Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

  Back then I thought that I was running away from Ellie, but now I wonder if I was actually running away from myself.

  I wasn’t upset because my best friend unexpectedly kissed me.

  I was upset because I started to kiss her back.

  For two hours I drive aimlessly, but I think I know where I’m headed even before I get there. There is a light on upstairs at Vanessa’s house, so when she opens the door I don’t feel guilty about waking her.

  “Where have you been?” she bursts out. “You’re not answering your phone. Dara and I have both been trying to reach you. You never went home tonight—”

  “We have to talk,” I interrupt.

  Vanessa steps back so that I can come into the entryway. She is still wearing the clothes she was wearing today at school, and she looks like hell—her hair’s a mess; there are faint purple circles beneath her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean for you—for me to—” She breaks off, shaking her head. “The thing is, Zoe, nothing happened. And I can promise you nothing will happen, because it’s way too important for me to have you as a friend than to risk losing you because—”

  “Nothing happened? Nothing happened?” I can barely breathe. “You’re my best friend,” I say. “I want to be with you all the time, and when I’m not, I’m thinking about being with you. I don’t know anyone—including my mother, and my ex-husband—who gets me the way you do. I don’t even have to speak a sentence out loud for you to finish it.” I stare at Vanessa until she looks me in the eye. “So when you tell me Nothing happened? You’re dead wrong, Vanessa, because I love you. And that means everything happened. Everything.”

  Vanessa’s jaw drops. She doesn’t move a muscle. “I . . . I don’t understand.”

  “That makes two of us,” I admit.

  We never know people as well as we think we do—including ourselves. I don’t believe you can wake up and suddenly be gay. But I do believe you can wake up and realize that you cannot spend the rest of your life without a certain individual.

  She is taller than I am, so I have to come up on my toes. I put my hands on her shoulders.

  It is not like kissing a man. It’s softer. More intuitive. More equal.

  She puts her hands on either side of my face, and the room falls away. I have never gotten so lost in a kiss before.

  And then, the space between us explodes. My heart keeps missing beats and my hands cannot bring her close enough to me. I taste her and realize I have been starving.

  I have loved before, but it didn’t feel like this.

  I have kissed before, but it didn’t burn me alive.

  Maybe it lasts a minute, and maybe it’s an hour. All I know is that kiss, and how soft her skin is when it brushes against mine, and that, even if I did not know it until now, I have been waiting for this person forever.

  VANESSA

  When I was little, I became obsessed with the prizes offered on Bazooka Joe comics. A gold-plated ring with my initial, a chemical magic set, a telescope, a genuine compass. You remember those wax papers, wrapped around the nuggets of gum? A fine white dust coated the Bazooka and would rub off on your fingers as you read the joke, which was rarely if ever funny.

  Each prize sounded more exotic than the last, and could be mine for a pittance and a ridiculous number of Bazooka comics. But nothing captured my fancy as much as the one I found on a gum wrapper in the spring of 1985. If I could just manage to amass $1.10 and sixty-five Bazooka comics, I could have my own pair of X-ray vision glasses.

  For a full week I would go to sleep at night wondering what you could see with X-ray vision. I pictured people in their underwear, the skeletons of dogs walking in the street, the insides of jewelry boxes and violin cases. I wondered if I would be able to peer through walls, if I would know what was going on in the teachers’ lounge, if I could read through the manila folder on Ms. Watkins’s desk and see the answer key for the math test. There was a world of possibility in X-ray vision, and I knew I could not live another day without it.

  So I began to save. It didn’t take long to scrape together $1.10, but the Bazooka comics were another story entirely. I bought twenty pieces of gum that week with my allowance. I traded my best Topps baseball card—a Roger Clemens Red Sox rookie—to Joey Palliazo for ten Bazooka comics (he had been saving up for the decoder rings). I let Adam Waldman touch my boob for another five (believe me, it didn’t do anything for either one of us). Eventually, within a few weeks, I had enough comics and change to mail off to the address listed. In four to six weeks, those X-ray vision glasses would be mine.

  I spent the time imagining a world where I could see beneath the surface. Where I could eavesdrop on the conversations of my parents about my Christmas gifts, could see what leftovers were in the fridge before I opened it, could read my best friend’s diary to see if she felt about me the same way I felt about her. Then one day, a plain brown box arrived with my name on it. I ripped it open, unraveled the Bubble Wrap, and pulled out a pair of white plastic glasses.

  They were too big for my face and slid down my nose. They had slightly opaque lenses with a fuzzy white bone etched in the center of each one. When I put them on, everything I looked at was printed with that stupid fake bone.

  I couldn’t see through anything at all.

  I tell you this as a cautionary tale: beware of getting what you want. It’s bound to disappoint you.

  You would think, after that first kiss, there would have been some kind of apology, an awkward pause between us. And in fact the next day, after eight hours at school analyzing every moment of that kiss (Was Zoe drunk, or just a little buzzed? Did I encourage her, or was that entirely her own idea? Was it really as magical as I thought it had been, or was that twenty-twenty hindsight?), I met Zoe at the hospital where she was working with burn victims. She told the nurses she was taking a ten-minute break, and we walked down a long hallway, close enough to hold hands, except we didn’t.

  “Listen,” I said, as soon as we were outside and out of earshot of anyone who happened to be eavesdropping.

  That was as far as I got before Zoe launched herself at me. Her kiss was blistering. “God, yes,” she breathed against my lips, when we broke apart. “That’s exactly how I remembered it.” Then she looked up at me, her eyes bright. “Is it always like this?”

  How was I supposed to answer that? The first time I’d kissed a woman, I felt like I had been shot into space. It was unfamiliar and exciting and felt so incredibly right that I couldn’t believe I’d never done it before. There was an evenness of the playing field that was different from the kisses I’d shared with guys—and yet somehow it wasn’t soft and delicate. It was surround-sound, earthshaking, intense.

  But that said, it wasn’t always like this.

  I wanted to tell Zoe that, yes, the reason it felt like her skin was on fire was because she was kissing a woman. But more than that, I wanted to tell Zoe that the reason it felt like her skin was on fire was because she was kissing me.

  So I didn’t actually answer. I just reached for her, cradled her head in my hands, and kissed her again.

  In the three days since then, we have spent hours in her car, on my couch, and in the supply room at the hospital making out like we are teenagers. I know every inch of her mouth. I know what spot on her jaw, when brushed, makes her shudder. I know that the hollow behind her ear smells of lemons and that she has a birthmark shaped like Massachusetts at the nape of her neck.

  Last night when we stopped, flushed and breathing hard, Zoe said, “What happens next?”

  Which is how I’ve ended up where I am right now: lying on my bed, fully clothed, with the curtain of Zoe’s hair covering my face as she kisses me. With her hands moving tentatively over the terrain of my body.

  I think we both knew tonight would end up like this—in spite of its humble beginnings of an Italian dinner and a bad movie. How does sex ever happen between couples, except as an electrical storm that’s been gathering in the space between