Orange You Glad We Kissed

Chapter 1-2

Johnny shrugged again.

“You have to know.” Since Johnny’s gaze alternated between my face and my hands, I furrowed a brow. Once sure he saw it, I switched to a smile. “Are you hungry or not? Have you spoken or not?” I signed.

Shy ginger Johnny shook his head no, then he tripped on a root and grunted.

I laughed hard enough to make the hem of my T-shirt jiggle at my knees. Johnny scowled. Circling my fist with its thumb up around the Camp Quick Fingers logo printed across the gray fabric, I said, “Sorry,” then added, “But wouldn’t you like to shout a slew of expletives when something like that happens?” I yelled and signed several options. “Damn it! s**t! f*****g fuckity motherfucker!”

Johnny Orange’s smile egged me on. Since “fuckity” had brought a huge one, I tried a few more new words once we made it to the very edge of the water.

“What’s this fuckishness?” I had to spell out the good ones, since no ASL sign existed for them. “The lake should not be this cold in July.”

Though I was quickly wet to my knees, Johnny seemed reluctant to venture in beyond his big toe sticking out of flip-flops.

“The fuckitude of it, Johnny! It’s as cold as fuckituity!” When I backed away from him, farther into the water, he followed me, though. And when the lake’s chill swallowed him up below the waist, he definitely had something to say.

“Holy f**k s**t!” Johnny signed.

“There ya go, Johnny!” Though that interjection might not have been original, making up words that made Johnny laugh, albeit silently, I already knew that was going to be our thing. “Maybe we can start by laughing out loud,” I suggested. “And then work our way up to words.”

Johnny looked away.

“Don’t.” I brought his face back to me, then signed and said it again. “Don’t.” Starting with my thumb at my chin, I shook my head curtly as I moved the thumb forward. Then, I signed, “Laugh for me, Johnny.” I just had a feeling he could. “For fuckity sake, please laugh for me.”

He wouldn’t, but at least he told me why. “My sister, our cousins, and I were all laughing one Christmastime. Then I stopped, but they kept going. They were laughing at me.”

“A lot of people have goofy laughs, Johnny. You should hear mine.” I immediately regretted my choice of words. Some counselor I was.

“I’d like to,” he signed.

“Sorry.”

“No. I would.” Now, Johnny looked at my mouth more than my fingers. Not just to read my lips, which I was told he could, it was almost as if he wanted to see my laugh.

“Ha-ha? It’s nothing special,” I told him.

“I bet you don’t sound like a brain damaged donkey getting fucked.” Johnny lowered his eyes while signing that, but once again, I made him bring his gaze back to me.

“Your cousin isn’t very nice, if that’s what he said to you.” My hand came to rest on Johnny’s face as we lazily rose and fell at the will of the water with our feet up off the sandy bottom. I wasn’t even sure how we’d gotten so far out. Had I led us there, or was I now following Johnny?

“A donkey getting f****d I could have lived with.”

“f**k your fuckity cousin. Say it, Johnny. Say fuckity…or maybe something else.”

“Like what?” Johnny still spoke only with his hands.

“Hmm.” I wanted to kiss him, and maybe have him utter something romantic, but my brain, taking its cue from my hormonal teenage body with thoughts of burgeoning manhood, could only think of dirty words. “n****e” was most prevalent, as Johnny’s got hard and pointy now that he was wet. Though not particularly filthy, it didn’t seem quite appropriate, either. With the younger kids, we mostly stuck to “face,” “ears,” “fingers,” and “toes.” Inevitably, some wise guy always wanted to know how to say butt. “Say…” I almost said butt, but Johnny had a question for me.

“What’s it like to hear, Alan?”

“Oh.” I concentrated on all the sounds around me, the birds, the water that only moved when we did, the rustling leaves, and far off voices of the other campers all rowdy and sugar high. It sucked that Johnny couldn’t hear them, too. “Wow. That’s a tough one.”

