10. A Kiss to Build a Dream On
CHAPTER 10
A Kiss to Build a Dream On
KEY
Twelve Years Ago
T he heat is malicious today. Every pedal of my bike feels like torture as the sun radiates down on the back of my neck. I can’t wait to get to the pool. At least I’ll have some relief there. I think the heat even got to my parents because I was shocked they agreed to let me go. But I’m thirteen now, hardly a little kid in need of constant supervision. Even if they think the pool is the devil’s playground.
Sweat trickles down my face and back, but finally I hear the noise from the public pool. I’m only a block away, and I feel cooler already, as if the water nearby hangs in the air. There’s the sound of children screaming, splashing, and laughter as I round the corner and spot the massive fenced pool deck.
It’s super busy, but I’m hardly surprised. On a day like today? There isn’t anything better to do. The bike racks are practically full, but I find one last empty slot, grabbing my towel and swim trunks and heading around the pool house to the change rooms.
The soles of my feet burn as I tiptoe across the concrete five minutes later. I look around, wondering if any of my friends from school are here or if they went to the other one across town. Standing by the pool, I curl my toes around the edge, breathing in the sour smell of chlorine.
Making sure no one is in the way, I don’t hesitate any longer and cannonball into the deep end. The water isn’t overly warm, but every muscle relaxes as I sink below the surface, feeling that sweet relief I’ve been craving all day. My butt hits the bottom of the pool, but I wait before kicking back up to the top. How long can I stay here until I need to take a breath?
Something prickles up my spine and I open my eyes to find the blurry figures of swimmers around me, and . . . there . Sitting at the bottom of the pool across from me, a watery halo of hair the color of fire.
Air escapes my mouth, bubbles floating away from me, and I’m suddenly desperate to breathe. At the top, I wipe the water out of my eyes as I tread, searching for her, but she’s not there. Am I so desperate to see her again that I’m hallucinating, or is it that I finally have heat stroke?
I spin around when someone taps on my shoulder, and blue eyes the color of the pool look back at me. “Hey, Key.”
She’s here. I haven’t seen her in over a year, but she’s actually here. A wave hits me in the face and I swallow too much water, my eyes squinting shut as I cough and splutter.
She giggles and I shake my head, finally spitting out the last of the pool water. “Dusty? What—what are you doing here?”
She grins. “Same as you, dummy. It’s hot as hell today.”
I blink. Did she just swear?
“I—right. Yeah. It’s hot as—yeah.”
She smirks, knowing as well as I do that no one cusses around here, not even the adults.
“You . . . haven’t been coming to church.”
Her face scrunches. “I know. I wanted to, but after Mama left, Daddy had to find an actual job and we moved out of town.”
“Oh.”
She tilts her head, the wet strands of her hair falling over one side of her face. “It didn’t work out though.”
“No?”
“No, so we’re back while he tries to find something else. Daddy was real mad he got fired, but they didn’t take too kindly to him drinking at work.”
“Will you be coming back to church, then?” I ask, then blush when I hear how hopeful my voice sounds.
“Why? You miss me?”
I’ve missed her more than she’ll ever know. “I just mean, it would be nice to talk to someone about music again.”
Her eyes brighten. “Are you still writing songs?”
I nod. “Yeah! Well, trying to.”
“Key, that’s amazing. You’ll have to sing them for me.”
I look around. “What . . . here?”
She rolls her eyes. “No, dummy. Come on.”
She turns and swims toward the ladder. I watch, stuck in place as she climbs out of the water in the tiniest bathing suit I’ve ever seen.
The blue polka dot fabric clings to hips I never noticed before. She stands, glittering in the sunshine as she turns back to me, and while her smile has never failed to draw my attention to her face, I can’t help but stare at her chest hidden under the triangles of her bikini top.
“Are you coming?” she asks.
My throat is dry, but before I can move to follow her, I panic and sink a little deeper in the water. I reach down to the front of my swim trunks and feel a bulge. No no no no . What am I going to do now?
“Key?”
I look up and she stands with her hand on her hip. “Uh,” I start. “Yeah. I just—I forgot something over there. I’ll meet you by the lifeguard tower.”
“Oh, okay!” She smiles easily and disappears into the crowd, her hips swinging.
“Oh man,” I groan. It’s only happened a few times before. What did I do then? Right . . . think of gross things. That’ll do it. But as hard as I try, it’s impossible not to think of Dusty in that bikini. I try not to watch her as she walks across the pool deck, but it’s impossible. She’s hot.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone hotter than her. And, as I glance around, it seems I’m not the only one who thinks so. A dozen men, some even as old as my father, are staring at her like they’ve never seen a girl before. She doesn’t seem to notice as she flips her hair over her shoulder to wring it out, the water dripping down between the polka dot fabric on her chest and glinting off the golden pendant hanging there.
Okay, this isn’t helping.
