Chapter Text
Alex Mullner had been Maru Sedgwick-Fuentes's first kiss.
It had been like any other afternoon of tutoring at the Mullner house, except Grandma Evelyn was in bed with a cold, and Grandpa George had gone to the library because nothing good was on TV. Penny, who'd just finished shepherding Alex through a chapter of their civics textbook, offered to accompany George there and tagged Maru in.
"Okay," Maru said, having finished her own homework already. "Geometry. What page is your homework on today?"
She flipped idly through his textbook while Alex blinked his eyes back into focus. When he didn't answer, she paged through his barely used notebook in the hopes he'd copied the assignment off the board before leaving class. When she didn't find it there, he sighed, pulled out his phone, and texted a teammate for the page numbers. Maru was in a more advanced math class with her brother Sebastian, so Alex couldn't ask her.
Alex leaned forward and rested his head on the table while his arm stretched with the cell phone toward Maru. He was exhausted from gridball practice, only to get home from school on the late bus to drag himself and be dragged through his homework. With his grandma sick, he also had to cook dinner tonight. Penny had read the civics chapter aloud while he chopped things and threw them into a soup pot. He probably napped on the bus, but Maru always felt a little sorry for Alex on afternoons like this.
His hair looked soft and messy after his locker room shower and bus nap.
The phone buzzed, and its greenish LCD screen lit up.
Parker
> p 37 dumbass
Alex snorted and texted back a "thnx asshole" before letting the phone slide onto the table. Maru saw the inbox had a few unread messages from Haley Carr before the backlight dimmed.
Alex leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms over his head. The chair tipped back onto two legs before gravity brought things back to a stable four with a thump. When Alex folded his arms over the table again, the outlines of his biceps were just barely visible through the thick fabric of his hooded sweatshirt. He rested his forehead on his arms, then raised slightly so he could look at the problem Maru pointed at. He fumbled for a pencil.
To his credit, Alex always tried to solve each problem on his own first, Maru noticed. But where math was straightforward and simple for her, a matter of slotting the right variables into their proper places, he mashed them into combinations with a logic she didn't understand.
He opened his mouth and tapped his paper. "So now I divide b by 28, right?"
Maru shook her head. "No, you times it. Wait, where'd you get 28?"
When Alex and Maru bent over a bisected trapezoid or a clumsy proof together, she could smell his soap, sharp and faintly pine-scented. It was the same kind of supermarket antibacterial soap her parents used to wash their hands after work.
She was in the middle of explaining his next mistake when Alex abruptly jumped up and stepped toward the stove. "Sorry!" he said. "Just forgot."
The burner clicked off, and he started lifting bowls down from inside a peeling cabinet with a misaligned door. Maru stared at that cabinet door in momentary confusion. Something about the way it sagged from its hinges pricked at her. The tang of tomatoes and whatever else Alex had put in the soup wafted gently over to the table.
"Gimme a minute, Mar; I'll just take this to Grandma." He peeled the plastic off a cheese single to lay on the surface of the soup — a culinary touch that woefully reminded Maru of the rich, caramelized onion soup with mozzarella her mom liked to order at their Sunday place in Grampleton. Maru realized then why the cabinet door bothered her. There were no peeling, misaligned panels in the Sedgwick-Fuentes house.
"Here," Alex said.
To Maru's surprise, Alex put a steaming bowl and a spoon down for her. Some kind of vegetable hodgepodge in bright red tomato, with that cheese single on top.
"You want some toast?" he asked, lightly touching her shoulder.
She quickly shook her head.
"Well, help yourself if you change your mind; bread's over there. I'll just take this to Grandma."
He disappeared down the hallway with the tray steady on the flat of one hand. On the way, he reached up to tap a light fixture on the ceiling, and it brightened just a tad.
Maru's shoulder seemed to prickle where Alex had touched it. Her whole arm felt weird as she reached for the spoon.
When Maru was old enough to rationalize — to know what rationalization was (a fairly familiar process she had engaged in all her life, even before she had the label) — she could look back on this afternoon and pull its incandescent-bulb-lighted layers apart for cool examination.
She was in a boy's house. No matter how often she'd tutored Alex before, no matter how much she got to know him in these late afternoons, that fact remained. All the thrill and mystery of being a girl in a boy's house didn't really go away.
