Chapter 24

I kissed Avril goodbye. She wanted to follow me down Coburg and Spring Garden to Sacred Heart, but I wanted to focus on Kitty. Did I not put her together right? Or did Fox’s mom pull her daughter’s brain apart? I held my hoodie forward and trudged down the street.

Middle of the day, walking by busy restaurants, was pickling my sensitive brain. I texted Kitty as I approached the school. “When you’re on lunch.” and a picture of me, half a block down the street.

I was tackled before I could even blackout my phone from sending the picture. I staggered, unprepared, for an aerial high-speed assault, and slid in the crackly ice that hadn’t been wholly cleared from the wintry sidewalks.

“Hi!”

“Hey,” I said, brushing her hair back from her face and hitting her earmuffs. I put her face straight in the funnel of my hood. She was bundled up in fluffy parka as well, but her tartan skirt and navy tights showed off the uniform underneath. We didn’t have uniforms back at my high school, a public high school. I hardly ever saw girls in skirts last year.

I think I would’ve been brutally distracted by legs to the point of flunking out. Especially by girls like Kitty.

“You’re, um...”

There were half a dozen minds fractalling out impossibly nearby. I grabbed the back of Kitty’s neck, messing up her blond hair. And pulled her in for a kiss.

She melted and squeezed me.

I got the mouth of my hood around the edges of her face.

“Ooh!” Some nearby girls squealed and shouted. She had brought friends? I didn’t care.

I burned away the non-Kitty minds. I focused until I had a splitting sharp pain inside my skull.

Three minds. All spinning in opposite directions of each other.

She was a fucking mess.

I let go of her kiss hard.

“Lunch is about to end,” she said, red cheeked and not from the cold. “I gotta go back to class in like three minutes,”

“You’re Jordan?” one of the girls she had brought with her asked. I turned and looked at the three of them.

Kitty was gorgeous. Her friends were ... Cute, is the best I could say.

I didn’t want these two.

I had eight girls and I had to take care of them.

“Yeah,” I said, grabbing Kitty’s fingers. When I realized she wasn’t wearing gloves, I pulled mine off and held her freezing skinny digits in my recently warm ones. I turned and focused right into Kitty’s eyes. “Kitty’s my girl.”

One brain shot to the moon. One brain teetered and tottered. One brain sputtered down gears. I ran my lips over hers, starting and stopping several kisses. I whispered.

“How’d you come apart again? Was it me in there?”

All three minds cranked down a step.

“Don’t bring mom into this!” Kitty growled.

I felt relieved before I felt angry.

“Kitty says you’re a slut,” a fierce brown eyed girl said, interrupting my clash of emotions. I swallowed everything down and bottled it. I gave Kitty a quick kiss and pulled back from her face. The world flowed in. My stomach and inner ears wobbled.

“No,” I said, running my thumb up and down Kitty’s finger. She was a mess and I had lost my place without literally walling off the world with her face and my hood. “Sluts play to play. I play to win. For keeps.”

“Ah ... He’s so dumb, he thinks that’s romantic,” said a blue-haired Asian girl, with a quiet chuckle. Her cheeks were glowing red all the while.

“It is romantic,” said the brown eyed girl. She looked defeated.

“OK, how about you meet me and my friends after school?” Kitty said.

“At your place?” I asked.

“At mine,” brown-eyed girl said. “Her mom and dad are gonna be home. Mine are–”

“Yeah, no. I’m going to Kitty’s,” I said. “And you two can go to her place.” I nodded at brown eyes. I turned back to Kitty. “I’ll see you after school.” Not a question. A certainty.

I kissed Kitty again. “Is Dove at work?”

Again the minds all around me were reacting in conflicting ways. I kissed her hard, cutting off her answer, and leaning her backwards onto her heels. She pulled on my belt. The tips of my toes scuffed up the ice I had just earlier managed to save myself from.

“Whoa!” Kitty said, slipping out from under me as I face planted next to her into the concrete. I bumped my nose, but prevented myself from pulping my face with a crooked arm.

“Ha! Ah!” Kitty laughed and screamed all at once. She corkscrewed down and grabbed my shoulder. I slowly pushed myself up to my knees.

“Is my nose bleeding?” I asked, wiping wetness away with the back of my hand. It was just semi-melted ice. Then I turned my hand over and saw the red. I had scraped up the heel of my left palm.

“No,” said brown-eyes. “You OK?”

“I’ll survive,” I said. Provided Kitty doesn’t kill me before I can get in her head and set things straight once more. Honestly, I wanted to kiss her and leave her spun up and excited over me. I didn’t want to fuck with the opposed brains. I didn’t want to play with her friends either. Kitty was the prettiest girl in the group. Her crooked smile and asymmetric freckles. Her glasses were dirty. Her hair was a wild mess under her earmuffs.

My right hand was bloody, so I just squeezed her fingers with my left. I forewent grabbing the back of her neck again and leaned in for a light kiss.

“You already kissed her goodbye,” said brown-eyes.

“Shut it Jackie!” said blue Asian.

