Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

Bryony’s First Kiss

So Bryony lived.

She lived past second grade and third and fourth. In fifth there was a bit of nastiness when a car swerved onto the sidewalk and nearly hit her while she was roller skating, but a thirteen year old boy zipped by on his skateboard and pushed her into the neighbor’s roses. It saved her life, but scratched her up terribly, and Bryony refused to talk to him for the next three years. When he was sixteen and she was thirteen, she realized with starry eyes that he had been her hero. When he was seventeen and she was fourteen, she wrote biting notes to his girlfriend that she never sent. When he was eighteen and she was fifteen, he joined the military and was killed that very year. Bryony once again felt the fangs of death striking at her ankles, pricking her skin but not wounding her directly. It was a warning, like everything else was a warning. She knew that she would die in high school.

How does this knowledge affect a young girl? How does it change her existence, knowing that the cruel universe is hovering ever at hand, waiting to snuff out her life?

Something inside of her tender heart gave up and died, even while something else struggled to survive. Relationships and memories passively floated past her like flotsam in the tide pool while a part of her grabbed at everything desperately, pulling it to her bosom while she still had time.

Take Teddy Baker.

While her Skateboard Hero was busy not focusing his attention on her, Bryony became enamored with a rather pretty boy who was in her Music Theory class. Large brown eyes, black hair, and a somewhat melancholy countenance convinced her that he needed bounteous amounts of love to be happy, more than any one person could give, but if everybody just dropped tiny drops of love into his empty bucket of a heart, then surely one day it would fill up. Love is sometimes a collaborative effort, you see.

Bryony and Teddy both stayed after class one day, this momentous occasion marked by the ringing of the school bell. The other students and the teacher quickly abandoned the room, and Bryony twirled her light hair self-consciously around her finger while Teddy talked about his family. His woes. The struggles that he went through, the way that he was misunderstood.

“I think that people don’t love you enough,” Bryony said simply. Teddy blinked his rather vacant eyes, and quickly agreed.

“You’re so right, Bry,” he said. “Nobody loves me. Nobody really gets me at all. It’s lonely sometimes, you know?”

He eyed her, gauging her reaction. Her skin was soft and she had that otherworldly ambiance that clung to her. She slid through school as if her death had come and she was a ghost, one foot tethered on earth and the other already off in the stars. Teddy dug that. It made everything easier. It made it not quite so bad, this thing that he was about to do.

“Well, I love you,” she said. Her cheeks pinked. “I mean, not like that, of course. I don’t know you that well yet. But I have this theory, right? We all have a bucket. This big, empty bucket that’s just waiting for somebody to fill it, and . . . ”

Teddy didn’t care much about big, empty buckets. He took her head in his hands, zeroed in, and pushed his mouth against hers. She kept talking for a few seconds, and finally fell silent. Teddy moved his lips a little bit like his sister instructed him to do, and he felt Bryony tentatively do something similar. Teddy pulled away and looked at her, trying to read the unusual expression on her face.

Part of her brain said, “Stop, Bryony! You are a dead girl, and you cannot get attached to anybody. One day you are going to leave suddenly and without warning, and how cruel would that be? To all of you?” That part shook its fist angrily.

The other part of her brain said, “Listen up, you, this may very well be the night. The night that has always been coming, the night when you finally sigh and your ribs still. Don’t you dare miss this momentary chance at happiness!”

“Wh-what are you thinking about?” Teddy asked nervously. He hadn’t had many kisses, but never in all of the movies he had watched had the kissee stared at the kisser with such concentration afterwards. It unnerved him, and rightfully so, for being judged harshly after sharing a first kiss with somebody is a horrid, horrid thing indeed.

Bryony came to a decision. “Teddy, I think that you are very sweet. If tonight is the night that I am murdered, I want to think about your eyes and the way that your hair is falling into them. I want to think about this kiss right now, because it is the first one that I have ever had. And I would like to try it again so that it is a little bit better, if that’s okay with you. I wasn’t really prepared.”

For a second, Teddy caught a glimpse of Bryony as a little girl, when she would stare at the sky, and the clouds would pass over her eyes. She stood as tall as she could, but something was already breaking inside, and Teddy could almost hear it. The gears of her soul grinding to a halt. The bright metal filings of it struck sparks and shone like stars.

She watched him carefully, and Teddy only nodded. He pressed his lips to hers more gently this time, and it was as a first kiss should be—gentle and hopeful and full of nervous delight. He didn’t invite her out as he had first planned. He didn’t take her to the mesa where their headlights would sweep over the desert, where the night would reflect back eyes that couldn’t be seen otherwise. He only told his friends that she refused to come, that she wanted nothing to do with him, and they would have no use for their rope and lighters and eagerly sharpened knives that night. They would have to find somebody else to practice on, somebody else to assuage their burgeoning hunger, because Bryony was on to them, he said, and would never come. Never, so don’t even try.

They said hateful words about her, that devil girl who mysteriously knew so much. Teddy agreed with them, and told them that he would never talk to her again. When her gray eyes searched him out, he avoided them. Eventually they dropped to the ground whenever she saw him, and he felt her spirit crushing underneath his sneakers as he walked by. It was easy to ignore her, to even tease her when he was with his friends. But when he was by himself, it was different.

He treasured that kiss up in his heart, taking it out to test it from time to time. It always held up. It always shone.