If We Kiss Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Mom!”
    She picked up. My heart was still thumping a few minutes later when Mom yelled from the kitchen, “Charlie, it’s George!”
    “No, it’s not,” I yelled back.
    “Yes it is,” she yelled back.
    An impasse. I didn’t know who that was, that person who sounded exactly like Kevin, but it definitely was not George. “No, it is not,” I said.
    “He called on call-waiting!”
    “I’ll call him back,” I yelled. “You can finish. Who are you talking to?”
    “I’m done,” she said, coming up the stairs with the portable. She thrust it toward me and whispered, “He’s so cute.”
    “Who?”
    She pointed at the phone.
    “Kevin?”
    “George!” She made a face like why was I being so thick, and left.
    I looked at the phone and thought about that for a second, if George was cute or not. I realized I didn’t know if he was or wasn’t. It seemed beside the point.
    “Hello?” I was not sure who would answer.
    It was George, just George, just calling to say hi. I told him some guy had called before and thought I was my mom. George said, “Yeah, you do sound alike, actually. Probably the structure of your larynx, don’t you think?”
    I said, “You want to watch TV over the phone?”
    He said, “Sure,” so we did for a while.
    “It’s all so fleeting,” I said, as the TV announcer promised to be right back after a short break.
    He didn’t say anything right away so I wasn’t sure if maybe I had just imagined blurting such a random thing out loud. A commercial for particularly greasy-looking hamburgers came on. I had to look away.
    “Yeah,” George said. “You’re right. It is all so fleeting.” So I guess he’d heard me.
    I wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or mortified. “You know what I mean?” I asked him.
    “Not really,” he answered. “Fleeting?”
    “Forget it.”
    “I won’t,” he said. “Tell me.”
    I wasn’t even sure what I meant myself. “I don’t know.” I picked up the newspaper I’d been sitting on and pointed at it. “Like this,” I said.
    “Hamburgers?”
    “No,” I said. “Not on the TV. The weather.”
    “Well, yes,” he said. “Weather is definitely more fleeting than hamburgers. But . . . ”
    “Never mind.” I watched a commercial for khaki pants, grateful the hamburger had gone away. The pants music was so annoying, I pressed mute. “The weather report .”
    “The weather report is fleeting?” George asked.
    “Yes,” I said. “It is. There it is, up on the top corner of the paper, and it’s like the only thing some people ever read of the news. Right?”
    “That’s true,” said George. “My dad.”
    “Right. Okay. It’s so vitally important, the only thing on people’s minds, and then the next day they don’t even care what the weather was before; they’re on to the vitally important question of what is the weather today . Unless there’s, like, a major hurricane or something, it is totally unimportant and unmemorable what the weather was like last Tuesday, or a year ago Thursday.”
    Pause. “True.”
    “Don’t you find that depressing? And, like, disconcerting?”
    Pause. “You’re in a weird mood.”
    I dropped the paper. “It’s a metaphor for my life,” I mumbled.
    “The weather report?”
    “I just . . . It’s like you can’t hold on . . .”
    “The weather report is a metaphor for your life?”
    “Fine. You’re right,” I told George. “I’m in a weird mood. I should go get my homework done before I . . . before I . . . I don’t know.”
    “Before you scatter showers?”
    “Exactly.”
    “Okay. See you tomorrow,” said George.
    “Yeah?” I asked, but he’d already hung up.
    I do like George, I guess. There’s nothing not to like. I feel bad for him, though. He has this idea of me that he likes a whole lot more than he’d ever like the actual, secret, horrible me. He thinks I have values and standards and morals, that I’m “mature,” that I’m “deep.” But I’m not