Kissing Kate Read Free

mall,” she said softly.
    “No.”
    “But—”
    “I said no, Beth.” I yanked open the dishwasher. “Go call Nikki. If she’s going with you, she needs to get ready. I’m leaving in half an hour.”
    Upstairs in my room, I flopped onto my bed and stared at the ceiling. Why had I treated Beth like such a jerk for mentioning Kate’s tattoo? It wasn’t my job to protect Kate, and even if it were, she hardly needed protection from Jerry. It wasn’t like he was going to call her parents or anything. Anyway, it had been almost a month since she’d gotten it. Surely they’d noticed by now.
    “A tattoo? ” I’d exclaimed when Kate first suggested it. We were sitting in a booth at McDonald’s, and I looked at her over the top of my Coke. “Kate.”
    “What’s wrong with a tattoo? I’ll get a cute one, not ‘I Love Mother’ stenciled across my biceps.” She laughed. “God, wouldn’t she love that.”
    I’d smiled. Kate’s mom already hated the fact that we didn’t dress more like “ladies.” “You two have such darling figures,” she chided. “You need to accentuate them. Boys like to see a girl’s curves.”
    “You have to come with me or I’ll wimp out,” Kate said, slapping some money on the table and standing up. “I need you, Lissa.”
    At the tattoo parlor—“Tattoo U” it was called—Kate got nervous and clutched my arm. “What if it hurts?” she whispered as a man named Big Joe readied the needle.
    “What if you get gangrene?” I whispered back.
    She drove her elbow into my side.
    “Ready?” said Big Joe. He wore a cracked leather jacket, and he had thick lines of oil, or maybe dye, under his fingernails. His stomach hung over his jeans like a sack of flour.
    Kate sat down across from him. “It won’t hurt, will it?”
    “Hell, no. No more’n a bee sting. You ever been stung by a bee?”
    Kate nodded.
    Big Joe cackled. “Hurts, don’t it?”
    Kate’s eyes flew to me, and I lifted my shoulders.
    Big Joe had her prop her ankle on a stool so he could stencil the outline of the tattoo. “A snake, right? Heh. Just kidding.” He switched on the tattoo machine, Kate turned pale, and fifteen minutes later it was done. Big Joe taped a gauze pad over Kate’s ankle and wiped his hands on his jeans.
    “Leave this bandage on till the next time you take a shower,” he instructed. “Then turn the water up hot—hot as you can stand it—and let the bandage soak off. The hot water’ll soak the plasma out of your skin, too, make it heal up quicker.” He gave her a tube of antibiotic. “You’ll want to smear on some of this ointment every day for two to three days. After that, switch to plain lotion. No aloe vera or any of that scented crap. Any questions?”
    Kate stood up. She was still a little shaky, but the color was coming back to her cheeks. “How long will it take to heal?”
    “Two to three weeks, unless I screwed up.” He slapped his leg. “That’ll be forty dollars, no out-of-state checks.”
    Afterward, we went to Baskin-Robbins to celebrate. “You’re amazing,” I told Kate as she slid in beside me in the booth.
    “I thought I was going to faint. I didn’t know it would bleed so much. Did you?”
    I shook my head. “I guess I thought it was more like getting your ears pierced.”
    “Yeah. Remind me to put on socks when I go home, so Mom won’t see the bandage.”
    I slurped my milk shake. “So. What about Big Joe? Pretty hot, huh?”
    “Omigod. Did you see that he does body piercings, too?”
    “You’re tempted, aren’t you?”
    She snorted, then leaned against me and put her head on my shoulder. “Hey, thanks for going with me.”
    “No problem.” I could smell her shampoo. Paul Mitchell, the kind that smelled like coconut.
     
     
     
    Nikki’s cousin Vanessa did want to go to the mall, which meant that all four of us—me, Beth, Nikki, and Vanessa—were crammed into the front seat of my Nissan pickup. It was an ’86, it had over two hundred