“Never mind.”

“Nah. We can do this.” After a momentary panic—How in hell could I possibly explain sound to someone who’d never heard one?—I put my hand on Johnny’s bare chest. “It stormed the other day. Remember?”

Johnny nodded.

“The rain…it kind of sounded like this.” I made my fingers dance like the most graceful of ballerinas right beside that n****e I’d been staring at. “Then it got harder.” So did the n****e. “And it sounded more like this.” Now, my fingers tapped like Gregory Hines. “Snow…a snowy day…that sounds like this.” I gently caressed Johnny cheek.

“What about thunder?” he asked, pointing to one ear, then shaking both fists. “I don’t like thunder.” He twisted the sodden fabric of my shirt, then took his hands away to sign some more. “You know why?”

“Why?”

“Someone told me once, if you can hear the thunder, it means the lightning didn’t get you. I can’t hear thunder, Alan. How would I know?” Johnny raised both palms toward the sky.

“Hmm.” I moved from his eyes a veil of almost burgundy corkscrews reminiscent of the Velvet Queen sunflowers Bette grew back home. “Can you feel it?”

“Feel it?”

“The thunder.”

“Oh,” Johnny signed. “Sometimes.”

“Always, I bet, if you really concentrate. What say next time it storms, I’ll come to your cabin to make sure?”

Johnny looked down at the water. “There won’t be a next time. It’s our last day.”

Shit. I’d forgotten that.

“And there’s not a cloud in the sky, Alan.”

I already knew what snow sounded like, but I liked Johnny’s hands on cheek.

“Do you want to know what it’s like for me…being deaf?” he took it away to ask.

“Yes.”

“Last year, someone who couldn’t hear but does now with an implant, she said it was like this.”

Before I knew what was happening, Johnny shoved my head underwater. I spit and flailed a moment, but then calmed myself. Somehow, I trusted him, especially once I found his eyes as he joined me down beneath the surface of the lake.

“You think it’s true?” Johnny’s fingers, as he spoke with them, cut through the cloud of tiny particles floating around us. “Is what you hear now like not hearing at all?”

I tried to focus on the echo of nothingness. It was almost like a hum but not quite, this underwater sound that might have been only imaginary. “Maybe.”

“Why do you have this on?”

In my rush to get away when Johnny tried to pull at my shirt, we sprang to the surface together.

“If you take off your shirt, Alan…” Johnny was suddenly bold, his burgeoning manhood likely fighting to take charge, too. “I’ll talk for you.”

It was that day I learned one could sign seductively.

“One word,” Johnny stipulated.

“What word?” I asked.

“You pick.”

“Well, if that’s the deal, Johnny Orange, I’m going to have to think on it a bit.”

A beautiful sunset, perhaps the most beautiful sunset ever, fate had timed it perfectly. Our now or never romantic moment was all I had before time to leave Johnny in Massachusetts and head back to New York.

“Did you think of one yet?” he asked.

“I thought of several. Now, I just have to narrow it down.”

“Take your shirt off while you do.”

We were the same height treading water, just shoulders and heads, so I pulled my shirt off over mine. “Okay.” It was a struggle all wet, and even as it stuck on my nose and ears, I knew Johnny went under.

“Hey!” I covered myself again.

“Your skin is a pretty color,” Johnny signed after popping back up. “Especially wet.”

“Thank you.” The water was still cold, but I was heating up.

“I wanted to see more.”

“The skin hardly shows with so much hair.”

“I like both.”

“I have a big gut. Bette calls it a happy plumpy tummy.”

Johnny smiled.

“Well, she used to…when I was little.” I was still little. “Younger, I mean, and she still does. I eat a lot of Oreos.”

“P-l-u-m-p-y.” Johnny seemed to like the word. I knew he would. “Who’s Bette? Your girlfriend?”

I finally got my shirt past my forehead. “My mom.” Alan’s mom, I figured.

“You call your mother by her name?”

