The Kissing Game Read online

  The

  Kissing

  Game

  By Marie Turner

  Text copyright © 2014

  Marie Turner

  All rights reserved

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 1

  “Nunca es tarde cuando la dicha es buena.”

  It’s never too late for joy.

  My great grandmother, who lived to be 94 years old and drove a stick shift until the last week of her life, used to say, “It’s never too late to make your life what you want it to be.” I’m thinking about this while rushing down the stairs of my apartment. I pass my neighbor. He’s handsome in that serial killer kind of way. He looks like Ted Bundy: dark wavy hair, somewhat pointy nose, blue eyes. All that’s missing is the bludgeon in his hand and the white turtleneck sweater.

  “Hi, Ted,” I interrupt him. It's an unfortunate twist of fate that his name is also Ted. He’s sitting on a chair on his porch wearing a t-shirt and shorts, drinking his coffee, and reading something on his iPad. He’s a law student at Hastings and poor as dirt like me. I doubt he hears me over the freeway noise—the background music to our luxurious San Francisco apartment complex, but there’s no trace of poverty in the rich smile he offers me back.

  “Wearing pants and long sleeves today?” he asks as if I’m at the beach wearing a trench coat. “You’ll roast. It’s supposed to hit ninety-seven, a record breaking day.”

  And for a moment I wonder what he would look like if he had a beanie cap on his head and was strapped to the electric chair. He’s got to be just a little older than my twenty-three years. If it weren’t for the Bundy thing, I think I might have nursed a crush by now. As it is, I don’t know whether to fantasize about him knocking on my apartment door one night or be terrified by the thought.

  I don’t bother explaining to Ted that my boss is the anti-Christ in a fancy suit who won’t let me wear what I want. Instead, I wave and say, “I’ll roast, most definitely. See you later.”

  I pick up my pace down the block, knowing I’ll need to catch the 7:47 a.m. bus to catch the 8:20 BART train. I pass more apartments that look like mine: barred windows, dirt covered plaster exteriors, dingy curtains on the windows, sounds of televisions blaring inside as if they seek escape. Not a tree among the forest of concrete. Fences I pass are spray painted with mostly indecipherable graffiti, which on some days really drives me crazy. (Who is Feliz and what did he do in 1984?) A police siren screams nearby.

  One bus and train ride later, I disembark with the throngs. On the sidewalk I spot my fellow workers walking like wooden planks turned upright for the day. They look as excited as I am to suck at the teat of the heartless conglomerate that is one of the nation’s 100 most prestigious law firms: Benson & McKinley. I eye their sleepy faces while we sway in formation into the elevator and press our respective buttons. My nose is met with a mix of shampoo and coffee smells.

  Shouldering his way toward me, my coworker Todd slides through Nancy from Human Resources and Debbie from Accounting to chat with me. He’s tall and lean and gay as a tight pair of pants. In his dream world, he would walk around everyday wearing a tight t-shirt that proclaimed Kill your ass, just for the fun of the looks on people’s faces.

  “You sport’n some Prozac today, Caroline?” he whispers above the whistling elevator noise. “I think you’re gonna need it. After you left last night, Robert was a rabid hot squirrel.”

  I can feel the steady sucking of blood out of my face as I contemplate my boss being mad at me. Todd and I exit and walk around the corner past other cubicles. We glide silently past closed office doors towards our joined cubicles, where lawyers swarm the halls like buzzards all day long.

  “Why?” I whisper, my mind racing but coming up empty.

  “Something about timesheets.” Todd waves his hand in the air. “Can’t believe he makes you do them for him. You know you’re the last assistant around here who enters a timesheet anymore. And why’re you wearing those horrid pants and button-up shirts all the time? You see any other lackies dressed like that?” He points at Maria, another office worker, who’s wearing a short-sleeved pink sundress. Maria nods at us. Her eyes offer silent condolence that another weekday has just begun.

  “You don’t have to dress how he wants you to. He can’t force you. If I were you, I’d complain or quit.” Todd raises his eyebrows at me and hustles to his cubicle. Opening his desk drawer, he places his neat knapsack inside before sitting down at his desk. A glitter-framed photo of James Dean sits next to his computer.

