My first kiss?
Well…It’s a long story.
What?
You like long stories?
Um, well, okay.
—
Henry and I kissed once.
It was nothing at first. Dumb kid stuff. I was fifteen and still hadn’t kissed a boy. I thought this was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Serena had kissed a boy, and so had my other friends. I thought I was a freak.
I looked at Henry’s foreign boy lips and his foreign boy hands. I thought about the lips, but the hands seemed safer so I reached for one. We held hands for a moment, sitting by each other, not saying anything. He squeezed.
“Do you think I’m pretty?” I asked. The moment it came out of my mouth I regretted it. It was one of those things I never wanted to admit I worried about out loud. Such a cliché thing to say, really.
That’s when he kissed me, and it wasn’t what I expected. I felt that I was fumbling. It was as if we were dancing and I was a step behind, but he knew all the steps. Pretty soon I fell into the rhythm. I like to think that I did a pretty good job because when we pulled our lips apart he smiled at me and lines crinkled around his eyes as he did so. I liked it so much that I leaned in again. Without thinking, I lifted my hands and intertwined them in his hair like I had seen in the movies. I pulled him closer.
His hand grabbed my arm.
I opened my eyes with his face close to mine while his body was not. I dropped his head, shaking, and it fell to the ground with a thump.
“Ow,” he said.
—
I met Henry when I was eight years old.
I went for a walk by myself. It was fall so I had on my puffy green coat and pink boots. I liked stepping on the colorful leaves, hearing the distinctive crunch underneath my feet, the crisp smell of the world as the icy air burned up my eight-year-old nostrils. I didn’t know that the graveyard was supposed to be a scary place back then. I just saw the steps, and then I saw a man sitting on them. His blonde hair was that messy kind of cool, his eyes a mellow emerald. He smiled at me.
“Hey,” I said, pointing at his neck. “Hey, you have a cut on your neck.”
First he looked behind him, then back at me. “Me?” he said. “You’re talking to me?”
“Yeah, I’m talking to you. What happened to your neck?”
“Oh this? This is nothing, kid. Just a little accident.”
I knew enough of the world to know that the red line that ran around his neck wasn’t “nothing.” Little raggedy pieces of flesh stuck up in places along his wound, but no blood fell from it. In fact, it wasn’t even scabbed over.
“Does it hurt?” I asked in a small voice, my fingers fumbling with the edges of my sleeves.
“Naw, kid.” He smirked and chuckled. “Wanna see something cool?”
I didn’t say anything, just stared. He took this silence as permission, placing his two hands against the sides of his head and lifting it from his neck.
His dismembered head laughed in the air.
“Hey kid, this aint no magic trick. Go on, stick your hand in there. No strings, promise.”
—
No one in there right mind would go back, right?
Right. Especially after that. I mean, I watched this guy pull his head off his shoulders. That’s not normal.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
But it was almost unavoidable, really. His graveyard was just down the road from my house. It was the road I took to school, to town, to anything.
So that’s my excuse.
Whenever my mom would drive past the cemetery, I would slide down in my seat so he wouldn’t see me, because he was always there with the same messy hair and mellow eyes. In the beginning, I tried pointing him out to others. “Hey,” I’d say. “Do you see that guy? Do you see that guy on the steps there?” They always said no and gave me worried looks. I suppose this strange behavior was forgiven because I was young. I was playing make-believe, they reasoned. So I stopped pointing him out after a while, tried to ignore him. He was like the imaginary friend I never wanted. Time passed, and I got used to it.
But then it happened. He waved at me. I don’t know what it was about that wave, but for some reason I couldn’t shake it from my brain. I was thirteen and knew about ghosts, the supernatural, whatever. I knew this had to be something of that sort, but before this I never wanted to confront it. However, now he stirred something in me.
Sometimes I get weird like that.
I walked there that night. It was spring and I was wearing short shorts because that was the cool thing to do. He smiled at me standing there in front of his graveyard, and I noticed that his severed head was kinda cute.
“My name is Charlie,” I told him. He didn’t ask for it, but I said it anyway.
“I’m Henry,” he said, holding out his pale hand with a smirk on his lips. “Nice to meet you.”
At first, I could only stare. I was waiting for the big spook, you know? I wanted to feel fear, that creepy crawly feeling on my skin, but I didn’t. Instead, I stood there awkwardly some more.
I saw him a lot after that.
—
But then we kissed. And I dropped his head.
Not exactly an ideal moment.
I didn’t even help him pick it up. How terrible is that? I just left, walked away, put my cool fingers against my red cheeks.
Life is complicated, you know?
Anyway, I told you my first kiss was a long story. You don’t have to believe me, it’s okay. Most people don’t.
Henry says Happy Halloween, though.