Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [39]
“Your mom’s bringing in the wash.”
“Yeah.”
“I love the way the sheets smell when they’ve been dried outside, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“You never thought about it.”
“Nope.”
“Not a guy thing.”
“Nope.”
Alice goes back to watching the clouds and the sky and thinking about her dad, but she can’t stand this train of thought so she turns back to Henry. Henry on the unmade bed, Henry who is scratching his ankle until it bleeds, Henry who forgot to comb his hair this morning and all of his cowlicks are sticking up.
There are still Transformers on the shelves and the complete set of Harry Potter. She knows if she opened the drawer to her left, Henry’s collection of arrowheads would be there, perfectly labeled, right next to the tackle box with all his stuff for tying flies. Henry ties the most beautiful flies. He even has a Web site for selling them. And then there’s his iPod—which he earned by mowing lawns—and his collection of jazz CDs. Henry is one of those kind of dorky boys with a lot of interests. But the piano is moving beyond that now; the piano has totally overshadowed the arrowheads; the piano is even starting to move the fly tying aside. Alice thinks that there is always music inside Henry’s head, and right now she wishes she could have music inside her head, too.
There are no rules at Henry’s house about what Henry and Alice can and can’t do, where they can go, what rooms they can be in, what doors have to be open. At Alice’s house the rules are probably the same rules her parents lived with. No boys in a bedroom, yours or anyone else’s. In fact, no boys on the second floor. Ever. No closed doors. Feet on the floor at all times.
She turns back to the window and wonders what her Dad is listening to. Are there radio stations? Is there rock and roll? R&B? Hip hop? Rap? Does he hear the call to prayer five times a day? Is it just background noise or does he really hear it? What if Alice heard a call to prayer five times a day? And what if, instead of praying, which she only half or one quarter believes in anyway, what if she just stopped and listened five times a day? Could she hear her dad’s voice? She can’t remember his voice. She can almost see his face sometimes, but she can never hear his voice. And the harder she tries to see him or hear him inside her mind the farther away he recedes. If there were music inside her head could she forget for five minutes, could she ride the sound, the voices of the instruments, just take a ride, fly away from everything she’s thinking all the time?
Henry is standing beside her.
“What’s so interesting out there?”
“We haven’t heard from my dad in three days.”
She can feel Henry weighing his words, trying to figure out how to respond, but mostly she can feel his warm, solid presence beside her, and before Alice has time to think about what she’s doing, or even know what she’s doing, she kisses him. Just leans in and kisses him. Everything slows way down for a few seconds as she bumps into his glasses and stumbles over one foot and wonders, fleetingly, if she should close her eyes or not, but really doesn’t have time to worry about that because time flips back to normal mode and Henry recoils in shock—or is that disgust?—she’s not sure. Whatever it is, it’s not pretty and it’s not what she expected, if she expected anything at all and now she can feel a blush blooming from the top of her head and flushing red and hot the whole length of her body. The talking part of her brain is in panic mode: Oh, no! You idiot! Why did you do that? That was so stupid! The feeling/sensing part of her brain is going Wow, not so bad, really, if you were just a little more mellow and relaxed maybe you could get the hang of this. But Henry? What is she doing kissing Henry? From the look on his face, he’s wondering the same thing.
Henry has turned away from Alice. His face is flaming hot and he is so acutely embarrassed he doesn’t know how he is ever going to be able