Orange You Glad We Kissed

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2Eli, Jonathan, What’s His Name, Casey, and Jatin

That September, I returned to Trinity Waller Prep as a junior. The campus and buildings were right off the front of a college brochure, all lush green courtyards and brick facades outside, and inside big wooden desks and old, bound books one could smell just walking the hallways. Every boy who went there had to sign up for at least one sport per semester. I had a feeling it was to give two hundred horny teenagers something to do other than masturbate when not in class.

My very first day back, it seemed as if fate had good things in store for me, just as Bette had predicted the morning I’d returned from camp in an overly emotional state.

* * * *

“I met the love of my life, and he’s gone!” I’d run straight into Bette’s arms upon entering the mansion through the kitchen door. “Gone! Gone! Gone!” I slammed it twice, once against the wall and then shut. Talk about soap opera drama!

“Who, Eli? What happened?”

“Johnny, Bette. I love him, but I don’t even know his real name. No one would tell me. They have to know.”

“Come.” Bette led me to the counter. “Sit.”

The milk and cookies in front of me remained untouched as I described Johnny, the lake, the sunset, and my first kiss.

“When I got back to camp, I asked Brandon what cabin Johnny was in. He told me Cabin B, but then said Johnny’s mother had already come to take him home. She’d been waiting.” I touched my cheek where Johnny had. “He was gone.”

“Oh, Eeyore.”

The cornflower blue linen napkin I used to wipe my eyes and blow my nose ended up dotted with darker splotches. “God fuckity damn it!” Slapping the granite on the kitchen island was a mistake. My heart hurt worse, though. “Why didn’t I find out who he really is and where he lives?”

Bette had almost spoken with “fuckity,” but she quietly held my hand.

“It was love, Bette. I know it was. What if he’s my one and only? What if I never feel this way again? What if I never see him again and never get over him?”

“So dramatic.” Bette finally spoke. “What is that you’re saying?”

My hands had been speaking something different than my voice. “Fate.” I recited Johnny’s poem with both. “F-A-T-E. Fate. Follow always toward eventuality. The universe guides me. What will be will be. Johnny signed it all the time.”

“Well, perhaps there’s your answer,” Bette said. “If it was meant to be, someday it will. Now, have another cookie.”

* * * *

I thought that someday was already upon me when the Dean of Students at Trinity Waller cornered me and brought me down to his office before classes even began. “We have a hearing impaired student. His name is Johnathan. Your transcripts mention you’re fluent in ASL?”

“Yes.” My heart was all a-flutter.

“It would be a marvelous thing if you would take him under your wing.”

I’d tuned out Dean Hammond after hearing the name.

Johnathan.

It had to be my Johnny, I thought, just like in Grease, when Sandy showed up at Rydell High. I’d watched my VHS copy of the 1978 blockbuster so many times the rest of July and August while thinking about my own summer love, I’d just about worn it out.

“Do you think you could do that, Elijah?”

“Huh?” I composed myself. “Yeah. Sure.”

“Excellent. He’s right outside.”

I held my breath as Dean Hammond’s door opened into the main office. Sunlight poured in from floor to ceiling windows. It was so bright, it blinded me.

“Elijah Wentworth,” Hammond said, “this is Johnathan Orange.”

“Johnny.” I shielded my eyes, and my gray wool slacks suddenly felt tight at the zipper. “Oh. You’re not…him.”

“I’m not who?” Johnathan asked with his voice.

“I was anticipating…” I was also forgetting to sign. “Never mind.” For that, I remembered.

“I read lips,” Johnathan said. “You don’t have to sign.”

* * * *

New Johnny was cute, even if he did insist I call him Johnathan. Johnathan St. Onge. Sometimes the mind hears what it wants to. I took him down to the cafeteria for breakfast that first day, where the new cafeteria lady, Rosianne, told me her name when I told her mine.

“A gentleman always introduces himself,” Bette had taught me years earlier.

Rosianne also told me she was out of oranges when I asked for one. I liked Rosianne. Her skin tone was close to mine, just a little lighter. I thought my mom’s might have been that color. “All I have is grapefruit, bananas, and pears, hon,” she said.

Johnathan grabbed a pear, then tossed me a banana. “You look like a banana man.” His smile was bigger than the fruit.

“No thanks.” I put it back and decided on just a bowl of cereal.

Johnathan and I were partway to a table in the loud, crowded dining hall when I heard my name. “Elijah!”

I turned back.

“Look what I found.”

My smile rivaled Johnathan’s.

“It was in with the grapefruit,” Rosianne said when I approached. “Fate said don’t settle, Elijah.” The advice that came with the orange also came with a wink. “Always hold out for the orange.”

I silently vowed that I would.

* * * *

That first weekend, I summoned my driver, Doug, to come bring me home, so I could storm into my father’s huge office to ask about our holdings.

“Where’s Bette?” I asked something else first.

My father kept the vertical blinds in his home office closed most of the time, probably a good thing, with so much black leather to soak up the heat and all the chrome that would cause quite a glare.

“Father?”

“Yes.” He didn’t look up from the Wall Street Journal.

“Did Bette know I was coming?” I felt so small in Father’s office, not just because of my stature. “I asked Ahmed.” Father’s assistant was hot. “But he said ask you. So, where is she?”

“Bette doesn’t work here anymore.”

