Mary Hogan: The Serious Kiss

My dad drinks too much and my mom eats too much, which pretty much sums up why I am the way I am: a knotted mass of anxiety, a walking cold sweat. Three weeks ago, when I entered my fourteenth year of existence, I realized the only stable, solid truth in my universe: Being me isn’t easy.

“Dinneroo!” Mom yelled down the hall like she always yells down the hall each night as she comes home from work. Her perfume instantly gave me a headache. The slamming of the front door and the jingle of her car keys woke Juan Dog. Yip. Yip.

In a sec!” I yelled back, but I didn’t move a muscle. Dinner scares me. In fact, all meals and most salty snacks freak me out. They trigger an inner horror movie: Attack of the Killer Fat Cells. It’s not that I hate food. I love it. What’s better than hot bread slathered in melted butter? Or, Doritos with an extra blast of nacho flavor? My mouth is watering just thinking of it. But, given my genetics–Mom’s size has never even come close to my age and Dad wouldn’t need any padding to play Santa Claus–I realize that letting my guard down, even once, is an invitation for my fat cells to puff out like blowfish. I’m definitely pre-fat. And food is simply too hard to control, too easy to send your whole life careening out of control. So, when Mom called me for dinner, I ignored my growling stomach, lifted the phone back to my ear, wiggled my shoulder blades into the comfy warm groove of my bed,and kept talking to my best friend Nadine.

“So what’d he say? Then what’d you say? Uh huh. Then what’d he say?”

Through my closed bedroom door I heard one of my brothers playing Game Boy. “Get him! Get him! Get him!” I smelled the Mickey D fries Mom brought home.

My eleven-year-old brother, Dirk,is three years younger than me, but light years from maturity. He’s not what you’d ever call a high-achiever. He’s forever stalling for time, saying “Huh?,” scratching his nose, and slurping back the pool of drool that builds up behind his hanging lower lip. Juan Dog the Chihuahua is almost my age, which, in dog years, means he’s like ninety-eight. Juan is what you’d call high-strung. He yaps so much he levitates his tiny, quivering body all the way off the floor.

Did I mention my mother adds cutesy suffixes to words? She thinks it’s youthful and snappy. I happen to know it’s too embarrassing for words. One time, about a month ago, she called Juan Dog’s business a poopadilly. Outside, in front of everybody.

Mom pounded on my bedroom door. “You still on that thing?” Like she hadn’t clicked in on the extension twice already. “Dinner’s on the table.”

“I’ll be off in a minute!” I said. Then to Nadine: “So what’d he say?”

That was a no-brainer. Rif, my sixteen-year-old brother, is never around. He hides cigarettes in the tight curls of his ash blond hair. When no one is in smelling distance, he lights up, takes a long slow drag, then smothers the end with two spit-wet fingers and tucks it back into his hair.

“Who needs a nicotine patch?” he says. “I got my own method.” Whatever that means. One time, about a year ago, the right side of Rif’s head started smoldering when he sat in the family room watching MTV. Mom was like, “Call the fire department!” Dad was like, “Isn’t there a football game on?” My parents have never seemed like they belonged together. And I’ve never, ever felt like I belonged in this family.

I hung up, fluffed my flattened hair, and walked down the hall to the kitchen. Rif slithered in behind me smelling of burned hair gel.

“Whatever,” she said, rolling her eyes right back at me. Mom shoved a stray strand of her cottony over-bleached hair back into the cat fight she calls a hairstyle. She tugged on her too-tight orange skirt, applied a new layer of magenta lipstick over the faded old one, removed black eyeliner goop from the corners of her green eyes, and tottered around the kitchen on spiked heels way too high for a woman of her age and heft. I’m not talking stare-at-you-in-the-mall quantities of fat, but my mother definitely hasn’t seen her feet, or how sausage-like they look shoved into those strappy high heels, for quite a while. It’s hard to believe I came out of this person. My hair is long and brown and shiny. My eyes are blue. I’ve never worn any makeup, unless you consider Vaseline “lip gloss.”

Like I said, being me isn’t easy. Isn’t your own mother supposed to think you’re an “A” even if you’re not? While I’m at it, aren’t your parents supposed to set a good example? I’m not saying that my mom and dad are bad influences, it’s just that they haven’t exactly set the family bar very high. I can’t remember the last time I saw my mother pick up a book, or my father put down the remote control. Mom’s idea of the perfect family vacation is Las Vegas, primarily for the cheap all-you-can-eat buffets. Dad dreams of staying home alone with several six-packs while we all go somewhere that has no cell service. Once, he actually said to me, “You know what the worst thing about having kids is? They are always here.”

