It was the summer before high school. I had my first kiss with a girl who was spending the summer in one of the nicer houses up on the hill. I would see her walking through town sometimes, alone, and then I was sitting on the bleachers of the football and she came walking across from the other side, from the high school and past that, the houses on the hill. She was wearing cut off jean shorts and a tank top and she had dark hair with a red streak died into her bangs which were pushed back behind her ears, and she was walking straight towards me. I was smoking a cigarette on the bleachers and thinking about the school year ahead and what it would be like to go to school with my father and whether or not he would be my teacher freshman year, or later, and how much shit I would have to take for it.
I looked away, pretended like I didn't see her coming, and then I would look back up and she was walking towards me still. Her hands were in her pockets and she was looking straight at me. I was wearing tight black jeans and converse and a Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt and I had a bracelet on my left hand that was really the top part of tube socks, with black stripes that I had cut off three inches of. My hair was short and messy and I hadn't washed it in a while and when I saw she was looking at me still I didn't look away. She was almost all the way across the field and she kept walking and when she was only twenty or thirty feet away from the bleachers I said, "hey," and she said, "hey," and then she climbed up onto the bleachers and sat down next to me. I took a drag of my cigarette, and before I had taken the cigarette away from my lips, she took it from me and took a drag. She blew out the smoke towards me but she didn't give the cigarette back.
"I've seen you before," I said. "Around." She looked at me and took another drag of the cigarette and said, "I know. You're always staring." I didn't know what to say so I took my cigarette back and looked down. "It's ok," she said, "I don't mind." I still didn't know what to say, so I asked her name, and she said it was Chris, and I said that was funny because my name was Charles and then she said, "It's not funny cause it's a boy's name?" I asked her why I would care if it was or it wasn't, and anyway isn't it short for Christine, and she said it was. "Where are you from," I asked her, and she said, "New York." I laughed. "What's so funny," she asked me, and I said, "No it's just that . . . well, me too. Sort of. I moved here when I was really young. It's just whenever people say New York, it's like they forget that they're already in New York, and they never say, 'New York City,' just "New York," like it's the only place in the world." She looked at me funny. She had a sort of half smile, and she took my cigarette back and she said, "Well, isn't it?" And then I said, "yeah, I guess," and then she kissed me and it was wet and I could feel her chapped lips and her lip ring and then her tongue finding its way into my mouth and I could taste the smoke on her mouth different from the smoke on my mouth and we leaned into each other for what seemed like forever and then she pulled away and stood up and walked to the bottom of the bleachers. When she got to the bottom she turned and smiled up at me and said, "Seeya."
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