The Art of the Kiss Read online

  And yes, their versions of Heather’s story are blends of fact and fiction. Sharon and Michael have filled in the missing details by digging into their own hearts, projecting their feelings onto her.

  In a way, that’s the beauty of their stories—they’ll tell more about themselves than they ever will about Heather.

  Of course they will. They’re hungry for their voices to be heard.

  Excerpt from

  The Fairyland Times

  Classifieds

  March 4, 2018

  ALL YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY NEEDS: Weddings, Senior Portraits, Engagement Pictures, Family Pictures, Special Events, Social Media Marketing, Publicity Photos. Contact Heather Scott, owner of Photo Phrenzy.

  ~Michael~

  That Saturday morning in early June when I brought Sharon’s camera down to her—the same morning when we unearthed magic and the dirt started to swirl around our rut—was also the same morning we both got sucked into what can only be referred to as a modern-day Cinderella story. One that is both recognizable and unlike anything you’ve ever heard before.

  What’s a Cinderella story without a poor, pitiful waif? A downtrodden soul? A bedraggled castaway?

  Rest assured, we have one in the gentle and agreeable Heather Scott.

  Our Heather was an orphan. To be fair, you’d probably say that at thirty-four, she was laughably far too old to be an orphan, but I’m going to put my foot down and insist we hearken back here to fairy tale language. Heather—an orphan, a bedraggled soul, an only child raised by a single mother who’d died of cancer five years earlier—did, by this point, live alone in a tiny little hole of an apartment at the bottom of two flights of creaky stairs in an old redbrick building. The windows leaked, the complimentary washer and dryer in the shed out back worked every other Tuesday, and the fridge was held together with bungee cords. The wooden floors gave her splinters when she walked barefoot. The heater in the center of the apartment (which she unaffectionately referred to as The Creature) clanked and coughed frighteningly throughout the night. The Creature was controlled by a wayward pilot light which was perpetually going out, and each time poor Heather relit it, the cantankerous thing hacked up some sort of black soot, spraying it all over her face and hands.

  Yes, just like the first Cinderella, whose rotten stepsisters tormented her, turning her into nothing more than a kitchen maid forced to sleep on the hearth and soil herself with the day’s ashes, our own Heather also frequently found herself, throughout the cooler months, covered in soot coughed up by The Creature.

  “You really need to switch to a lower-tar cigarette,” she once tried to joke as she replaced the tarnished cover plate. But as usual, The Creature only seemed relieved to have gotten the junk off its chest. It did not think she was funny, nor did it feel bad for totally wrecking yet another T-shirt.

  She couldn’t have come to this tale with a better set of fairy tale credentials.

  Heather was also attempting to succeed as a professional photographer at the exact point in time when the rest of the world had decided photographers were as useful as a sixth toe. Camera and business card in hand, she was forever pitching herself, offering to document birthday parties or marriage proposals—but had snagged embarrassingly few takers. What did they need her for? Everyone had become something of a digital photography expert. And she could forget about weddings or headshots or some kind of commercial gig. Without a decent portfolio of previous work to submit, who would ever hire her, pitiful little needy waif that she was?

  Another woman might have been pushier. Brazen, even. But as Heather’s mother withered away, she’d made her only child promise, over and over again, to lead with kindness once she’d gone.

  “Good things will happen to you when you are good to others,” her mother had declared, stretched out upon her deathbed, too weak by then to so much as squeeze Heather’s hand.

  (Oh, stop grumbling. A dash of melodrama can be good for the soul.)

  And so our Heather had conducted herself in a somewhat milder manner, refusing to oversell herself. Hyperbole and making promises she wasn’t sure she could deliver wasn’t exactly what her mother’d had in mind, now was it?

  She left her business cards at gas station counters and stuck them to bulletin boards inside local cafés and libraries. So many of them, she sometimes felt like Gretel scattering breadcrumbs behind her to mark her trails. She returned regularly, walking down the breadcrumb-marked paths, following up, checking back, meekly asking about possible work. People would smile at her, act glad she’d reminded them. They promised to call. Why, they’d probably need a photographer soon. Very soon, in fact.