“Dove’s down at the Henry House?” I asked.

“Uh, she had a shift at eleven, so probably? Unless she died in a car accident. Actually, Mom probably would’ve called me by now if that happened. And I’d get out of afternoon classes.”

“You don’t have your license, do you?” I asked, trepidatiously.

“Yeah, got it years ago,” she said, beaming her shiny teeth. “They even took the N off it so I don’t turn into a pumpkin at midnight. Do you wanna go out on a date later? I’ll see if I can get the car from dad and we can–”

“I’ll see you after school tonight.” I finally kissed her goodbye and headed down the street. She waved and crashed into her friends. I was glad I wasn’t the only person she was knocking about on the ice.

She better not be doing that with her guy friends.

Put Humpty Dumpty back together and you won’t have to worry about other people. I did it for Avril and Avril hadn’t been looking for a one guy thing before I got inside her brain folds. Kitty wanted to be my princess.

I just had to slay that dragon.

Kitty’s dragon was her own reckless craziness.

I stuffed the mangled metaphors as I blew on my weeping hand. I crossed the lights at South Park and rushed by the McDonald’s to the Lawton’s for some band-aids. The pharmacist wasn’t happy when I had cracked the box while in line to pay for it. She just needed the barcode on the box to ring it in. I checked; it was still intact.

“Goodbye Mrs Meier.” Her face changed on a dime when she met my eyes. “Let me look at that,” she grabbed my hand, slapping my wrist down on the counter. “Half-assed boy bullshit...” She probably had sons. She peeled off the band-aids I had slapped on and manifested some bottle from seemingly nowhere. I clenched my teeth as she quickly washed out the shallow scrapes.

“I fell on the sidewalk,” I said, because I felt awkward. An old man had fallen into line behind me. The pharmacist just nodded. She spread one new band-aid over the cut. Her way fit my hand better. It didn’t buckle up when I made a fist. She rang in the box, tossed it in the trash (there were another five band-aids in that.) “You can grab another box from the shelf,” she said, forming a genuine and concerned smile on her face. “Now be careful out there.”

‘Thanks,” I said. Her mind manifested clearly in the unbusyness of the store. She was an OK looking woman in her forties. I left her brain at a one and pulled my glove back over my hand. “My girlfriend knocked me over.”

“Congratulations,” she said, wryly, and looked beyond my shoulder. “Hello Mr Keaton! You’re just in time!”

Right, I headed out.

The mild embarrassment and the mothering actually choked up a lot of my brain as I marched by the dorms and down to Dove’s pub. If I could take on enough distraction, I wasn’t getting overwhelmed by the world around me. That lasted fine on a mildly populated street where all the cars that drove by had their windows up and their brains sectioned off. It wasn’t so good as I got walloped in the busy lunch of the pub.

“Hey, for one?”

“In Dove’s section?” I said, eyes closed and headed forward.

“I’m all full up,” Dove said, sarcastically. I blinked open, hardly having noticed it was she who greeted me.

“What?”

“Shut up and sit at the bar, Jordan,” Dove laughed. She pointed and I followed her finger. I hopped on the stool. The bartender looked at me.

“ID?”

“No need,” I said. “Just a diet coke.”

“Right,” he said, pouring me one from the gun. He put it on a coaster next to me.

“He’s mine,” Dove said. “Give him a menu.”

“If he’s yours, should I really be doing all the work?” the bartender asked. He was flirting with her. I closed my eyes and looked at Dove. There were a half dozen other women on the floor. I couldn’t be certain which one she was.

I did sniff out her one.

The bartender slid a menu in front of me. “You look hungover. Greasy eggs and poutine’s my cure.”

“Sounds good,” I said, not hungover and not really that hungry. I was about to nix the eggs.

“Yeah, except our chef does her job well,” the bartender said. “Great eggs ... aren’t the solution.”

“Just the poutine then,” I said.

“I hope you tip Dove real well for this,” he said.

“Maybe later tonight,” I said, grinning. I took several deep breaths. The bartender ignored me until my glass was empty and he quietly refilled it. The food came before Dove made her way over to me. Mozzarella not cheese curds, this place was swankier than where I’d usually go for this kind of stuff, I’d figure they get it right.

The fries were awesome though.

“Hey!” Dove slipped in front of me and stole one of said fries. I squared her off in my two hoods.

“Your mom fuck with your brain?” I asked.

“I would’ve been too distracted to make it to work if she didn’t,” Dove said.

I rolled her up to a healthy three. Not enough for her to drag me off for a quickie, but enough to flush her cheeks with pink when she smiled at me.

“I’m heading by your place with Kitty this afternoon,” I said. “When you gonna get home?”

“I’m off here at seven,” she said. “If cleanup’s not a bitch, quarter after or so?”

“Right,” I said. “Do you want to be in a state to remember your job?”

“God no!” Dove rolled her eyes. “It’s way more fun and shit just is brighter when you get in there and pull the ripcord.”

“Huh,” I said. “OK, Kitty said you’re mom’ll be home after school?”