex. It was a consistent bell that rang every few months in a room full of hormone-crazed teenagers. As an almost eighteen year old I felt I was walking out of that. It was always the teenagers being talked to, never the twenty something I would be soon enough. Hopefully, barring a rush of application rejections, spent at college.

“Now kids,” Pastor Childman said,“ sex is a good thing. I mean, it feels really good, but it has some limitations. It works best in a certain way. Two men are not equipped for that kind of intimacy. Neither are two women, but it’s the man and the woman in the shelter of their marriage vows who are able to experience it most fully.”

Then, as an object lesson, he took his shirt off and put peanut butter in his armpit, and then put a peanut butter sandwich close by asking each person who came up on stage which they preferred. Most pointed at the sandwich and giggled at the shirtless Pastor Childman with his arm raised in the air, his peanut butter deodorant in full view. When it was Devin’s turn he licked the armpit and raised his own arms up in victory afterwards while Pastor Childman blushed.

It was then that I felt it again. He sat back down. Devin’s hand reached for my own. He held my hand loosely with two fingers as he went to scratch an itch on his leg.

“Sorry Farrah,” He said to throw of any onlookers, but I knew. He loved me.

After youth group everyone was talking. Devin was on the other side of the room with Nathan and some of our other friends. Holly found me and grabbed my arm. She wanted to talk. She said it was private. We walked outside the building beside the dumpsters where no one went voluntarily unless they were hauling trash.

“Farrah, Nathan told me something,” she said wringing her hands like a dirty washcloth, twirling her promise band from Love is for Later on her ring finger, “He said that he and Devin were seeing each other, like dating, not just friends.”

“No way, Holly. That’s silly. Why would he do that?” I said feeling my stomach sink deep inside to places I didn’t even know existed: dusty basements, old memories.

Dad wasn’t exactly a great role model. There was that time we came back from the grocery store with Mom, and found him in bed with another woman — our strange older cousin watching, his hand rubbing his crotch through his jeans. Mom took us out of the room as quickly as she could, her hands covering our eyes.

Still we saw something sexual, homosexual even. Maybe it burned brighter in his mind than the moving pictures on the television screen, the volume turned up high after the strange woman left wearing a sheet where her shirt used to be and Mom lectured Dad behind the closed door.

​I prefer to remember the times when I was a little girl playing dress-up. I would walk into the room in a fluffy pink dress with sequins, a tiara. Dad would look at me and smile like I was the most beautiful girl in the world. Now, there was Devin, relatively unknown, but loved for what he was, what I thought he could be.

​“Because something inside him really wants to, I guess, and I’m sure it’s more physical by now — or already was,” she said rolling her fingers now against the side of her dress as if counting the number of times my brother and Devin engaged in fornication, her body loosening some with her honesty.

“How long has it been?” I asked wrinkling my nose at the scent of garbage.

“He told me a few weeks ago, but I know it’s been longer than that. I didn’t want to tell you because it didn’t seem like mine to tell, but I can’t stand to see them together like that.”

The next day I called Devin, and told him to meet me. I couldn’t talk to my brother about this, it was too hard, but I could talk to Devin. I had to. Still, when I looked into his face as I told him I was leaving, the bright eyes looking at me from his desk as he did homework, I knew it was true. I knew there was something else behind them I couldn’t see. That only God could see from his throne looking down.

I saw his truck pull into the Market Basket parking lot, it had just gotten dark, and I was putting bags of groceries into the back of my car. Devin got out of his truck, his lights still on, and helped. He found the heaviest bags with a glance and lifted them without effort or strain into the back of my car. I closed the trunk.

“So, what do you want to talk about?” He asked.

“Not here,” I said with a strained smile, “Let’s get in your truck.” I tried my best to hide my gratitude for what he just done for me, knowing what I knew, what I would reveal. The gospel says, “Ask and ye shall receive,” and so I would, knowing the answer I wanted was not the one I would get.

“Holly told me,” I said.

“I didn’t really think it was something to talk about, especially with the church set.”

“So, it’s true?”

“Yes.”

“Are you holding hands, kissing, having sex?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” he said answering each question in quick rhythm.

“Where? How? When?”

“It just happens when we’re together. We don’t plan it, but we’re safe — don’t worry.”

“Safe! Safe?” I said aloud like an umpire making a call after the dust clears. The dust was already in the air, clogging my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. It all sounded suspiciously like a plan to me.

“Are you okay?” Devin asked responding to my wheezing, ignoring my tears.

“I mean — how are you doing this? Don’t you know? — Pastor Childman says — ”

“I know what he says, Farrah, but it’s not what we do. It’s not what anyone does. People have sex, love affairs, and secret relationships with the dumpy girl’s brother. Pastor Childman is a child. Grown men don’t slather their armpit with peanut butter.”

“But you’ll lick it.”

“I never claimed maturity — physical, spiritual, or otherwise. I’m only fifteen.”

“It’s so strange,” I said grabbing his hand, letting it hang limply in my own, “You can’t do this. Not with Nathan,” then I began caressing it like a puppy, trying to cajole it to take heartworm medicine from my outstretched palm.

“Oh Farrah, but I have, many times, often, with gusto. Would you rather I do it with you? I’ve done it before. It’s a different experience, but not an unpleasant one.”

That’s when he did it. No, not that, the kiss. He ran his fingers through my hair, part of me wishing the fiery strands would heat like oven coils and burn him, and another part of me wishing his lips would meet my own.

He ignored my squash body, freckles, and face. His lips kissed mine. His tongue slipped through my teeth. Mine followed his back into my mouth. It felt — good, great, wonderful. All those things until I realized those same lips kissed my brother’s, in the same way, in the same place, and more.

Still, when I pulled my lips away I smiled. I couldn’t help but return his. The way his eyes scrunched when he smiled first. The light in his eyes I’d never seen before but only imagined directed at me, like a spotlight. The unattractive boy and the unattractive girl together, a possibility tainted by yearnings shared in my own family.

The hand mirror, dog, and heart were just my own imagination, but I hoped to have one of them: beauty, comfort, or love — two of which were lost to me in that moment. Maybe ugly is the right word, but maybe it’s more than that. Maybe I’m just unloved.

I got out of the cab of his truck in a panicked frenzy, all my squishy parts jiggled when I landed on the ground, my face as red as the tomatoes I just bought from the store. I drove home away from Devin and his truck, and the kiss. I could hear the car groaning. It’s frame shaking beneath my feet.

A picture of my brother, Nathan, in my mind blurring with my tears until there is nothing left until he isn’t even my brother. Devin not loved but lurved — a fake form of love that swerves.

Swerves, let’s say when you are upset, and crying, and driving a car, into a ditch by the road where you’d sometimes seen them both run. And then the engine is smoking, and the air is hot, but you get out of the car and are okay, and there’s a stray dog passing by on the road. He comes up to you, like no boy ever did, or at least no boy who had ever fondled your brother first, and leans close to your sweaty, dirty face and licks you with his warm pink tongue. You grab the matted fur on his neck, pulling him closer, and decide, in an instant, that his name, the dog’s name — is Love.