The best thing about going to public school is the testing.
It’s also the worst thing, sometimes, but testing means that every week or so, we have a strange schedule. More often than not, it’s last period that gets affected—it gets extended, making it twice as long, three times as long, once four times as long as normal. I have Intro to Theater last period, which basically means I paint sets for the Advanced Theater class’s productions. That, and I watch the teacher struggle to keep an eye on the plethora of “bad” kids who got signed up for the class because they hate school too much to choose their own electives.
Which, incidentally, is the second-best thing about public school: If you’re not a genius or a future crackhead, teachers pretty much don’t notice you. That’s why it’s so easy for me to skip the end of the school day every round of standardized testing. I’m not really sure how Kai manages it, since he is a genius, but he figures it out. We don’t even have to plan it anymore—if sixth period is extended, we duck out right after the fifth period bell rings. Today is one such day. I slink around the back of the school, where he’s already waiting for me, anxious to hurry off into the early afternoon as if the city is ours.
“What takes you so long?” Kai mutters, leaning against a trailer classroom’s wall. The annoyance in his voice is betrayed by the way his eyes shine at me.
“I had to go to my locker,” I answer. “Otherwise I have to walk all the way home with my chem book.”
“Excuses, Ginny, excuses,” he says, knocking the back of my legs with his violin case, grinning as he does so. That’s where Kai’s supposed to be in last period—orchestra—but he and the orchestra teacher are more friends than student and teacher, largely due to the fact that the teacher could probably learn more from Kai than vice versa.
It’s cold, especially for October. Usually Georgia is in between summer and fall this time of year. The chill makes my nose run and my eyes water, but it also makes me feel more alive than the lazy summer heat from last month. Kai and I trudge across a bridge that’s been painted with our school colors and leads from the school’s property to a public park. The park is largely empty, save a few overweight cops on Segways and some sketchy-looking guys hanging out by the entrance. They’re the reason that Kai’s expensive violin is in a crappy-looking case: to keep anyone from knowing just how much it’s worth. Even I’m not supposed to know, really, but of course he told me.
We ignore the sidewalks and cut straight through the park, heading up a few blocks toward our building. It’s one of the few brick structures in a cityscape of steel, neon, and concrete. I turn to say something to Kai, but he suddenly grabs my hand and tugs me around a corner. He puts his arms on either side at me, palms against the concrete I’m pressed up against, as he peers past the building’s granite edge. I raise my eyebrows at him, fighting the blush that’s creeping onto my cheeks over how close we are.
“Is there a problem?” I ask.
Kai turns back to me and smiles. “Sorry,” he says. “Grandma was at the window.” He’s whispering, as if she might be able to hear us from a half a block away.
“I’d be willing to place a bet that if she catches us, it’ll somehow be my fault,” I say, and Kai laughs, his chest rising and falling against mine as he does so.
“It’s always your fault with Grandma,” he agrees. As far as Grandma Dalia is concerned, I’m the ultimate distraction in her Kai-is-a-prodigy plan. Kai says she’s always been like this—she keeps her things close, and Kai is her most valuable thing. Our apartment building itself is probably a close second—she persuaded her husband to buy it ages ago, then got it in the divorce. It can’t be torn down since it houses Atlanta’s oldest (if broken) elevator, but I don’t think she’d let a wrecking ball touch it anyhow. She loves it—though I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why. If I had the money Grandma Dalia has, I’d live somewhere—anywhere—else.
Kai hesitates, then drops his arms so I’m freed—though he doesn’t take a step back. I keep my back firmly planted against the stone wall, unwilling to disrupt the feeling rippling between us, the pull to be closer still. We watch each other, waiting for it….
The first time I kissed Kai was when we were in the vacant lot by our building. He was holding an acceptance letter to a music intensive in New York, and I was holding nothing but his hand, and then his arms, and then his cheek as we pulled in to each other and kissed for what was only moments but felt like hours. We were high on the idea of living in New York together, of the tiny coffee shops we would visit and the museums we would sneak into. We dreamed of late-night stops at street-food vendors and a handful of artistic, clever friends, the philosophical sort we’d never find in our school. It was his acceptance letter, of course, but it was our dream, our shared fantasy, and it boiled over in our minds until the only thing left to do was to kiss, to kiss as if we’d done it a million times before.