And of all the boys' houses she might be in, she was in a popular boy's house. It was the quarterback's house, Alex "Ghost Train" Mullner's house. There was status involved. She'd learned this the first time Alex had smiled and waved at her — "What's up, Maru?" — in school the day after their first tutorial.
Oh my god, you know Alex Mullner? You're friends with Ghost Train Mullner? You, mortal nerd, are on a "what's up" basis with a bright shining adolescent demigod? You've been in his house?!
What's his house like?
This was another layer. The Mullners lived in a prefab catalog cottage from his grandparents' generation — way before Maru's mom was even born, much less the town carpenter. George and Evelyn had the parts brought in on the train, and then they and their neighbors had helped put the house up with their own hands.
The province was dotted with houses like these — Willow Lane here in Pelican Town had two more, of different models — but of course, it was down to the dweller to make it their own. Kitschy dog figurines. Hand-knit throw on the couch. An actually impressive mineral collection. Gridball and quadball trophies. Mangled dog toys, one end of an old rawhide bone chewed loose. Photos of Alex's mother, but not of his father. Old incandescent bulbs. Old and slightly too small TV. Old, peeling cabinets that needed fresh paint and new hinges. But gleaming, spotless floors and countertops, and fresh flowers in the patched-up vases.
As Maru filled her soup spoon, she had a sense of what it meant for this house to house that boy. There was a specialness to being able to identify and observe this environmental factor — unobservable to most other peers — and its possible influence on the resulting combination of variables that strutted confidently down the school hallways in a varsity jacket and a chipped-tooth smile and the daytime and said, "What's up?" That is, Maru felt, knew she was in possession of some very human secret, by getting to be in this boy's house.
Alex's phone, forgotten on the table, buzzed.
> Ex-Babe: 4 new messages
Okay, not a very secret secret.
So, years later, when Maru had all the layers of this afternoon spread out before her like specimens to be mounted and labeled, she could tell herself that it was girlish confusion and plain curiosity and just a little bit of high schooler envy that had led to what happened next.
A low laugh echoed from down the hall. Maru tipped her own chair back to see that Evelyn and George's door was half-open, and she could see Alex half-seated, one leg dangling, on the quilted bedspread. As if sensing her, he turned his head and smiled through the doorway at Maru before turning back to his grandma. He said something to Evelyn, then took care not to dislodge the tray table as he got up. Half his body disappeared behind the door, likely to give Grandma a kiss, before he reemerged in the dim hallway and closed the door behind him.
He stepped into the circle of the kitchen light and nodded at the bowl. "Done with your soup?"
"Oh? Oh. Yeah."
Maru was done with her soup. She hadn't realized. She did vaguely remember, though, how the slight sharpness of the processed cheese actually suited this no-name vegetable soup, even if it hadn't melted in the same smooth and stringy way as mozzarella.
As she tipped her chair down to four legs again, she did realize that Alex's hand was on it, slowing the chair's descent so it wouldn't thump. Maru was the one who felt unsteady.
"Leave the bowl. I'll wash it when I get back," Alex said. "I'll walk you home."
Oh my god, Alex Mullner walked you home!
"You don't have t– "
"I'll bring Dusty. He needs a walk anyway," he said with a shrug. Already, he was closing the geometry book and shuffling the scattered papers together.
Maru frowned. "We didn't finish the homework."
Alex tilted his head and tapped his paper, lips moving as he counted under his breath. " — six, seven. You helped me get seven of them. I'll try the rest on my own. But I'll still pass if I mess those up, right?" His chipped tooth — a lateral incisor, Maru would learn when she looked it up later — made the point of the adjacent canine look just a little pointier as he grinned.
"But — "
"It's fiiine. Plus I know your dad doesn't like you out too late."
Maru's frown twisted. But in the next moment, she was arranging her own stuff in her backpack.
It took Alex another couple of minutes to calm his puppy, a ridgeback pitbull mix, into sitting to be leashed. Alex liked to joke that Dusty was the most pedigreed member of the Mullner family; the pup had come from a rich classmate whose parents were unhappy about their show dog's dalliance at the park. "I'll take 'im; it's mutt city back here," Alex had said.