  Yes, they said, they would call.

  But they never did.

  Heather sold the occasional stock photo of rustic Missouri landscapes (winding dirt roads, unused railroad tracks, fields of Queen Anne’s lace, and rusted barbed wire fences) while working two part-time jobs, one sacking groceries and the other corralling kids at a Build-A-Bear. She’d taken a class picture at a preschool, a job that had required more patience than talent—and led to absolutely nothing. Not a single additional job acquired through word-of-mouth. She was drowning in bills and debts despite her efforts. After several years of getting nowhere, her situation in life had begun to feel not like a starting point, a bottom rung on a ladder, but permanent. As if she’d been encased in a concrete vault with no escape hatch.

  As the meanest little boy in the neighborhood—whom she’d once stupidly let in out of the rain when he’d forgotten his own house key—liked to tell her (taunt her was more like it), she and The Creature were destined to be together forever and ever and ever. He would never be old and still stuck in their crummy neighborhood, ha, ha, ha.

  Good things will happen to you when you are good to others. Yeah, well, she had been nice. To everyone. Even Darth Billy, as she had come to refer to the mean little taunting neighbor. And where had it gotten her? When was that luck going to kick in, anyway?

  Finally, finally, maybe it had.

  The husband of Heather’s best friend had dropped her name at a stuffy cocktail party where names must have been spewing everywhere like water from fire hoses for hers to come up. But it had, in fact, led to a “gig,” as her ex-boyfriend would have described it. Official photographer for a family reunion. Booked and pre-paid, the whole shebang. And the guy—Liu, that was the client’s last name—owned a marketing and advertising firm. Looking to expand his business, that was the way Tom, Amanda’s husband, had described Liu. So sure, to start with, it was nothing more than a Saturday afternoon shoot in a park. But handled right, Heather dreamed, it could lead to something big.

  She’d preened herself to look the part (or what she imaged looked the part), lightening her hair for the occasion using a fifteen-dollar home highlighting kit and scrounging through her favorite thrift store for a simple khaki knee-length skirt, which she paired with a fitted pink T-shirt and a pair of pink flats that didn’t appear to have been worn once. She’d packed her gear up and carried it to her car.

  Unsurprisingly, Heather drove a ten-year-old Cobalt with flaking purple paint, a rusted bumper, a “Photo Phrenzy” sign in her back window, three hundred and twenty thousand miles on the odometer, and various internal ailments, including a faulty transmission and cirrhosis of the intake manifold.

  She cranked the ignition. In response, the Cobalt shrugged.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Heather asked, slamming her foot into the gas pedal and cranking the ignition again.

  Still, not a single wheeze or sputter. The lights on the dash flashed briefly, as if to acknowledge that yes, what passed for her transportation had in fact heard her plea. But that didn’t change its response.

  Heather’s eyes swelled as alarm lit up her entire body. “What am I supposed to do now?” she asked the car…and the empty parking lot…a nearby bird cocking his head at her as if questioning whether she was in her right mind.

  Sensing trouble, Darth Billy steered his bicycle i
n circles in the lot behind her. “Vroom, vroom!” he shouted. And then he dissolved into the kind of laughter usually reserved for wicked step-family-members and arch-enemies.

  ~Michael~

  Ah, yes. Arch-enemies. Of course, a Cinderella story is nothing without a villain or two. A heaping handful of those cruel, nasty, wicked stepsisters, perhaps. Scoundrels and mischief-makers bent on wreaking havoc.

  Maybe Heather didn’t see herself as a real-life modern-day Cinderella. But everybody recognizes they have enemies. And on that lovely June day, when her Cobalt decided to officially succumb to its assortment of maladies, Heather really did believe that the one and only villain in her own life was none other than Darth Billy.

