“Guess that’s up to you,” he said, favoring me with his full smile. I realized his front teeth were actually a little bit crooked, and I realized that a person’s flaws could make them even more beautiful sometimes. “I know I want to.”
“But the other day, after school, you seemed like you wanted to be as far away from me as possible.”
“Shit,” Grant said, sighing. His hands beat a steady rhythm on the wheel. “I’m sorry, Amanda. I guess I was just embarrassed about not being able to give you a ride. Made me feel less manly or something. It’s just things with you are so fresh and new, and … you ever feel like you only want somebody to see you at your best?”
I couldn’t help smiling.
“I don’t just want you at your best though,” I said. “I want to get to know you.”
I thought about what Virginia had said, about us both keeping secrets, and I thought about my parents and how quiet it was in our home in the year before they got divorced. How they basically stopped telling each other anything important. If I was going to do this, I wanted to do it right. I chewed my knuckle for a moment as I remembered the day at the plantation with Bee. “What if we played the honesty game?”
“What’s that?” he said. I explained the rules the way Bee had explained them to me. Grant paused a moment, thinking. “So it’s like Truth or Dare?” he said.
“Kind of.” I nodded, thinking of how Bee had described it. “Just, you know, without the pervy stuff.” He put on a show of pouting and I gave him a light shove. “Whatever! Play your cards right and pervy stuff might be negotiable. So you’ll play it with me?”
He nodded. “Do we start now?”
I shrugged. “No time like the present, right?” I took a deep breath. “Okay, I’ll go first.” I took another deep breath and thought of the sermon at church with Anna. The idea of shedding all your layers of secrets and lies. Maybe someday, if we played this long enough, I would be able to tell him the truth about everything. “That night by the lake was my first kiss.”
“No way,” Grant said, shaking his head. “No way.” I nodded emphatically. “How’d you hold out so long? Pretty as you are, guys must’ve been chasing you since middle school.”
“Thanks,” I said, blushing. “I changed a lot last summer, so this is all pretty new,” I told him truthfully. “Your turn.”
“That was your first kiss,” Grant said, tapping his chin and looking up at the ceiling, “but it was my best.”
I touched my lips and looked down at my knees, my cheeks burning. I had been so afraid I would be a bad kisser or, worse yet, that I would kiss like a boy. I closed my eyes and remembered the kiss and my heart began to race. When I calmed down enough to look back at him I saw him blushing as well. I laced my fingers in his and said, “We can’t just let that record stand, can we?”
“Why, no ma’am,” Grant said, leaning toward me, “I suppose we cannot.”
The kiss outside the apartment was beautiful and nervous and almost chaste. The kiss on the bleachers was tender but fleeting. What happened next was different. Our mouths connected and somehow I found myself in the driver’s seat, poised above him with my hands on his hard, broad chest and my hair draped around us like a curtain. I pulled back for a moment and we just breathed, staring into each other’s eyes. I felt something brush my waist and looked down to see his hand inching toward the hem of my shirt, his gaze questioning if this was okay. I bit my lip and answered by kissing his neck and biting his ear. His fingers burrowed beneath my shirt and drifted past my belly button, where they stopped for a moment, and then I felt them near my ribs.
“Hey!” Rodney yelled, pounding his fist on the window. I screamed and tumbled back to the passenger seat, banging my head in the process. “Come on, y’all, that’s new upholstery!”
Grant stammered an apology as we stumbled out of the cab, both of us red-faced with embarrassment and stifled laughter. Rodney climbed into his truck in a huff and sped away, splattering both of us with mud.
We stood there in silence for a moment, shaking and smiling, until Grant leaned over and smeared some of his mud into some of my mud and the laughter we’d been holding in finally escaped in a rush.
12
I sat with Bee beneath a canopy of brown and red leaves behind the art building, wisps of smoke rising from our lips as we talked. She fiddled with the settings on a new digital camera while I tried to draw her without her noticing. The cicadas had died off a few weeks before, and everything from the wind to the scratch of my pencil as it moved across the page seemed raw and loud in their absence.
“How was your report card?” I asked, my voice croaking as I handed the joint back to her.
“Shitty,” she said. “I would’ve done okay in English if Mr. Robinson didn’t have it out for me, but I managed to pull out a B anyway. Got a C in chemistry and a D in calc, but who cares, right?”
“I care,” I said, rolling the tension out of my neck as I turned my attention to her hair, trying to translate its movement in the breeze in frozen graphite.
“Oh yeah?” Bee said. “What do you wanna do with your life anyway?”
“I want to go to school up north,” I said. “NYU maybe, if I get in. No idea what to major in though.”
She leaned over suddenly and examined my drawing. I tried to hide it from her, but she grinned.