Dusty's paws were comically massive. Maru got a close-up look when he tried to jump at her. She was a little awed at how much the puppy had left to grow.
"Down, boy! Sorry, sorry. Did he get dirt on you, Mar?"
She shook her head. "It's laundry day tomorrow, anyway," she mumbled.
Dusty was excited, yanking and pulling hard on the leash, but Alex held tight like it was nothing at all, woven strap looped tight around his forearm. Every now and then they stopped; Alex was trying to teach Dusty to heel.
"I dunno, feels like he's just gonna barely pass class, too," he joked. "I'm not a good teacher like you 'n Penny."
Maru, one hand gripping her backpack strap at her shoulder, never knew what to say on these walks. She was maybe too aware of the narrow space between their two free hands swinging as they walked. She wondered if Alex expected her to make more conversation. But she didn't understand gridball, she didn't watch the TV shows Alex watched, and Alex didn't read the books she read. Alex didn't read much at all, she gathered. It was a struggle for her to think of things to say.
For him, it was effortless. He asked her what they did in science club the other day. He asked her what kind of experiments her dad did at home, and if she got to help. He asked her how hard it would be to build a talking robot like in the ChangeOBots movie, 'cause he wanted one like that yellow muscle car one that played rock music. His would play Asha Barrett all the time; he thought Asha Barrett was hot.
"Who do you think is hot?"
Maru sputtered. This was a mystery even to Maru. It wasn't that she didn't feel attraction. She just wanted to get a handle on the things she felt before she could put the right labels on them. And a label like "hot" — there was something embarrassing about it, and embarrassment was one of the feelings Maru liked least of all. She needed to get used to the idea of "hot" before she could confidently incorporate it into her figurative taxonomy for people and things unrelated to measures of temperature.
"I don't know," she mumbled.
"What? No celebrity crushes?"
Maru felt her cheeks grow warm, more at the idea of a celebrity crush than of any particular celebrity. She shook her head.
From her friends, she knew that certain heartthrobs and sirens on primetime TV could have someone squealing over every new episode and collecting notebook covers and posters and stickers with these people's faces on them. Maru didn't know what that was like. When John Bellinger smirked into the camera on "Cubeland", when Celia Fong bit her lip in thought on "The Five Jades", Maru got warm squirmy feelings in her chest that she still hadn't named. But she felt no impulse to scream her devotion or plaster it on her walls and all her stuff, so it probably wasn't the same thing. "Celebrity crush" was not what she had, based on the data she had gathered. Maru was not yet familiar with the concept of outliers, though on some level, she was starting to sense that she was one.
She considered Asha Barrett now, a brown-haired crooner with a sparkly turquoise guitar and feathery lashes she batted behind a million pairs of wire-rimmed, circular, colored sunglasses. Maru agreed with Alex to the extent that she could place Asha in the Celia Fong quadrant of squirmy.
"What about guys at school?" Alex asked. "Or girls, whatever. No, Dusty! Leave it!"
Haley, Maru couldn't help thinking, as Alex tugged the puppy out of the bushes near the abandoned Community Center. Haley on pep rally days, pompoms and war paint and snow-white sneakers kicking in perfect angles at the sky. Penny when she reads poetry aloud and forgets that people are watching. Sam closing his eyes and tossing his sweaty hair in the middle of a really, really good riff.
Maru swallowed.
Alex reaching up to tap the ceiling light, his shoulders framed by the hallway dark as he balanced a bowl of soup.
Maru nearly bumped into him; he'd stepped in front of her all of a sudden. The fingers of his free hand reached forward and gently circled her forearm before resting just under her elbow. Curiosity shaded his eyes, still visibly green in the fading light, and a faint smile pricked up the corners of his mouth.
Bizarrely, Alex's gridball nickname flashed through Maru's mind.
When ya see 'im, folks, it's too late to stop 'im!
When Maru remembered this moment years later, when her emotional vocabulary had sufficiently expanded to isolate and name every element in its pine- and puppy-scented haze, she could hypothesize about what had happened. She could think, Alex Mullner somehow read my dumb teenage desires on my face and wanted to stoke them for the Void of it. She could think, Alex Mullner's stupid pheromones and line of questioning made me flustered, and there is a thing he likes to do when someone gets flustered. She could think, Alex Mullner wanted a rebound, and I was just there.