What does help me is a man in a tiny pair of shorts walking along the pool deck. He’s eating a hot dog and he’s got mustard dripping down his chin. He stops and drags his towel off his shoulder, rubbing it all over and smearing the yellow sauce and hot dog juice into his hairy chest. Taking my opportunity, I swim across to the other ladder and climb up, moving to wrap my towel around my waist, then head for the lifeguard tower.
I find her leaning against it like the statue of a goddess. She’s so much more than hot. She’s pretty. Beautiful . Long gone is the babyish quality of her voice or the roundness in her cheeks. She grew up, and I guess . . . so did I. I just wish we could’ve grown up together.
“Want to get out of here?” she asks me once I join her.
“Where would we go?” What I’m thinking, though, is why would anyone want to leave the pool in this heat?
But all thoughts of the pool disappear when she leans forward to whisper in my ear. “It’s a secret.”
Dusty winks at me and my knees nearly buckle. Next thing I know, we’re on our bikes and I’m following her down a street I’ve never been on before. Dusty’s bike is a bit rusty, and it squeaks like crazy when she brakes, but the white shirt she threw over her bikini top has gotten soaked through and nothing else but that seems to matter.
Soon enough, she turns down a narrow, overgrown driveway and for a moment I think she’s taking me to her house, but then she cuts through some dense trees on the right. I slow down, amazed at how she so effortlessly darts down the dirt path through the woods. I’m about to ask her how far till we’re there when the trees part and a small wooden cabin appears before us.
She stops by the front staircase and looks back at me, her red hair dry and wind blown out around her face.
“This is it,” she says, her eyes wild. She looks . . . excited. Happy .
I push off my bike. “Is this your?—?”
“My house?” she answers. “No way. It’s no one’s house. It’s abandoned, but I fixed up the inside. Come on, I want to show you.”
She grabs my hand, and I follow along after her as she opens the creaking door and pulls me inside. Woah . From the outside, it looked like the place was about to fall down, and maybe it still is, but the inside is clean. There’s a sofa with blankets and cushions without a speck of dust on them, a table with candles in the middle that look like they’re only a few hours from being completely burned out. It’s small—one main room, and there’s a wood stove in the corner next to the sofa.
“What do you think?” she asks, staring at me.
“It’s . . . amazing,” I whisper.
She squeals, dropping my hand to clap and bounce on her toes. “I knew you’d like it. I cleaned the place up myself. I even figured out how to get the old generator going out back.”
I blink in surprise. “A generator? What for?”
She leans forward until our noses are almost touching. “That’s the best part!” Dusty skips over across from the sofa and throws both arms out wide. “Ta-da!”
My mouth drops open when I notice the TV. I step toward the large square box, bunny ears poking up, and slide my fingers along the thin metal rods. “Wow, and it works?”
She shrugs. “It doesn’t get cable, we’re too far into the woods.” She flops down on the sofa and grins. “But look underneath.”
My eyes trail down to where?—
“A VCR?”
She grins and shimmies in her seat. “That’s right! Now I can watch whatever movies I can get my hands on.”
I glance around the place again. It’s cool in here, the tree canopy cutting at least a few degrees off the top. But part of me wonders . . .
“Aren’t you worried someone will find you in here? What if they arrest you for trespassing?”
She stands up and grabs my hand again before pulling me to the couch. “You worry too much. Who the hell is going to come back here? Besides, I’ve been coming here for two months now and never seen so much as a hint that someone else has been on the property.”
With a sharp tug, she pulls me down onto the couch next to her, our bodies press into each other’s sides, and all worries about being caught in someone else’s home fly out of my mind. All I can think of is the feel of her damp shirt against my arm, the skin of her knee touching my thigh, and the fact that her hand is still clasped in mine.
“So,” she starts, her face turning serious. “Sing.”
“Wait . . . what?”
“You told me you had new songs. Sing them for me.”
An odd squeak comes out of my throat. “I-I don’t?—”
She rolls her eyes. “Come on! How are you ever going to become a super famous singer if you don’t practice in front of anyone?”
Because she’s not just anyone. She’s everything.
“Yeah, but I . . .”
She leans back, pulling her hand away to cross them over her chest, blue polka dots taunting me.
“I—okay. But they’re not practiced or anything and I don’t have a guitar?—”
“Oh! I have one back here.”
In a flurry of red curls, she’s gone across the room to a closet and pulling out an old electric guitar. “It’s nothing fancy but it’ll do, right?”
She hands it to me, and I grasp the neck of the guitar gentler than I’ve ever handled an object before. She hurries around, sitting back down on the couch and pulling her knees into her chest to watch me. I look down at the guitar, which is chipped and missing a few frets near the bottom as well as the E string. But it’s something.
