“You must miss her a lot.”
I can’t say anything. I pick at the carpet.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, it’s okay.”
I keep picking at the carpet, hoping that I won’t start crying again.
Taylor slides a rubber band off the map he brought and spreads the map out across the space between us.
“Okay,” he says. “So this is Nice, where Jacques DeSoir grew up. We should put the first thumbtack here. Where was the next place he went? I’ll look it up.”
He opens the book and flips through the pages. I don’t want to talk about geography; I just want to be close to someone. I know that I’m only a couple feet away from him. I know that my parents are only a staircase away.
But still, I feel alone.
Silently, I pull my shirt over my head.
My heart is beating in my throat.
Still staring at the book, he says, “Okay, so it looks like he went to these Greek Islands.” No boy has seen me in just a bra before. I wait for him to look up.
Then he does.
His face flushes and he swallows slowly. I ease forward, across a thousand pastel-colored countries and into his lap, wrap my legs around his waist, and kiss him.
His mouth feels cold and my tongue grazes his mint gum. He touches my back with warm hands and I wonder if he’s fantasized about something like this, if he’s ever thought of me like this before. I hope he has, because I’m not really this brave. We kiss and kiss. I wait for him to start fumbling with my bra strap like boys in movies do, but he doesn’t. His hands move across my back gently and I still feel far away. I still feel alone. I start hearing these words in my head. i want you to touch me. i want you to take my clothes off. I hear them over and over, like the chorus of a song, before I realize that they’re Ingrid’s words, that I’m feeling what Ingrid felt, and it’s then I start to panic. I don’t stop kissing Taylor. I don’t stop anything. I don’t know what I’ll do when this moment is over and I’ll actually have to see him look at me.
But then it happens.
Taylor’s body gets tense. He stops kissing me. I climb off of him. I sit. I cover my chest with my arm. I look at his sneakers, at the frays on the bottom of his jeans, anywhere but at his face. I look at his hand as it moves to where my tank top lies on the carpet and as he lifts it up for me to take. I put it back on.
We sit in silence.
Then Taylor says, “I should go.”
I close my eyes. I’m waiting for the world to end.
I nod, whisper, “Okay.”
There’s the sound of him putting his books back into his backpack, of him rolling up the map. The sound of a zipper zipping. The sound of him standing up. The silence of his not moving.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says.
I open my eyes and scan the ceiling. “Okay.”
He walks softly out of my room. I watch the back of him as he eases the door closed. Once it’s shut, I lean forward and put my head in my hands. Then the door swings open again, and Taylor comes back. He leans against my wall and says, “Just so you know, I do like you. That just felt weird.”
I guess I should say something, but I don’t. At this moment I am so far from thinking clearly, so far from making sense.
“Caitlin?” he asks.
I look into his face for the first time in minutes.
“I just want to make sure you know. It’s not like I didn’t want it or anything.”
He waits for me to say something. When I don’t, he walks in from the doorway and kneels on the carpet next to me. I get this terrible feeling that he’s going to kiss my cheek out of pity. I put my hand over my face so he can’t get to it.
“You know,” he says, “I had this huge crush on you in third grade.”
“Third grade?” I don’t even remember knowing him in third grade.
“Yeah, Mrs. Capelli’s class. Remember?”
I move my hand away from my face. I do remember. Mrs. Capelli wore colorful sweaters that smelled like mothballs and kept a hamster as the class pet.
“Your desk was one row ahead of mine and one row over, which was like the best setup imaginable because I could stare at you all day long without you seeing me.”
I glance at him and try to remember what he looked like as a little kid. I can remember him from middle school, practicing skating tricks in the front circle after the bell rang, but I can’t visualize him as an eight-year-old.
I open my mouth to ask him a question, then think better of it.
“What?” he asks.
So I say it anyway. “What did you like about me?”
“Lots of things.” He shifts his weight and ends up a little closer to me—still not touching, but closer. “But what I remember the most is this thing you used to do whenever we did art projects.”
“What was it?”
“Okay, well, you know how we had those boxes at our desks with our names on them? You kept a plastic bag in one—not a grocery bag, it was more like a sandwich bag. So, I’d glance over at you a lot during art projects and watch you gluing things. You always worked really slowly and carefully, and you hardly ever finished anything.”
I nod. It’s true—the art hour was always too short.
“So when Mrs. Capelli would tell us that our time was up, most of the kids just dumped the colored-paper scraps and glitter and cotton balls and stuff into the trash, but you would get out your plastic bag and put everything you didn’t use inside it.”