Page 41 of Kiss Me Now
She came back a few minutes later with a plastic painter’s tarp, a paint scraper, and an oversized spray bottle. She set them down and dug a small object from her back pocket. “This will score the wallpaper,” she said, handing it to me. “Lay down the tarp, then run this down the wallpaper but not too hard or I’ll have to putty it before I paint. Then peel it off and let it fall to the tarp. It’s disposable, so I’ll bundle it up and throw it all away.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad.”
“Oh, you sweet, innocent man. This is going to suck. You can tap out anytime you want to because there are a hundred better ways for you to spend your Saturday, and all of them start with you running away fast.”
“I can handle it.” I flexed as a joke but caught an appreciative glint in her eye before she shook her head.
“It doesn’t take strength, it takes patience. So much patience. Wheelbarrows of patience. Most of the paper won’t come up very easily. Once you’ve peeled away everything you can, there’s still going to be patches that cling to the wall like they were welded there. But let’s get you through the initial removal first, and if you survive, I’ll explain how to do the next part.”
She laid the paint scraper in my hand and turned toward the bathroom, but I reached out to catch her fingers and hold her in place with a light pressure she could break with no trouble.
“I’m patient, Brooke. I won’t tap out.”
She glanced down at my hand holding hers and slowly slid hers from my grasp. “I know I don’t teach English, but I’m almost positive there’s some subtext there.” She ran her freed hand down her braid, pushing it behind her and meeting my eyes. “If you’re here to help, I’m happy to have it. But if you’re here for anything else...”
“No ulterior motives, I promise. Just trying to make up for digging into your business.”
“The flowers were enough,” Brooke said.
“They weren’t. I’m so used to having to do metaphorical dirty work that I couldn’t see the obvious when it was right in front of me. I won’t make that mistake again. And I figured the best way to atone is to do your literal dirty work. You’re doing me a favor by letting me.”
She shook her head. “All right, if you really want to. I’ll be cursing at tile if you need anything.”
She disappeared into the bathroom. I decided to start on the wallpaper closest to her. “Brooke?” I asked, as I looked for the first seam to begin ripping.
“Yeah?” She was only a few feet away even though I could only see the soles of her shoes. She must have already knelt to do her work.
“Why Lincoln? And teaching high school? And this old house?”
She was quiet for a while. Finally, she said, “In college, I wanted to go into biology because I find life so interesting. I like looking at the building blocks of it, understanding how it all works. I ended up on a career detour after I lost a friend, and—”
I waited, but she didn’t continue. “Brooke?”
She crawled backwards out of the bathroom and sat on her heels in the hallway, watching me for a few seconds. “How much did you find out about my past in your investigation?”
“Ellen Brown set me straight on a lot of it,” I admitted. “But I’d like to hear about it from you.”
She seemed to consider that for a minute before disappearing into the bathroom again. Just as I wondered if she’d decided to ignore my question, her voice floated out to the hall.
“I wanted to make a difference. I thought I’d get into research, find a cure or two.” She laughed. “Like it’s that easy. Anyway, my roommate died from using a faulty vape. I kept telling her not to vape at all, but she insisted it was way better for her than smoking. Then she got a lung infection, and she didn’t recover. I took a semester off because her death was this reminder that life was really short, and I wanted to make sure I was making it count.”
“And you decided politics was the answer? I think that brings a lot of idealists to DC.”
“No, I wasn’t interested in politics. But I felt like I’d failed Chelsea, my roommate, because I couldn’t talk her out of vaping. So I decided to make it harder for the vape industry to hook young people, and I spent my semester off researching the industry, the growth rates, the demographics of users. It was disturbing. I wanted to make sure no one else on my campus would become their victim either by getting sick or losing someone like I did. And I started lobbying my state delegate to get a law passed that banned the sale of flavored vape products in Virginia, since that’s how they hook new users. They were pretty much marketing straight to kids.”
“And that’s when you caught Ellen Brown’s eye?” I asked.
Her head popped out of the bathroom. “She’s great, isn’t she?”
I nodded, and she disappeared again.
“She convinced me to do an internship with the delegate’s office the following summer,” she explained before giving a soft but audible curse.
“You liked it that much, huh?”
“Sorry, no, I can’t get this tile piece to line up right.” She fell quiet for a moment, then I heard a small, satisfied grunt, and she picked up the thread of the conversation. “I did like working for the delegate. And I thought if I brought my science background to work with me in her office, I could do some good work around all kinds of related issues. Public health, the environment.”
“So you got into politics like thousands of idealists all over the country.”