  Little did she know, as she dialed up her emergency contact (who also happened to be her oldest and dearest friend), she’d called the individual who was in the process of becoming her absolute worst nemesis.

  A few blocks away, Amanda’s phone went off in the front passenger seat of her Escalade. “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” the ringtone she’d assigned to Heather.

  “Call, Mommy,” her son alerted her from the backseat of the Escalade. And then he sang along with the opening guitar riff (or tried to, anyway—it always wound up sounding a little like a police siren coming from him).

  Amanda’s attention shot up to the rearview. Rather than her little boy, she saw the crow’s feet splintering out from the corners of her brown eyes, below her threaded eyebrows.

  “I’m driving, baby,” Amanda told her son. A nice excuse. In all honesty, she plain didn’t want to talk to Heather.

  Aiden swung his feet about in his car seat. Amanda’s heart swelled. She loved her son—and his older twin sisters, Eva and Olivia. She loved their silliness and their discovery of the world and their freshness and their energy and their cuddliness. She even, on occasion, loved their tears because they were something she could soothe away.

  The ringtone started playing again, the guitar riff sounding almost sinister to Amanda.

  Aiden sang. She watched in the rearview as his eyes popped and his face twisted with joy. He waved his arms to the beat. He raised a hand, balled his fingers into a fist, and tugged down.

  Amanda smiled. In her family’s closest circle, Aiden was renowned for the tugging. As a baby, he’d tugged on long hair and necklaces, cords that cinched hoodies tight. Once he’d started walking, he’d tugged window curtains and throws from the couch and his sister’s favorite princess wand from her hand. He was always making fists in the air above his head and wrenching them down, like he thought he could tug something utterly delightful straight out of heaven.

  If Amanda could tug something from heaven, what would it be?

  The mere question made her aware, suddenly and sharply, of a painful hole deep inside her. Out of nowhere, several weeks ago, she’d discovered it: a black, festering hole. Maybe it had been there for a while, and she hadn’t noticed it. But after more than a solid month of poking at it and hoping it would clear up on its own, it now had her as worried as she would have been if she’d found a hard lump in her breast.

  Her cell sang out again. The hole throbbed.

  At a stoplight, Amanda turned the phone off and opened the glove compartment. Before she could toss the phone inside, fistfuls of business cards tumbled into the floorboard.

  They all belonged to Heather.

  “Oops, Mommy!” Aiden shouted, dissolving into giggles.

  Amanda struggled to scoop them up, her cheeks flaming. Why was she so embarrassed? Aiden couldn’t even read.

  Sometimes, she supposed, a person could be embarrassed by her own actions without anyone knowing what she’d done.

  She welcomed the embarrassment. It showed that her conscience hadn’t packed its bags and left town on the 7:30 Greyhound.

  For weeks (none-too-coincidentally, about as long as she’d been aware of the awful sore spot in her chest), Amanda had started seeing Heather’s Photo Phrenzy business cards. Oh, they’d been hanging long before then. But that was the point Amanda really started to notice. And they were everywhere. On the bulletin board at the public library and the counters of the gas station where she filled her Cadillac and the butcher where she bought her lamb chops. Until finally, one day, she’d cracked. In the vestibule of the restaurant where her family ate their Sunday brunches, of all places.

  Aiden had begun crying inconsolably for some incredibly toddler-ish reason (the boysenberry syrup got drizzled on his plate and he didn’t like it because it was purple, or he’d wanted two slices of bacon instead of one, or he’d been denied the ability to take off his socks). She was rocking him in a vestibule where the rest of the diners wouldn’t be bothered, while her own French toast and eggs were growing cold, and there it was, yet again: one of Heather’s cards. Stuck to the bulletin board between a customers-only coat rack and a display of thick Sunday papers.

  Amanda stared, the awful hole inside of her throbbing and pulsing. On the opposite side of the vestibule’s glass wall, next to her plate of congealing French toast, Amanda’s family was scarfing down their own breakfasts. She swallowed hard, her saliva like the burn of a martini.