But we hadn’t—and we hadn’t even done it very often since, though every day pulls us closer together, closer to another moment when our lips will touch.
This is one of those moments. I wait, not letting my eyes waver from Kai’s, and watch the rhythm of his breath. His skin is olive, his hair dark, and it’s falling across his forehead the way it always does. I reach up to brush it aside, but Kai leans in before I can do so, letting his breath dance across my skin for a moment. I let him pull me up onto my tiptoes and press in until our lips touch. His hand is on my back, my fingers drifting down the front of his chest, and in my head a thousand fires spring up all at once.
It’s several quickened heartbeats before we release each other; Kai’s hand immediately trails along my forearm before he laces his fingers with mine. I lean close to him; he grins at me, looks around the corner…
“Coast is clear,” he says, and we come out of hiding. For a moment, I wonder if we shouldn’t hold hands, just in case his grandmother sees us—cutting class plus holding my hand? Grandma Dalia would be furious. Kai seems less concerned, though, which quietly pleases me—his desire to touch me is stronger than his loyalty to Grandma Dalia, which I know is no small thing itself. Kai drums his fingertips on my knuckles and moves so that our lower arms are curved around each other as we get closer to our building.
It was a pretty place at one time—I’ve seen photos of it when it was brand-new, back when Kai’s grandmother lived here as a little girl and this was still a decent neighborhood. The stonework above the door is still kind of pretty, actually—marble carved into a lion’s face with a cloth banner around it. But the lion aside, 333 Andern is mostly a pile of bricks with an ever-changing sea of graffiti on the outside walls.
Kai hands me his key chain and I select a small silver key, then use it to open the door leading into the basement. We creep past the washing machines, all of which have OUT OF ORDER signs on them, and around bottles of cleaner so old that the logos look all wrong. Up the back stairs, one flight, two flights, three—eight altogether, each with its own litter and grime and collection of rattraps, until we reach the rooftop access door. I select another key from Kai’s key chain, a key he isn’t supposed to have, and insert it in the lock. Slowly, carefully, I open the door—it usually squeaks, but over the years I’ve perfected opening it silently. I slip through, Kai close behind me, then turn back to shut it.
I exhale when I turn around. This is the only thing about the building that’s not only still pretty, but beautiful. Kai and I found it when we were little, prompting his grandmother to declare the rooftop strictly off limits and install a new lock. It was only a matter of time before he stole the key and I had it copied before she missed it. His grandmother would kill us—well, me, anyway—if she found us here. But how could we stay away? I think, gazing across the rooftop.
Roses, roses everywhere. What was once a large rooftop garden is now a mess of rosebushes, wild and resistant to the constant breeze. The roses have devoured an old trellis, long fallen and decaying, and were on their way to eating an iron bench before Kai and I cut the thorns away and rescued it. They’re still in bloom—they’re almost always in bloom, save around Christmas. Bright reds and fuchsias and shades in between, blooms so big that when Kai moves down the path we forged through the briars they almost hide him completely. I follow him to the bench, then pull out my math book and sit on it so I don’t get rust all over my clothes. We’re silent for a few moments, the comfortable sort of quiet that exists only with someone you’ve known forever.
“Two hundred seventy-three days until we’re in New York,” Kai finally says, sighing as he gazes across the rooftop. Looking backward, all you can see is roses, but forward, over the building’s edge, past the courtyard and the bars and the parks, is the Atlanta skyline. It looks massive yet cage-like. The buildings aren’t places to go but enormous walls, keeping us in.
“I’ll have to get a job,” I say. “I guess I could… waitress or something.”