  Swinging over to my desk, I place my backpack inside my drawer. At my computer, I exhale and try not to think about my 40-hour-per-week post-apocalyptic, dead-end, phosphorescent purgatory.

  Of course, the second I sit down I see the little red light on my phone blinking. The light indicates that my boss is calling me on the intercom. He doesn’t like the intercom to make noise. Basically, he doesn’t want to alert everyone that he’s summoning me. He likes it to be silent and stealthy in his daily shattering of my self-worth.

  For a moment, I organize my organized desk. I move the stapler to the other side near my cup full of pencils and ballpoints. I tuck the yellow Post-its next to the phone. I press the power button on my computer. It wheezes.

  But the damn red light keeps blinking.

  I pick up the phone.

  “I’ll be right in,” I say and hang up.

  Standing steady and tall, I remind myself that I sound like a cow sucking its tongue when I cry.

  I walk the four paces from my desk across the blue-carpeted hallway. For a second I stand at my boss’s big white door. With my hand barely on the handle, it clicks open as if by magic.

  My twenty-eight-year-old boss Robert looks up from a binder so full of pages that it would frighten schoolchildren. Closing the door behind me, I wait. I’m suddenly very aware of my posture, my clothing, the shape of my body, the state of my hair.

  Meanwhile my boss looks as if he woke up and walked outside to the sound of singing birds and harp-playing angels. If any woman saw him from afar, she would automatically picture the white picket fence, her children playing in the yard with smile-plastered faces while Robert pulls up in the driveway, steps out of his sedan, and proclaims, “Honey, I’m home.” His blackish-brown hair is parted on the side, perfectly coifed. His navy blue suit looks as if mud or dirt would be repelled from it, like same-side magnets. His crisp white shirt and yellow tie remind me of hotels with Gatsby-esque lobbies, where everyone makes so much money that they eat chocolate-covered croissants from room service all day. If that isn’t enough, his dark eyelashes are thick and curly. So much so that regularly I have an urge to reach out and try to pull them off, just to test if they’re real.

  With eyes the color of pure blue spring water, Robert looks up at me and growls, “Where the hell are my timesheets?!”

  “I put them on your desk, last night, before I left,” I mumble. I remember perfectly clearly that I walked over to the printer, picked up the printed timesheets, and brought them to his desk last night. Then I grabbed my backpack and ran like an antelope to the elevator.

  “You mean these?” He holds up white pieces of paper, partially smudged with ink, the ghostly imprints of timesheets on their faces.

  “Oh. The printer must’ve run out of in
k,” I conclude. With a swallow, I lean toward him to take the timesheets out of his hand, but he jerks away from me as if my stupidity is contagious. Huffing, he tosses the paper into the recycle bin behind him.

  A cow sucking its tongue, a cow sucking its tongue...

  “I’ll print them again. I’m sorry.”

  His pretty mouth twists, and I swear his fist almost clenches.

  “You might want to make sure the printer is working so you don’t leave me useless documents before you race out of here every night. You’d think the building was on fire the way you fly out the door every evening at 5:30.”

  The truth is I have a 5:35 train to catch. If I miss it, I have to wait an extra forty minutes for the next bus to take me home from the train station. This means a one-hour commute would turn into a two-hour commute. But I don’t bother to tell him this. His perfect face might turn purple and explode.

  “Sorry,” I say again. Sucking cow…

  “I have to be in court this morning, and I need you to pick up my dry cleaning.” He hands me the dry cleaning tickets without looking at me. Apparently I’m the last assistant on earth who still picks up dry cleaning, coffee, and lunches for her boss. This is apparently an outdated practice no longer deemed acceptable once women stopped letting men walk all over them.

  “And this time, make sure they put my shirts in boxes. Boxes. I don’t even want the shirts if they’re hung up on a hanger. Just tell the cleaners I’ll wait.”