  Everything in that moment hurt. And Amanda had no real idea why.

  But she did know the longer she stared at the card, the worse the ache and the burn got inside her. Her face hardened, and Amanda snatched Heather’s business card, shoved it deep into the pocket of her church slacks. For a moment, the pain subsided, replaced by a rush of satisfaction.

  She’d immediately gone back to hushing and rocking and consoling Aiden.

  It could have ended there, of course.

  But it hadn’t.

  Instead, Amanda had stolen the cards every single time she’d encountered them: at the gym, at her salon. She tugged them out from under thumbtacks, scooped whole stacks of them from checkout counters. She couldn’t explain why she kept at it. But once she’d gotten started, she hadn’t been able to stop.

  She hadn’t been able to see Heather, either. Not once since she’d started stealing her business cards. She was sabotaging her friend. How could she look her in the face?

  Such a funny word, really: sabotage. Somehow far too serious to describe what Amanda was doing—taking down some silly little cards. But also, at times, the perfect word to describe what was in her heart.

  The car behind her honked. “Beep, beep!” Aiden echoed.

  Amanda slammed as many cards as possible back into her glove compartment, and hit the gas.

  Why does Heather keep calling? Amanda asked herself. I haven’t returned a single one of her messages in eons. Then again, the two had been friends for decades. Why would Heather think Amanda was anything but busy?

  Amanda pulled into a parking lot. Her hands clenched into fists as she listened to the voicemail: Heather’s desperate plea for a ride.

  Amanda drummed the steering wheel, trying to sort out what to do.

  “Hey, baby?” she finally asked, her eye in the rearview again. “You know what I’m thinking?”

  “What!”

  “Since your sisters are having an adventure with their friends today, you and I ought to have an adventure too.”

  “Yeah!” he screeched.

  “You want to go on an adventure with me? It has to be our secret.”

  “Seeec-wet!” he repeated, kicking his feet.

  “If you let me make one quick stop, we might even wind up going to the park. You want to play in the park?”

  “Paaaayyyyee!”

  Amanda sighed. She knew Aiden had no idea what he was really agreeing to—park, he might have understood that one. But “adventure” and “secret”? He’d only been responding to the enthusiasm in her own voice.

  No matter. She picked up the rest of Heather’s cards, feeling a brief thrill when her fingertips brushed against them, almost like they were souvenirs of her kill. She tossed them into her purse just before she pulled back out into traffic, glaring through the windshield as she headed in the direction of
Heather’s apartment.

  ~Michael~

  You knew it was coming. In a story that features magic, a Fairyland setting, and a Cinderella-style waif, you had to suspect I’d say it sooner or later: Meet our Prince Charming. In Heather’s world, this specific Prince Charming was most commonly referred to as Ryan. He was, in fact, her ex-boyfriend. And when Amanda hadn’t immediately picked up, Heather’d panicked and called him, spewing all sorts of frantic explanations and a single simple request: a ride to her shoot. (The bus would take too long, and a cab or an Uber was plain too expensive, and, and, and…) One ride, she promised, and then he’d never hear from her again.

  To be completely honest, Heather wasn’t sure if calling an ex-boyfriend to beg for a ride thirty-two hours after he dumped her was truly the most pathetic thing a girl could do.

  But it was pretty close.

  She waved as he pulled to a stop near her curb. From a distance, she swore she could already see his bright green eyes. Only two percent of people even had green eyes. But that was how Heather had always thought of Ryan: as a rarity. More attractive than most (in the most classic, manly way), smarter than most, a polite door-opener and what her own mother would have called a “regular sweetheart.” Showing up to take her out in dress pants and a button-down shirt in an era when men were tattooed and sloppy, out on dates in jeans and ratty sneakers. So few of them walked girls to their front doors anymore—at least, not if they suspected they wouldn’t be invited in themselves.

  A guy coming to rescue his ex would also certainly be called a rarity.

  But what else could he have been? After all, he was Prince Charming.