Of course, I took it personally since my older brother, Rif, is never there and Dirk is still young enough to be ignored. I asked my dad, “Where do you expect me to go?” but he just shrugged and turned the volume up on the TV.

Mostly, it feels like my parents are the kids and we are left to raise ourselves. I mean, they provide food and shelter, but that’s about it. Mom and Dad have too many problems of their own to bother with silly stuff like grades, parent/teacher conferences, nutrition, or helping me figure out the difference between maxi and super maxi-pads and do I need wings?

The other night, as Dad and I watched The Discovery Channel’s exploration of the Nature vs. Nurture debate, I had a disturbing revelation. My inherited nature is filled with the potential for addictions, a butt the size of Texas, chronic self-absorption, word-butchering, a flourescent wardrobe and truly hideous hair. As for nurturing, well, in my family “nurturing” is mostly edible. Last year, when I was upset that Nadine got into Honors English and I didn’t, Mom baked me a tray of brownies and gave me a Get Well card. She signed it, “Luv, Mom,” which made me pretty sure she didn’t get into Honors Spelling.

That night, it became sickeningly clear that both Nature and Nurture were conspiring against me. What a rip-off! I have to overcome Creation if I want a normal life. How fair is that? What did I do to deserve such inadequate parents?

Beside me, on the couch, Dad burped, as if Creation was in total agreement. I couldn’t wait for the program to end so I could launch a searing discussion about how my dad could become a better role model, but he was already snoring by the final credits and his undershirt was jacked up revealing a very hairy bellybutton. Somehow, I knew, even if he was awake, he’d snore through my discussion and it would be about as successful as the hundreds of times my mom asked him to stop guzzling beer.

That night, I was forced to face the upsetting fact of my fourteen-year-old life: I’m on my own. It’s up to me to create the life I want. I can’t leave it up to chance any more than I can eat two slices of Domino’s Pepperoni Feast Pizza and hope my body doesn’t notice the five hundred and thirty-four calories and fifty-six grams of carbs. I must be mistress of my destiny or I’ll never even skim the surface of normal. I’ll never have a boyfriend or a cool job or a passport with exotic stamps in it. Most of all, I’ll never experience the one thing I want most. Love.

That’s when I knew exactly what I had to do. And that’s when the whole fiasco began.

It was originally Nadine’s idea. I think. Maybe mine. We’re like that, the two of us. Our brains are right and left hemispheres of one consciousness. She’s confident; I fake it. But I can’t tell you how many times we’ve hatched the exact same idea at the exact same time. So really, it’s hard to say who thought of it first. The Serious Kiss popped into existence somewhere in the air between our two brunette heads, right at the beginning of our freshman year.

“You know what I want?” Nadine had asked. We were lying on two blow-up rafts in the center of my dirt-flat backyard, tanning our legs. We’d both turned fourteen at the end of the summer, and were evaluating our lives with the wisdom that comes with maturity.

It was the first Saturday after school started. Already I was feeling majorly inadequate. I mean, Carrie Taylor spent a month in Greece with her family on some boat (she called it a “yacht”) and had the smoothest honey-brown tan I’ve ever seen. I heard she used olive oil instead of Coppertone, but my mom said, “No way, daisyfay,” when I tried to sneak ours out of the kitchen.

My own best friend, Nadine, was looking amazing, too. She’d grown taller, slimmer, and blonder over the summer. We’ve been best friends since she was short, chubby and bicycling around our neighborhood with a hacked-up haircut her mother created with the Flowbee she bought on eBay. Now, Nadine’s long, straight, much-blonder-than-mine hair is professionally trimmed. When she runs, her hair gently sways side-to-side like a hula dancer. She’s a really good soccer player, too, one of those “natural athlete” types. At school, Nadine wears cream-colored yoga pants and little tees and always looks effortlessly pulled-together. When I attempt a similar outfit, I look as though I forgot to change out of my pajamas. There’s no way you can fake being a “natural” athlete. I’ve tried. Nadine just laughs.

“Maybe you should stick to basic black,” she says, grinning, “to reflect the angst of your soul.”

Somehow, Nadine bypassed black angst, along with chin zits and bucked teeth and other teen horrors. She’s the kind of girl who radiates health and makes you smile just looking at her, like you know she’s nice. Which she is.

Me, I’m forever trying to raise my body-point average past, well, average.

Now and then, I wonder if Nadine and I would be best friends if we hadn’t been best friends since we were kids who lived two streets away from one another. Does our connection have more to do with geography than chemistry? All I know for sure is, I don’t want to put it to the test.