“Sure. Now that I’m grown up. Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Oh. Do you live here?” I asked.

“At the camp?” Johnny was relaxed enough to tease me.

“No,” I signed. “In Massachusetts?”

“Oh.” He shook his head. “Not too far away.”

“Is it a secret?” A little pretend seemed in order, a little play. “Like your last name?” I moved my eyes mysteriously side to side, “Like all of our last names,” and took his hand. “Johnny?”

“What?”

I said his name with my lips, and he mouthed the one word. But then I needed my hands, so I had to let his go. “Do you think Camp Quick Fingers is some sort of spy camp?”

Johnny’s auburn brows went up.

“I’ll tell you a secret. Come closer.”

Johnny swallowed hard. “If I come any closer, you’ll feel me breathe.”

“Is that a bad thing?” I could already feel the movement of his fingers with every word and hoped he could feel mine, too. “Is it?”

Johnny moved in. “What’s the secret?” Having him closer wasn’t a bad thing at all, especially when he made a small wave that caressed me through my shorts.

“My real name…” I looked around, as part of the game. I knew we were alone. “Isn’t Alan.”

Johnny’s smile broke through for only a second before he put on a serious expression, one befitting our subterfuge. “My name’s not Johnny, either.”

I gasped, bringing my hand to my mouth to show shock. “It’s not?” I asked with that hand after. “What is it?”

“You tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine,” Johnny signed.

Almost forehead to forehead, “I’m Bond,” I revealed. “Rufus Bond.”

Another crack in Johnny’s expression almost led to a laugh.

“Now you.”

He looked at me dead on. “I’m…” Johnny lost it. I got my laugh. It was glorious, spontaneous, as if he hadn’t even been aware. “I don’t know!” he signed. “I was going to use James Bond!”

“Hmm. You look like a…Mortimer,” I decided. “Your real name is Mortimer Wexler, isn’t it? Mortimer Wexler, spy in training.”

Johnny’s brows said as much as his fingers. “You’re good.”

I wanted to take Johnny’s hands and hold them. We couldn’t, though, not if we wanted to keep talking. “Only at certain things.”

“Is that the word you’re going to make me say?” Johnny spelled it out, “M-o-r-t-i-m-e-r?”

“Nah.” I sank deeper into the blue, trying to hide my gut and also my boner. “I have something else in mind, a word that came to me a while ago, almost as soon as we met.”

“Is it f-u-c-k-i-t-y?”

Johnny could make me laugh, too. “Nuh-uh. Something better. Your word, Johnny Orange…”

A sound escaped me when more than Johnny’s gut made contact with more than mine. It was a sound I had only ever heard in the privacy of my bedroom. Well, not really. I could pretty much make the sound and do the thing that brought it anywhere in the house. With only two of us around whenever Bette was out and the one who wasn’t me usually holed up in his office in another wing, my bedroom was usually my last choice.

“My word is what, Alan?”

“Say ‘kiss’ for me, Johnny,” I signed.

Johnny stared in silence, so I said it again, with voice and fingers, my lips pressed against his.

“Kiss, Johnny.”

He didn’t freak out. He didn’t turn and run.

“Feel it.” I broke the word into sounds I hoped he could. “K-i-ss. Kiss. You try. K-i-ssssss.”

Johnny swallowed hard. He stroked the hairs on my chest. “K…k…k-iss.” He mouthed it, and made a sound, not the right ones, but a sound.

“One more time,” I asked of him. “Kiss.”

“K-i-ss.” His pronunciation was slightly clearer that time. He’d said it. “Kiss.” And then, we did.

“Kiss, Johnny.” I wanted a hundred more. A thousand. But Johnny pulled away. “Hey! Where are you going?” My words were useless. He’d turned his back to my lips and my fingers as he clumsily climbed from the lake. “Come back, Johnny!”

But Johnny was faster than I, especially on waterlogged legs and back in my sodden T-shirt.

“Come back!”