“So maybe it’s a good thing that I keep asking him to keep an eye on you guys.”
She grins mischievously, scrunching up her nose . She looks so cute it takes everything in me to keep from kissing her. Instead, I turn back to the window on my side, watching as the Rockefeller Center goes by.
I can’t stop thinking about kissing her. Ever since our almost-kiss back in Raleigh, it’s been eating me up that I missed my chance. We haven’t had many other moments alone since then, and the longer I wait, the more convinced I am that is needs to be special. But that doesn’t make it any easier to get the idea out of my mind.
I’ve kissed Daisy exactly twice in my life. The first was when we were eight years old. We had just caught Cash making out with a girl behind the bleachers at the middle school during his track meet. We were fascinated. We’d seen kissing a lot on TV and movies and stuff, but neither of us had parents who were together, so we hadn’t seen much real life kissing.
Wanting to know what it felt like, we decided we would try it. As she leaned toward me, I suddenly felt very scared, so I slammed my eyes shut. I remember being surprised by how warm her lips were, and how soft. She had pressed them against mine for a good ten seconds before she burst into giggles and ran away. I had laughed too—Daisy laughing always made me join in—before running after her. After that, we went back to playing freeze tag and never talked about it again.
The second kiss was a bit more memorable. We were thirteen and had been invited to our first boy-girl party, which always seemed strange to me. With Daisy as my best friend, my entire life was boy-girl. I couldn’t figure out why it was such a big deal to everyone else, but the other kids were acting as if it was a major of rite of passage or something.
We sat on couches in Joanie Hartfield’s basement, the girls on one side and the boys clumped together on the other. I kept catching Daisy’s attention and rolling my eyes. She would smile and hide her face, probably not wanting the other girls to know that she had an ally in the enemy camp.
Eventually, Joanie got tired of the “mingling” phase and suggested we play Spin the Bottle. Kissing someone for no good reason seemed stupid to me, but everyone else got excited, so I didn’t complain. Daisy, though, was clearly uncomfortable. She sat next to me in the circle, fidgeting and playing with the cuffs of her sleeves and shoelaces. Every time a boy spun, I would hold my breath, not wanting the bottle neck to point to her. I told myself it was because she was so nervous, but in reality, I just didn’t like the idea of her kissing another guy.
After a half hour or so of awkward pecking, shrieks, and giggles, Joanie declared Spin the Bottle to be a baby game. “We should play Seven Minutes in Heaven.”
Daisy’s face went beet red. I hated the idea of her having to go into the laundry room with some stupid kid from our class, knowing that she would be teased if she refused.
We all wrote our names down on pieces of paper, and Joanie put the boys’ names in one bowl and the girls’ slips in another. She picked from the boy’s bowl and told the guy he had to pull a name from the girls’ bowl.
“And you get two vetos,” she said, “in case you pull someone totally awful.” She giggled.
Daisy’s face fell. I thought it was the stupidest, most boring game. Three guys were picked before me, and each one went to the bowl, looked at the first girl’s name, laughed, and put it back before picking again. Without fail, every one of them went through two vetos, which I was sure was a symptom of them being embarrassed and uncomfortable with the whole thing. I crossed my fingers each time that none of them would choose Daisy.
When it was my turn, I went to the bowl and peered inside. Some of the slips were open slightly, and I could make out Daisy’s handwriting easily. I pulled out a piece of paper and said, “Daisy.” I rolled my eyes as catcalls sounded.
Safely in the laundry room with the lights off, I finally relaxed. I leaned against the washing machine. “That was close. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find your name.” In the darkness, I heard a sniffle. “Daisy?”
“What?” Her voice was clogged up, as if she had a cold or something. Or maybe…
“Are you crying?”
Another sniff. “No.”
“Yes, you are. I can tell. What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to kiss any of those boys!”
“That’s why I got your name, silly. So you wouldn’t have to.”
“But none of them want to kiss me!”
I was stumped. “Why do you care? You just said you didn’t want to kiss any of them.”