I needed one of the room’s large, leather pieces to hold me up. “Why?” I landed first on the arm of the chair, and then, finally down in it. The thing always swallowed me up.

“Why employ a nanny when the child has grown up?” My father looked at me finally, over the top of his paper.

“Have I grown up?” First a rhetorical question, and then, “Where did she go?”

“That, I couldn’t tell you, son.”

No note? No phone call? I didn’t bother posing those questions to my father, since the answers I’d already gotten about Bette were almost more information than I knew about what happened to my mother. Maybe a letter would arrive at Trinity Waller soon after I got back there. Maybe Bette would call. All I knew for certain was as un-homey as home felt before, it was already way worse.

“Did you want something else, Elijah?”

I cleared my throat. “We own a lot of stuff, right?”

“Stuff?” my father asked.

“Different businesses and…whatever.”

The pages of the paper were loud when he turned them. “Lots of whatever. Yes, Eli.”

“Do we own an orange farm?” I asked.

“A grove?” Father didn’t sound Moroccan. “No.”

“Could we buy one?”

He folded up his paper then and took off his glasses. “I suppose we’d have room on one of the Florida properties.”

“And we could sell them?”

“From a roadside stand?” My dad’s inflection never sounded anything other than American, often with hints of disinterest, and now sarcasm.

“No.” I moved to sit on the corner of his desk, then stood, afraid the thick glass would crack under me. “Sell, like, all over.”

“The country?”

“Mass distribution, yeah. In the northeast, at least.” I assumed Johnny was still somewhere in that vicinity, unless he’d gone to college out of state.

“I believe that market has already been cornered by the biggest names in citrus.” My father reclaimed his newspaper and glasses. “Keep thinking.”

And so I did.

After loads of research on citrus growing, I decided to spend winter break down south picking oranges for someone else’s profit. Who knew oranges were picked in winter? Not I. A boldface lie about my age got me hired. I would always look young because of my height, but I could also grow rather thick facial hair four months shy of turning sixteen. That gave me an advantage and also a fair amount of envy amongst my peers back at school. Seeing as we were paid well below minimum wage, rules and regulations seemed flexible, anyway.

Most of my coworkers were from Mexico or Guatemala. They were friendly enough, but my inability to speak and understand them left me feeling isolated most of the time, much like Johnny must have felt in the hearing world, I thought. ASL, French, and a smattering of Mandarin, my dilettante studies never included advanced Spanish. Apparently, my fellow pickers just assumed. During my first week at Trinity Waller, I’d been approached about joining the African American Heritage Club, The Latin American Heritage Club, and the Middle Easterners Campus Alliance. A lot of people assumed a lot of things about me.

Picking oranges was grueling, most of it up on a ladder under a Florida sun quite hot, even in December and early January. By the end of each workday, everything hurt—legs, knees, feet, arms, hands, and shoulders—but it was all worth it in my silly little mind when I imagined Johnny peeling one of the oranges I had picked.

That summer, late May and June, I unloaded and repacked citrus at a location upstate for delivery throughout New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. At both jobs, picking and packing, I secretly kissed several dozen oranges per day, hoping they’d find their way where I dreamed of them going. I was either a true romantic or an unhygienic fool.

Camp Quick Fingers operated only in July. I couldn’t wait to tell Johnny where I’d been working before reupping for another season as a counselor. I brought with me two dozen oranges I’d packed myself for us to share. Johnny didn’t attend that July, though. Brandon told me he’d aged out. Duh. Excitement and romantic notions had clouded my brain. Johnny was an older man, after all.

The oranges tasted far less sweet that summer.

* * * *

The day my senior year started at Trinity Waller, I asked my Lit teacher, Mr. Mumford, for some romantic literature about two men. “Like Romeo and Juliet…only Romeo and Mercutio…without the suicide.”

Mr. Mumford suggested Maurice by E.M. Forster. “I think you’re mature enough for this now.”

I wasn’t. I started looking at every single boy at Trinity Waller Prep with unbridled lust and a boner. The locker room was torture. Swim practice was hell, as I imagined love triangles featuring me as Maurice and other boys as Clive and Alec Scudder, even New Johnny, who’d ditched me for a more popular clique by our fourth week of classes the year before. I was fine with that, because he was New Johnny, and, despite my literary fantasies, I was still holding out for my Johnny, for fate. That was the plan, at least.

* * * *

Every once in a while, my father would drag me to a function at “the club” to show me off as his “progeny.” We had Thanksgiving dinner there that year.

“You look good.” It might have been the first time he’d looked at me since I’d asked about orange groves over a year ago. “All your baby fat is gone.”

I thought of Bette. My tummy was no longer plumpy nor happy. “Thanks, I guess.”

I always felt more comfortable with the servers and kitchen staff at the club than I did with Biff, Buzz, Dirk, and Kirk. I shared an orange with a dishwasher, who invited me into the non-perishables closet afterwards to give each other head.

“Nah. I’m seeing someone.”

Johnny and I were together in my mind.

“You sure? It could be fun.” This guy had red hair, too.

“Pretty sure.”

“Alrighty, then.”

“Wait.” Rogers and Hammerstein were right about sixteen going on seventeen. It was a complicated age. “Let’s do it.”

I ran to Mr. Mumford the moment I got back to school to tell him all about it.

“I met a boy!”

“Wonderful, Eli! What’s his name?”