“Wait,” Zeke said. “If we put our faces side by side, it’ll be like those optical illusions where you see either two faces in profile or a vase. Yeah?”
“Oh,” I said, “okay, yeah.”
So we put our faces against the glass, our mouths so close together. “Wait,” Zeke said, seemingly unfazed by the proximity of our lips, “I’m trying to find the button.”
What resulted didn’t really look like an optical illusion. It looked like two dead people, two kids who had suddenly been pulled into a black hole or something.
“It’s cool, though,” Zeke said. “It looks like an album cover for a death metal band.”
“Let’s try again,” I said. I felt resolute. I felt like we were making something important. I felt like, I don’t know, I was in control. I was making the decisions. And as long as I was choosing, it was okay.
So we put our faces next to each other, but this time, when he pushed the button, I inched forward and kissed him, our mouths touching, this light slowly streaming past us. It didn’t feel real at all, which is what I thought kissing would be like. And we had to hold it, until the copier finished humming. My first kiss.
“Um,” Zeke said, bumping his head on the copier. “What did you do that for?”
“I don’t know,” I said, which was true. “I’ve never kissed anyone before.”
“Me either,” he told me.
“And this felt like a nice way to do it,” I said. “Like, you know, art.”
We looked at the copy that the machine spat out. We looked so ugly, our faces smashed together, but the blackness around us made it seem like a fairy tale. Was this what people looked like when they kissed? I guessed it wasn’t. It was what people looked like when they kissed against the glass of a copier. It’s what, I imagined, art looked like. Ugly and beautiful at the same time.
“I’m sorry I didn’t ask first,” I said, now very embarrassed. “I just, I don’t know, wanted to finally do it. So it wouldn’t be so scary. So I could move on and be normal.”
Zeke didn’t say anything. I thought he might kiss me for real, not for art but for real. But he didn’t. He smiled, sheepish, like he couldn’t control his mouth, and then said, “This could be fun.”
I thought he was talking about kissing but realized he was looking at the copier. “We could do something weird with this,” he went on.
“Weird,” I said, like it was a magic word, like all I had to do was say it out loud and my world would change.
Four
I DON’T THINK EITHER ONE OF US UNDERSTOOD HOW HARD IT was to create something good. We were smart kids, made excellent grades. Our teachers thought we were gifted because we could read and write at a slightly elevated level, because if we were gifted, then they weren’t wasting their lives teaching burnouts. Well, Zeke really was gifted, I think. He went to some fancy private school in Memphis, where they wore uniforms, where there was an actual class on sequential art and you could take it for actual credit. But that summer, away from school and classes and teachers, we were on our own, unsupervised, and we realized that we didn’t know what we were doing.
So for the next week, we sat at the table in my kitchen, drinking flavored instant coffee, and he drew his comics and I wrote my weird girl detective novel in my notebook, and occasionally we would brush our legs against each other, the slightest friction making my armpits sweat like crazy. We were sixteen. How did you prevent your life from turning into something so boring that no one wanted to know about it? How did you make yourself special?
We made collages from my mom’s old issues of Glamour, cutting out the mouths of every model, their pearly white teeth and plump lips. I couldn’t figure out what was creepier, the pile of mouths or all the discarded pictures of these beautiful women, jagged holes where their mouths had once been. We cut out the word beauty every time we saw it, until we’d covered a whole page with the word, until it looked like a different language, unrecognizable to us. We took all the sample strips of perfume, twenty or thirty of them with names like Fahrenheit 180 and Ransom, and rubbed them on our wrists until the combined smell became so overwhelming that we got sick. But I’d hold my arm out and Zeke would take it like it was a precious artifact from a museum. And he’d sniff and sniff, and I’d pray that he couldn’t smell me, what was underneath all that perfume, because I knew it would smell so desperate, so lonely.
And we’d kiss. It was the strangest kind of kissing, where our lips would touch and then lock onto each other for ten minutes at a time, but the rest of our bodies barely even touched. It would have been so much easier to just have sex, to get it over with, but I was terrified of getting pregnant, of getting some disease. I was terrified of what my body might do under those circumstances, what his would do. So we stayed fully clothed, hands at our sides, sucking on our faces until our mouths were red and angry. He tasted like celery, like rabbit food, every single time, and I loved it. I was afraid to ask him what I tasted like.