I got up on my knees.
June got up on her knees.
I said, We will stand under a chupa my father will build out of trees from our backyard.
I touched her hair.
She let me.
I said, I will smash a glass beneath my right foot in remembrance of our suffering and we will drink from one cup before thousands.
I bent my head.
June bent her head.
I said, We’ll raise sons who’ll lead armies and rule righteous city-states, and we will never die.
I leaned forward.
She didn’t lean forward.
I leaned back.
She laughed at me.
I was a bancer.
I pulled my hood on.
I said, I just tried to kiss you.
And then she leaned forward and I kissed her.
At first it was all tick-tock. I kept switching which side of June’s nose my nose was on and landed puckered ones rapidly. She did the same back to me. Our faces made smacking sounds and I couldn’t understand why kissing was important. It wasn’t that I was unhappy to be kissing her — I was happy — but I would have been at least as happy to thumb-wrestle, and even happier to play slapslap, if slapslap or thumb-wrestling signified what kissing signified.
For a second it seemed like maybe I was homosexual.
I thought: Are you homosexual? Maybe you’re a homosexual.
I didn’t want to be a homosexual. To be homosexual, I’d’ve had to like wangs, and wangs looked dumb to me: blind, fumbly animals needing sonar and lacking it. And also I’d probably have to like nuts, which looked even dumber — how they bulged out the sack, the way they’d flop and sway and that scarry line in the middle when it was cold. They were like brawn to the brain that was the wang atop them, and barely even that, for even when thinking of it as a personified animal, it was hard to grant the wang much beyond a basic invertbrate nervous system, let alone a brain capable of leadership, so the nuts thugged for wangs that were but stooges themselves; minions to lackeys were the nuts. It would’ve been too hard to be a homosexual. And plus I was in love with June, a girl.
Still, kissing her wasn’t great. And if it wasn’t great for me, then it could not have been so great for her, and it was obviously my fault. When she’d kissed me where my sideburns would be, that was perfect, but now that I was responsible for half the kissing, it was only a little bit nice. Something needed to be done.
She’d said she wanted us to lie about the same things, so I thought about asking her to lie with me about the meaning of slapslap — to agree with me that slapslap meant the same thing as kissing, and maybe even call the game of slapslap “kissing,” so that if she said to me, “Gurion, let’s kiss,” I would put my hands out, palms-down and parallel, and she would put her hands under mine, palms-up, and we’d start to play slapslap. I would always give her the first turn, unless she’d made me angry before. If she’d made me angry and she wanted to make up with me, then when she said, “Gurion, let’s kiss and make up,” she’d put her hands out palms down, offering me first turn, and when I put my hands under hers it would mean she was forgiven. Soon enough, no one would even have to say anything about kissing or forgiveness — we’d just put our hands out to play slapslap and know what we meant. So slapslap would make a lot more sense than kissing, because slapslap wouldn’t just signify love — it would also be fun to do.
I stopped switching nose-sides to make the slapslap proposition, but when I opened my eyes and saw her, the way her freckle-sprays were triangular and the colors of her eyelashes not black but one of the browner reds of her hair, I didn’t want to play slapslap, I wanted to kiss her, which didn’t make much sense, but we kissed some more, and it was more of the same tick-tocking, and I stopped again to look at her. The gaps in her top row winked, and we tick-tocked, and I stopped to look, and the lighter color of the hair above her ears that wasn’t long enough to be ponytailed, and tick-tock and stop, the one-stitch scar that notched her cheek beside the left mouthcorner, a permanent dimple…
It was impossible to not want to kiss her while I looked at her, but no matter how bad I wanted that, once I was kissing her the kissing wasn’t satisfying and I’d start thinking: slapslap. Slapslap’s no fun with your eyes closed, though, and looking at her made slapslap impossible to concentrate on because of how badly it made me want to kiss her. Looking at her, I couldn’t concentrate enough to even talk about slapslap. I was getting H.
There were freckles on her eyelids so I kissed the freckles on her eyelids, and while kissing on her eyelids I pushed her hood back and smelled her hair. It did smell sweet, though not as brightly as strawberries, not as red-and-greenly. It was a better, lazier kind of sweet than strawberries and it seemed to be made of smoke. If a hammock swaying in slomo between telephone poles in the poppyfield from The Wizard of Oz was a smell, that would be the smell of June’s hair.
With my thumbs and pointers I worked her hair-tie back until the ponytail was gone. Her hair curtained down and I slipped my fingers into it, deep, the topjoints touching her scalp. Her hair was as thick as its smell, and I was glad to have my hands in it. I became more satisfied than when I was only looking, but still not really satisfied. I didn’t know what to do.
“Keep your hands there,” June whispered. Her eyes were still closed. She told me, “Close your eyes again.” I did. She pushed my hood back and her palms on the sides of my neck felt fresh and this time our mouths weren’t puckered when we kissed. And we didn’t tick-tock. There weren’t smacking sounds. June’s lips parted to surround my bottom one, to press down on it a little, warm and slippery here, cool and steady there; she did these small pullings on my bottom lip and soon I did the same to her top one at the same time and something splashed bluely across my lobe, left-to-right, and I saw it on my eyelids like a waveform with tracers and these muscles in my temples slackened. I thought: Who knew the muscles in my temples had always been flexed? Who knew I even had muscles in my temples?
I thought: This is exactly what we should be doing right now. This is exactly what needs to be done.
June turned her head then, like she was arguing with my thoughts, saying, “No not that, but this,” and her tongue brushed mine, and it was such a good thing, my hands fell from her hair. She squeezed my neck and our tongues brushed again and that is when the kiss became perfect. I couldn’t tell my face from her face. I couldn’t tell the difference between the movements of her mouth and the movements of mine. I couldn’t separate June from Gurion. It was like being in the first and third person at the same time, the kiss not just something we were doing, but something that was happening to us.
I thought: This is not us kissing; this kiss is ussing.
Ussing? I thought.
Like hyperventilators getting breathed, I thought.
And then I heard this violent chucketa-cracketa noise like a helicopter crashing.
And Nakamook was shouting, “Goddamn!”
That was the end of the kiss.
The monitor, I said.
Across the cafeteria, pennygun in hand, Nakamook was racing to the bathroom. Right next to me rocked the rockinghorse he’d shot. It was not the same one that I’d dropkicked. Half this one’s face was gone, and inside its hollow, busted head lay a black wingnut I reached in and snatched.
“That was a serious,” June gasped, “kiss.”
Pink ghost-shapes spreading all over her neck.
I pulled her into the doorway at the side of the stage.
Become the wall, I told her.