“Sorry, I don’t have an amp to plug it into?—”
“It’s great,” I interrupt, flashing her a nervous smile. I’ve never played an electric guitar before. Actually, I’ve never even held one, until now. My fingers curl around the neck and I strum the strings. Immediately both Dusty and I scrunch our faces against the terrible noise, and I have to spend a few minutes tuning it before it sounds even remotely decent. Without an amp it’s a bit pitchy and nasal sounding, but I couldn’t be more excited.
“That sounds better,” I say, and take a deep breath. “Okay. Ready?”
She nods, and her eyes seem alight with wonder as I start to strum the strings in the basic chord patterns that I want. When my parents said I could learn the guitar, they strictly meant classical guitar and fingerpicking hymns, but I couldn’t help myself from stealing over to the public library and learning a handful of chord combinations. I feel like a real rebel now. Playing in a secret place on a forbidden electric guitar? I’ll be in so much trouble if I ever get caught.
But soon I forget all about that and am simply carried away by the freedom to play something my parents don’t approve of. Freedom to improvise and be creative. My eyes close, and my fingertips start to sting from the thin nickel strings as I press them into the board, but I don’t care, and before I can chicken out, I’m singing.
Singing a song I wrote inside my head, sure, but who cares. Because it sounds . . . good. There’s something missing, maybe the missing E string, but the words flow out of me, the dynamics of my voice following the intensity of the guitar. Before I know it, I strum one last time, the sound echoing around the room and I’m breathing hard and fast as the adrenaline rushes through my veins.
I open my eyes slowly to find Dusty staring at me wide-eyed, her dark pink lips open.
“Sorry, I’m still working on it?—”
“That was amazing,” she whispers.
“Re—really?”
“Key, I . . . wow. I had no idea how good you are.”
A blush spreads across my cheeks. “No, I’m not.”
“No, really,” she says seriously, leaning toward me. “I’m kind of in awe of you right now.”
“I—thanks, I guess.”
She frowns and sits back against the sofa.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I just—Key, you could really be something, you know?”
I shake my head. “No . . . I don’t know?—”
“You could!”
We look at each other for a long moment.
“When we said we could run away to Hollywood together,” she starts, “it was just a dream . . . but you—you could really do it.”
I place the guitar next to me and reach forward to grasp her hand. “You can too! Come on, show me some of your acting.”
She shakes her head and wipes a tear from her eye. “No, I’m terrible at it. You’ll just laugh at me.”
“No, I won’t.” She scoffs but I press on. “Come on! You didn’t laugh at me?—”
“Because you were good!”
“And you will be too!”
She tucks her bottom lip behind her teeth and it turns my insides to marshmallow.
“Please?” I beg. “For me?” This seems to win her over. “What’s your favorite movie? Show me a scene.”
A smile peeks out from the corner of her lips. “Promise you won’t laugh?”
I cross my heart with my finger then hold up my hand. “I would never.”
She grins widely then, and bounces up from the couch to stand next to the TV.
“Have you ever seen To Catch a Thief ?”
I shake my head. “No . . . my parents, they don’t really let us watch anything unless they’re there.”
“Okay, perfect. Picture this then. A big fancy room with fancy furniture, fireworks shooting into the sky in the background as a beautiful woman with a diamond necklace stands across from the most handsome jewel thief.”
My eyes widen. “Jewel thief?”
“Yes, hush!” She closes her eyes. When she speaks next, she takes on an accent that suggests it’s decades earlier. That she is the grown-up woman in the diamond necklace. She walks about the room with the air of someone with royal blood, like she’s been trained her whole life to look down on those beneath her, but somehow keeps her kind eyes and friendly smile. Her acting is subtle, each movement purposeful. It makes me wonder if she’s rehearsed this a million times.
Her fingers skim across her bare neck, and I let myself imagine a diamond necklace. Her chest heaves, and I can’t even hear what she’s saying as her breasts pull at her see-through shirt. Before I know it, she’s moving toward me, her hips swaying in a pair of high-cut shorts until she’s sitting right next to me.
I freeze. She takes my hand and places it where a necklace might be if she was wearing one, but my brain breaks and the earlier problem I had in the pool comes back with a vengeance. She leans toward me and I can’t breathe anymore. Her head tips forward and her eyes close and like a speeding train there’s no stopping it. Her lips touch mine and I can feel and see the scene she described.
Then, all too quickly, her lips are gone, and I take in a sharp breath, blink her back into focus. The only sound is our breathing and the cicadas chirping in the tall grass outside.
“How . . . how was that?” she asks, her voice barely above a whisper, no hint of that accent she had only minutes ago.
My mouth bobs open and closed for a few seconds. She’s just acting . I remind myself she didn’t kiss me because she likes me, but because it was part of the scene. Why does that make me so sad?
“That was the best acting I’ve ever seen.” I finally say.
The worry on her face softens. “Really?”
I nod and swallow. “Really. We’re going to get out of here, Dusty. Everyone will know who we are someday. Both of us.”