I know she’s my cousin. But kissing Celeste wasn’t a plan I’d had or anything. It’s just the adults were all downstairs at my house, eating coffee cake and funeral food and talking about Grandma Lily. It was depressing.
I was nursing a Sprite by the sink. My parents were telling a Lily story all somber, as if they hadn’t complained about her to anyone who’d listen while she was alive. Celeste was with Aunt Ruth in the foyer. She was holding a red cup and absently chewing on the string of her hoodie. She looked bored—bored and beautiful. I know she’s my cousin, but cousins can be beautiful too. They’re allowed.
I went over and told Aunt Ruth that my mom had been asking about the ingredients in her cream cheese dip. Ruth left us.
“Thanks,” said Celeste. We were both sixteen, and the last time we had seen each other was maybe eight years ago. There was an awkwardness between us now as we sized each other up, our partly-grown up selves. She gestured to the can in my hand incredulously. “What’s that you’re drinking?” I told her Sprite, and she snorted. “Try,” she said, handing me her cup.
The cup’s contents looked like Coke but smelled a little like medicine. I took a gulp, and a sweet, vanilla burning filled my mouth.
“Whiskey,” she said. “Your parents have it out.”
I gulped it down and handed her back the cup. “We need more.”
My parents had set up a makeshift bar on the kitchen island. I stood guard as Celeste slipped a bottle into her hoodie pocket—a well-practiced move. We took turns filling our cups in the bathroom, getting gigglier with each trip in and out. Nothing breaks the ice of eight years’ silence quite like underage drinking.
Celeste and I started a game: see who could keep a straight face the longest talking to the adults. The game ended when my sister Jodie pulled us away from Uncle Gavin and into the bathroom. “Are you two drunk?” Jodie was eighteen and leaving soon on a scholarship to Ohio State. My parents called her the responsible one.
I burped. Celeste laughed. Jodie shook her head. “I’m taking you upstairs,” she said, “before Mom and Dad see you.”
Up in my room, I sat on the floor and pulled at the fibers of the carpet. I liked the feeling, so I lay down on the carpet and rolled around for a bit. I realized things: I was drunk. I had a body.
I stopped rolling when I thought of Grandma Lily in the hospital bed, her body veiny and white. No one told me that it would take so long for her to die. We were in that room for hours while her breathing imperceptibly slowed. She said almost nothing. I kept checking my cell phone. When the time came, she gasped deeply and then let out a rattle—an actual fucking rattle—that seemed to push all the air out of the room.
“It was so beautiful,” my mom kept saying. I thought it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen.
“I’m bored.” A voice from the vent. Celeste. Jodie and I used to communicate through that vent in a language of our own invention when we were kids.
I rolled over to the vent and spoke into the grate. “Me too,” I said. “Funerals suck.”
“Actually, this one’s kind of fun.” A pause. “Come over here and hang out with me.”
I’d never been alone with a girl in the house (or anywhere, really)—I was pretty sure it was against some parental rule. But so was getting drunk at a wake. And besides, Celeste was my cousin. No cause for suspicion there.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m coming.”
What happened next: we talked about grandparents and death among the stuffed animals at the foot of Jodie’s bed. Celeste’s great-uncle had died last year (he was the other side of the family, so we didn’t go), but she hadn’t been in the room when it happened. I began to wax poetic. “Life is so fleeting,” I said. She punched my arm. “Oh, shut up,” she said. I gave her a mock shove. We were mock-fighting and then, suddenly, actual kissing, her tongue small and unfamiliar and alive in my mouth. Jodie walked in not long after and started yelling and the rest is a tipsy and humiliating blur.
Celeste and I always smile when we see each other now, which is not often. The occasional wedding or family reunion. Mostly, it’s at funerals. They’re really the only thing that brings the whole family together. I shake her husband’s hand firmly, dote on her son, now two. I endure our family’s questions about when I’m settling down, when I’ll provide them with a new nephew. I have never brought the same date twice.
Later that night, I got a call from my friends. The aunts and uncles were starting to trickle out, Celeste and I were hard avoiding each other’s eyes. I cut out from the end of the wake to shoot hoops. And that’s what I feel bad about, more than anything: Grandma Lily’s body laid out in the funeral home, soon to be burned, and mine, full of blood and booze and shame, making terrible shots, cracking jokes with my friends, not caring at all about the funeral.
Billy Hallal was born near Cleveland. His writing can be found or is forthcoming in Hobart, Peatsmoke, and Thrillist. You can find more of his writing at billyhallal.com.
This story was originally published in Summer 2015.
Photo by goodiesfirst on Foter.com / CC BY