“You want NASA to invent ice cream that makes you weightless,” I said to Nadine, letting humor camouflage my jealousy.

Nadine laughed. “Yeah, that, too.” We both reached for our Crystal-Light lemonades at the same time and sipped from bendable straws. “But you know what I really want?”

“Yeah.”

I knew. Of course I knew. I sighed. “Me, too.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice?”

“So nice.”

“What do you think it feels like?”

Leaning back on the rubber pillow of my raft, I tried to imagine it. The “it” we were both talking about, of course, was the big it, the it supreme: Love. I’d pictured true love before. It was full of color, light. Pink feathers and turquoise ribbons and gold-leaf swirls that flickered in the sun. And it was cool, too, a blanket of satin, air conditioning that never gave out and wasn’t too expensive to run all summer, even at night. Love was soft and smooth and beautiful. Nothing like our cruddy old beige stucco house in Chatsworth, California, that sat smack in the center of town like a steaming burrito in the hottest part of the hopelessly suburban San Fernando Valley. Nothing like this yard that had started out as prickly weeds and was now nothing but dry, dusty dirt.

“Why bother planting anything?” Dad had said. “We’re the only ones who will see it.”

Like we don’t matter and it’s only important if other people see it.

No, love was nothing like that. Real love was alive and vivid and out there for everybody to see.

“I think love feels like coming home,” I said, adding, “if you actually like where you live.”

Nadine laughed again. She always laughed at stuff I said, which made me feel wonderful.

“I think love feels like...like...” Nadine paused, looked over at me, then we both said the exact same thing at the exact same time: “Love is a serious kiss.”

“Yes!” I said. “A real kiss. Not some slobber session beneath the bleachers.”

“Not some stupid lap-dance kiss in somebody’s basement.”

“Not a fake kiss just ‘cause some guy wants you to think he loves you so you’ll do more.”

“No, not a liar’s kiss.”

“No way.” I leaned back on my raft, said, “True love feels like a deep, soul-melding, passion-bloated kiss.”

“A kiss so intense you faint afterwards.” Nadine sat up.

“And he revives you with another kiss.”

“He lifts your neck with the palm of his hand and kisses you back to life.”

“You open your eyes,” I said, my eyes drifting shut, “and see him gazing at you with such devotion your heart stops beating.”

“Because he is your heart,” Nadine said softly.

“And your soulmate.”

“And everything in between.” We stopped, sipped more lemonade, felt the cool, sweet and sour liquid trickle down our throats.

“That’s what I want,” I told my best friend.

“Me, too,” she said.

“That’s my goal this year.”

“Mine, too.”

We both sighed.

Nadine and I had been kissed before. I mean, we weren’t lip virgins or anything. But neither kiss had made the earth move...or even wiggle. Bert Trout, a.k.a. “Fish Boy,” kissed Nadine at a junior high football game. He just leaned over and planted one on her.

“It felt like kissing a pin cushion,” she reported. “His moustache–if you can call it that–was all prickly and painful.” It didn’t help matters that he missed her mouth entirely. Fish Boy kissed Nadine’s upper lip and lower nose, and, truthfully, she couldn’t wait for it to end.

My neighbor Greg Minsky kissed me once, but it was way too juicy and it grossed me out. He tried a little tongue action, but no way was I going to gulp Greg Minsky’s spit, so I basically shoved his tongue back where it belonged. After that, I pretty much kept my chin down and didn’t give him another opportunity. Though he still looks like he might try. Greg roller-blades up and down our street whenever I’m out front and always finds some reason to stop and chat. It’s cool. I like him, just not that way. He’s too skinny, and his butt is a flat inner tube. Unlike me, he eats all the time. But he once made the mistake of telling me that food went straight through his system several times a day. Yuck.

“Yeah, I want a serious kiss,” I said to Nadine. “A major smooch session. A kiss that means real love. That’s my ambition this year.”

“Mine, too.”

Sitting up, I held up my left hand, placed my right hand over my heart. Nadine did the same. I said, “By our fifteenth birthdays, we, Libby Madrigal and Nadine Tilson, will experience at least one totally real, sincere, meaningful, soulful, poetic, inspiring, knee-buckling, love-filled, journal-worthy, insomnia-producing, appetite-reducing, mind-blowing, life-changing, unforgettable, undeniable, serious kiss.”

We shook hands, felt excited. The plan was set. All we needed were two amazing, soulful, serious, kissable boys. That, and the nerve to pull it off.

What made me think–given my black angst and glaring deficiencies in the Nature/Nurture department–it would be easy?