4 November 2002 KISSING KATE by Lauren Myracle, Dutton, April 2003

A girl attends an end-of-summer party with her best friend, gets drunk, and has something so horrible happen to her that she cannot tell anyone about it. Her best friend along with her other so-called friends shun her, rather than trying to find out what awful thing had made her call the cops. With the support and nurture of a teacher she can trust, and after a school year from hell, she finally is able to speak.

Today, I will be finishing up this year's reading of Laurie Halse Anderson's beloved novel, SPEAK, to our three eighth-grade English classes. They'll hear the climax--Andy Beast invading the janitor's closet, and Melinda coming to terms with what happened that night. Then, sadly, my pleasure of sharing Melinda's story will be over until next year.

"I lift myself off the floor--easily, like a puff of air.

I float out of my bedroom and into the hall, past Beth's cracked-open door and down the staircase. I can see every grain of wood on the handrail, every fleck of paint on the walls. I propel myself toward the wide kitchen window above the sink, but I bump against the pane and bounce back. I back up and try again, focusing my concentration, and this time I push through--Zip--like pushing through steam.

In front of the house, I see a girl walking down the street. My spine tingles, because it's late. She shouldn't be out by herself.

'Hey,' I say, but the girl doesn't look up. 'Excuse me,' I say louder.

I float closer and I see the girl's face: it's Kate. She doesn't notice that I'm hovering in front of her. She doesn't hear me when I call her name.

'Kate!' I cry. I wave my hand in front of her face.

I don't like this. I want to wake up..."

KISSING KATE also involves a girl going to an end-of-summer party with her best friend, getting drunk, and having something happen that she won't tell anyone about...and causes her best friend to shun her. After four years of doing everything together and knowing each other's deepest secrets, it's all changed:

"I squeezed my eyes shut and wished I could take it all back, everything that happened, so that Kate and I could return to being friends like we used to be. I felt wrong inside without her, weepy and miserable and pathetic. And that was the part I didn't get, because didn't she feel that same way, too?

"We'd been best friends since we were twelve, long enough that our names were paired in everyone's mind: Kate and Lissa. Always her name first, not that I cared."

What happened that night at the party?

A kiss. Instigated by Kate. A kiss that for a brief moment has Lissa reaching for the stars, until Kate, clearly unhinged by the situation, runs to the nearest boy and leaves Lissa utterly alone.

"At school, Kate and I danced around each other like two like-charged magnets: close enough to keep tabs on each other, but with an invisible force preventing us from fully connecting."

KISSING KATE, Lauren Myracle's first novel, is the story of what happens to Lissa after that kiss. In the mix we find a little sister approaching adolescence, a delivery job working for the only close female adult in Lissa's life, a coworker who thinks herself an alien, and insights from a book on lucid dreaming.

In contrast to Melinda Sordino, who totally shuts down in her doomed attempt to make what happened just go away, Lissa faces the conundrum (a three-point vocab word from SPEAK) that while she's NOT trying to make it go away, the only person with whom she'd be open to discussing the situation is the same person who made it happen and who now won't speak honestly to her. It sure doesn't take being gay or lesbian (or contemplating the possibility) to empathize with the tension and confusion that Lissa faces, trying to come to terms with who she is when suddenly she no longer has that best friend for support.

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com