She could think and think, and think. Or she could take his word for it when he told her himself. But that wasn't till years and years later.
The empirical facts, at least. Alex had stopped them short just outside the town park border and at the foot of the dirt track up to Mountain Road. He'd given Maru a curious look. He'd asked, "Maru — have you ever been kissed?"
She'd felt her face go positively radioactive as she shook her head, longing to tear away from his gaze but somehow riveted there as she whispered, "No."
"You ever get, y'know, curious?"
Curious was such a useful word, Maru found. Curious could describe both people and the objects of their curiosity. On that afternoon, Alex was an especially curious person. And Maru had always been a curious person.
Maru felt herself nodding, wondering how Alex hadn't been burned away from sheer exposure to her face.
"Okay," he said, voice dropping to a near whisper. "Can I — ?"
Again, Maru felt herself nodding. So, Alex let her arm go briefly — she'd forgotten his fingers there, and now her arm felt strange without them — to hitch Dusty's leash to a stile. Then, just as quickly, he filled up her field of view again, raised her face up to his by the cheek, and kissed her.
Ah, Maru thought, mind furiously crawling over the moment as she let her face sink against his rough palms. Ah, I see.
The first point of data in Maru's set of kisses was cataloged more completely than almost any that would follow. Feel, duration, time of day, feel, pressure of hands, pressure of mouth, temperature of mouth, feel, outdoor light level, spring breeze wind speed, feel, feel, height of partner, shoulders of partner, thick soft sweatshirt of partner, back of partner, waist of partner, feel, feel, feel, proportion of pine scent to tomato to daffodil, noise frequency of excluded puppy whine, feel, feel, decibels of partner's laugh, as recorded in researcher's mouth, feel, feel, feel, feel.
In retrospect, it was chaste in comparison to a lot of the rest of Maru's data — he hadn't slipped her any tongue yet — but at the time, she had forgotten the importance of sample size; at the time, n = 1 = enough = not enough. Maru's first known paradox of feeling.
They went out for a short while after that. Alex even had dinner with her family at the start of the summer break. He praised her dad's sancocho and mangú as from Yoba's Vessel. He swept her mom off her feet, picked up the merengue in a snap. He even got a begrudging grunt and nod out of Sebastian when he said they totally messed up Bart's character in "Knife City VII: Folded Steel".
Then, Alex went away to a gridball camp for the summer, and he called and texted less and less — until his last text was, "its nt gunna wrk out. can we just b frnds?"
So, Alex Mullner gave Maru Sedgwick-Fuentes her first heartbreak, too.
It felt every bit the way it seemed to feel for all those people in all the the books and movies, but worse, because she wasn't separated from the feelings by screen or page or safety of knowing it was someone else's words and body. Suddenly everything was feeling, everything was awful, every five minutes, she was on the verge of tears. No matter how rational she was about it — of course Alex Mullner was going to break up with her; of course the jock was a dick; of course her high school boyfriend of five whole weeks wasn't for forever — she was just feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling.
"A spring fling," Maru's mom said. "Everybody's gotta have one of those. They never last, but they're fun. Wasn't he fun?"
"He didn't deserve you, mjia," Maru's dad said. "The right person for you will come along someday. You're still very young."
"Do you want us to tag his car or rig his locker to explode?" Sebastian asked.
Maru said no. But on the first day of the new school year, what must have been a thousand brightly colored bouncy rubber balls spilled and tumbled and rolled and bounced out of Alex Mullner's locker after lunch anyway, making everyone late to their next class. His sports locker, meanwhile, was stuffed with old wet hay. He was still picking stalks and chaff out of his itchy clothes as he walked to his car, where he saw ASSHOLE spray-painted across the hood in purple and black.
Now that her honor had been defended (and her brother had gone out of his way to do something nice for her for once), Maru called a ceasefire. Alex could look as sorry and as curious as he wanted, but Ex-Babe was Babe again, and anyway, Maru had set her sights beyond high school now.
With her dad's encouragement, Maru quit peer tutoring, piled on the extra-curriculars, and sent off her college applications. She got into the medical technology program of her number-one choice, an excellent university with a renowned teaching hospital attached. Somebody else would have to explain Alex's mistakes to him. By the time he understood them, she'd be gone.