“You can do a lot more than waitress,” Kai says a little tensely, and I feel the ghosts of old arguments rising between us. It’s not that I want to be a waitress or cashier or parking lot attendant. It’s that when your best friend is a prodigy, it feels a little dumb, auditioning for choir or joining the science team or the newspaper—you wrote an article on the student council election? Great—Kai went to San Francisco to play with an international youth symphony. The symphony flew him first-class.
It’s not Kai’s fault. I know it and he knows it, but I think he’s stuck at an intersection of responsibility and pity for me. He’s always trying to make up for it and feels the need to push me into doing something, anything, when the truth is all I want is for him to pull me closer.
I lean into him as a particularly cold breeze whips across the rooftop. “Anyway. I can be a waitress even though I’m under twenty-one, right? I was thinking about this. Even if we pull off me sleeping in your dorm room—”
“You’re not sleeping in my dorm room; you’re just an accomplished vocalist helping me practice in the evenings,” he reminds me, repeating the lie we constructed together. He’s better at lying than I am, but I’m the one who researched vocal classes on the Internet, who learned a bunch of music terms, who practiced the confident, tall way that singers sit in chairs. Kai can invent the lie, but I’ve always been better at the details, I suspect because while he’s always been busy doing, I’ve been busy watching.
“Yeah, yeah,” I answer. “But even if we pull that story off, I don’t want to be broke in New York, living off your dorm food. So I need a job, but I bet they’ll cross-reference or something and figure out I ran away.”
“You won’t be a runaway though, since you’ll be eighteen. And I mean… I don’t think your parents will…” Kai drifts off. The end of the sentence, I know, is “be looking for you.” Dad lives a few hours away, and Mom works two jobs—maybe three now, I’m not sure. It hurt when I was younger, but now I can’t help but think of their indifference as a good thing—it’ll be easier for me to break ties. To leave with Kai and…
I pause, exhale, and say the thing I really want. “What if we just never came back when the intensive ends?”
Kai looks at me, then down, playing with a briar that’s pressing against the bench. “I can’t leave my grandmother forever. Five months away from her will be bad enough. You know how she is.”
Crazy, is how she is. All right, maybe not crazy, but neurotic at least—she sprinkles salt around the entire building on Halloween. She once refused to allow a couple to rent an apartment because they owned a black cat. She spends most of the winter locked up inside, wary to go out among “the beasts.” Winter and the beasts it supposedly brings are what she fears most of all.
Neurotic at the very least.
“I know. I was just wondering,” I say, which isn’t entirely true—I wasn’t wondering. I was hoping. For me, it’ll be easy to leave and horrible to come back. But I can’t stay in New York without Kai, and I’m certainly not going someplace new without him, so…
Kai slides his hand across mine, and I move closer to him in response. One inch at a time, testing the water until I’m leaning against him, relaxing against his side. He exhales and rests his cheek against my forehead.
“Anyway,” he says against my skin, “you never know. Maybe New York will end up sucking.”
I frown. “It could really go either way. TV shows have taught me I’ll become a fashion magazine intern or be murdered in Central Park.”
Kai laughs and pulls me toward him, kissing my cheek briskly, easily. It’s a gesture that’s evolved—he used to shove me playfully whenever I said something funny, or weird, or particularly me. Then the shove became gentler, then it became him wrapping his arm around me, and now finally, he kisses me. Silently says he loves me without me even trying.
“I guess it doesn’t matter if it sucks or you’re a magazine intern,” he says as he pulls away, squinting as the sun creeps lower, its bright light rebounding off a condo building. “In the end, it’s always just us. Together.” It’s not a question, not something he doubts or wonders about. “Unless that Central Park thing happens.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh, and as I do I lift up, feel his breath warm my still-freezing nose. We pause for a moment, just a tiny moment, and then our lips meet. This time, it feels like the kissing in movies looks, long and powerful and sweet and as if it’s melting me. He smells like cinnamon and soap, same as he always has—
“Whoa,” he says, pulling back.
I freeze. “What?” I ask, wondering if I should be embarrassed. What happened?
“Look,” he says, pulling one hand away to motion at the world around us. “It’s starting to snow.”