  I glance briefly out Robert’s office window. It’s like a painting on a museum wall. The tops of the Bay Bridge are peaking out from the fog, which has opened in patches showing the blue waters of the bay. Seagulls fly over a boat in a distant patch of water. Sometimes if I look out the window, I can pretend my life isn’t this post-apocalyptic, demon-dominated, horrific—

  “Did you hear me?” Robert asks.

  “Yes. Yes. You mean, you don’t want the shirts at all if they’re not boxed—you’ll wait, but how long?” I inquire. I must always clarify instructions from Robert. I have learned this from experience.

  “A few days, whatever, just no hangers.”

  “Okay.” I turn to go—always like an escaping convict--but I can feel him mentally pulling me back, as he always does. It feels like the weight of a tanker stopping in front of me, only there’s no tanker, just that feeling.

  “Wait,” he says.

  Ugh.

  I turn.

  “Are you—” he hesitates. The tone of his voice suggests that what he wants to say is so awful he can’t let it out.

  “Are you wearing … perfume?” he asks, his face scrunched. His tone is so accusing that I can picture the wooden box I’m going to be buried in after he kills me. It would be cheap, maybe knotty pine, with unfinished edges, a little graffiti sprayed on the sides perhaps. Did I mention my boss hates perfume? He’s allergic or something. I’m not sure.

  His head cocks and he has that look, as if he isn’t sure what to do. The flames stoke just inside his ears. Suddenly I wish I had a glass of tall vodka, four tranquilizers, and several burly men. We’d hold him down so I could fill his gullet with so much alcohol and pills that he’d fall into a coma and wake up having forgotten whatever he thinks he smells right now.

  “No.” I feel my heart sweating. “You know I don’t wear perfume, and I—I wouldn’t wear perfume after you said not to.” I touch my neck defensively. Meanwhile I stand there, like a pile of sheep dung. I don’t know what else to say.

  He leans back in his chair and looks out the window as though he wants to lambaste something. Although he’s never physically hurt me or anyone as far as I know, I sense there’s a dragon deep inside him. It’s just waiting to rear its scaly head and bite someone in half.

  While he thinks about what to do, I hear nothing but his small clock ticking on the shelf. The little brass secondhand darts in a sharp circle. He takes the end of the fancy black and gold pen he’s holding and brings it to his lips. Then he points the end of the pen in my direction.

  “I smell perfume. That’s definitely perfume.” His eyes darken as he leans over his desk.

  “Robert,” I say gently. “On my life, Girl-Scout’s honor, I swear, I’m not wearing any perfume. I don’t even like perfume.” And I don’t. It totally gives me headaches.

  And then it dawns on me. My shampoo. He must be smelling my shampoo. See, I found this vanilla-scented conditioning brand at the Dollar Store last night. It smelled so good that I bought ten of them. So that’ll be ten dollars down the drain. I suppose I can always use dish soap to wash my hair.

  “Unless …” I say, deciding to confess, even though I am so close to escaping. The doorknob is just within reach. I wring my hands defensively as I begin. “Unless it’s my shampoo.”

  Robert scowls.

  “I bought this vanilla scented shampoo at the Dollar Store last night.” I pat my hair, which at the moment hangs down over the front of my plain purple button-up shirt.

  “You know how I feel about perfume, scented anything,” he chastises. He puts his hand over his mouth and then looks at my hair. Just looks at it! And I want to pry my eyeballs out and hand them to him just to get him to stop.

  “But it’s not perfume. It’s shampoo, a totally unintentional use of scent.” I’m edging towards the door in microscopic steps. My black flats are silent on the carpet. “And I won’t use it again. I promise.” My hand is on the doorknob.

  “That would be appreciated,” Robert says. “And one more thing,” he adds while I partially open the door. “I appreciate your not wearing inappropriate attire today, in light of the weather. Everyone else is wearing sundresses and short-sleeves. I think it’s important we be dressed for court, for whatever comes up.” He’s gesturing with his hands as if he’s pleading a case in court. It’s an unusual tone for Robert to use with me. He usually doesn’t try to convince me of anything. His word is law. Even so, he’s never explained why he won’t let me wear dresses or skirts. That part of his dress code I never understand. One would think skirts would be professional enough, but he always wants me to wear dress pants and button up shirts. Asking him now, however, would be beckoning hellfire. Suddenly, I wonder if he heard Todd and me talking in the hallway about his stupid dress code. Lawyers have bionic ears, you know. They hear all, see all, know all, like an omniscient narrator.

  I nod. “Sure,” I say. “No problem” before slipping out his door and closing it behind me.

  Robert soon leaves for court, and I spend an uneventful morning working at my desk. At lunchtime, I head to the nearby food court with Todd and my other two gay coworkers: Henry and Cory. They’re all in their twenties like me. And they all have ambitions to do other things in life besides working as assistants at a law firm.

  Henry works for the Chairman of the firm, Collin Snow. Henry is a short heavyset man who prefers sweater vests and khakis to all other forms of attire. Today, he’s strangely sporting a white polo shirt because it’s 80 degrees, even in the food court. He hopes to someday own a pet grooming operation where cute poodles come to be fluffed. Cory works in the technology center of the law firm. He wants to be an actor. He’s short, skinny, and fond of tie-dye clothing. Whoever said gay men know fashion has never met my gay friends. To me, they are still preferable to women friends. They’re honest and they keep all my secrets in a vault, locked up tight. Eating lunch with them is daily therapy.

  “You have enough liquids there to rehydrate a small African village,” Henry says to me as I set down onto the table my colossal soda and bowl of tortilla soup, otherwise known as the five-dollar special.

  “I said medium, but I think it’s a large. I was so worried I’d spill it,” I say sipping the soda. The food court is packed with other workers and lawyers, the bright sunlight of dome overhead shining on unfortunate patrons. We sit at a table under the shade of a fake palm tree.

  “You heard we all got invited to the summer intern dinner party tonight?” Henry says while holding a fork containing
pasta.

  “The staff?” Todd mumbles with a mouth full of burrito. A bead of sweat forms on his neck. The cackle of laughter erupts from a nearby table of legal assistants we know.

  “Yup,” Henry replies. “I think we should go. The interns are hot this year. We should give them a fond farewell. What do you think Cory?” Henry suddenly looks like an untethered horse at the thought of being around attractive interns.

  Cory wiggles in his tie-dye shirt and forks his Caesar salad. “Those affairs are so dull. Nothing worse than a room full of lawyers and wannabe lawyers. I hate them all.” He shoves a bite into his mouth and chews. I suddenly wish I’d ordered a Caesar salad. I blow at the hot soup and tell myself hot soup is appetizing when it’s 80 degrees.

  “So how did it go with hardass today, Caroline?” Todd asks me. He wipes a dab of sour cream off his lip with a napkin. “Did he scold you good?”

  I roll my eyes and snort, trying not to think about it. I gulp a spoonful of hot soup. Tastes like I’m in Mexico, feels like I’m in Mexico. I’m suddenly starving. Mexico is so underrated.

  “You shouldn’t put up with his bullshit,” Henry says, chewing. He points his plastic fork at me. “You need to stand up for yourself. I don’t know about you all, but I am tired of him walking all over Caroline. That man needs to be tied to a wagon and have some hungry rats thrown on him, like in that book, what was it? 1985? 1984? Jesus it’s hot in here.” Henry looks around to see if he’s the only one suffering. He pulls at the front of his polo shirt to get some air inside.

  “Yeah, Caroline. Henry’s right. You know he can’t treat you that way. I’d go to human resources and complain,” Todd swivels his head at me as if he’s a Bobblehead doll. “That human resources bitch can fix any squabble between a lawyer and an assistant.”

  “You guys,” I start, sounding whinier than I intend. “I can’t. Human resources will have me sit down with Robert face to face. I’d rather be shot in the foot. And I’ve tried to find a job elsewhere in the firm, but there’s nothing right now. I’ve even looked outside the firm, but the job market in San Francisco is tanked. I’m stuck. Unless I want to be homeless.” I spoon some soup into my mouth and think about moving in with my mom in Ohio, where she lives in a trailer park with my stepdad. So depressing.