Cinnamon Cloud

My first ever kiss tasted of sour cherry Bubbilicious, smelt of waffles and bacon, sounded of Cindy Lauper and felt of a state champion gymnast in greasy gingham. It happened in the alley behind the 24/7 diner, Toni’s, where we both worked after school. It was 1983, we were both sixteen. Her name was Debbie di Marco. It was the single most amazing moment of my adolescent life, strike that, life.

She’d known I'd been interested in her for months. In fact, only a few weeks before the kiss, she’d called me out on it while I’d been scrubbing some troublesome baked meatloaf off a tin.

With a pop of gum, “You like me, don’t you?” She said.

It was so palpably true that I indignantly denied it. She had smirked and left the kitchen with the sass that only a state champion gymnast could possess. Of course, I liked her. Only a few days before this encounter I’d told Jimmy the cook I liked her. Jimmy was the kind of person to whom, under dire instruction of silence, you tell a secret which you deep down wish to be far more widely known.

If telling Jimmy wasn’t enough, everyone knew I was into her because every time she came near me, my stomach would let out a loud involuntary gurgle which awkwardly filled the silence as she passed me by.

On occasions, I would smile at her, but only after she caught me gazing at her through the serving hatch. I wasn’t allowed on the diner floor. I washed pots. Or as Toni frequently reminded me. “Her face for customers, your face for cockroaches in the alley.”

Too and froing from the alley with bags of trash food was how I spent most of my time at the diner. The cockroaches were my therapists. One in particular, who I christened Sigmund and who bore a striking resemblance to the Austrian doctor, took a specific interest in my long ramblings about how much I was in love. And not once did he blame my inability to talk to Debbie on my Mother.

A few weeks before the kiss that changed my entire understanding of space, time, the universe and everything I’d even managed to talk to with her - a conversation! Unfortunately, I’d taken the decision to speak while on a food break and had proceeded to spray her with half-chewed chicken schnitzel. The conversation was actually just me over apologizing to the point where clearly me saying sorry became more annoying than the original spray of Mom’s cooking. Sigmund could definitely have blamed my Mother for that.

I couldn’t be sure, but in the days that followed schnitzelgate I felt I caught her looking at me. I assumed out of pity. But then about two weeks before she destroyed all concept of gravity in my body, she smiled and blushed at me. I had given her a compliment about her new neon hairbands precisely as everyone else in the diner unaccountably decided to stop talking. The silence had been excruciatingly loud, but nevertheless, she had smiled. And more importantly, blushed. But like the state-champion gymnast she was, she’d quickly recovered her composure and sashayed out of the kitchen. I had frantically gathered up a bag of trash and disappeared to find counsel from six-legged Sigmund.

That one blush, though, had given me hope. And hope is all a teenage boy ever needs. Over the next few days, we exchanged a series of looks where we glanced at one another for ever-increasing amounts of time. The point of such looks being to delay the moment when direct eye contact was made between us, and we acknowledged, with an ever so slight smirk, that we had both been looking at one another the whole time. But it was, of course, too good to be true.

Just a week after her blush, I was emptying trash in the alley when I saw her arrive for her shift. She always arrived late due to gym practice. I’d always assumed the station wagon, which dropped her off was her parent’s car. But I was wrong, it was Joey ‘the pommel horse cowboy’ Monteith’s. I didn’t have that hope anymore. Before I could see them kiss goodbye. I dropped the trash in the dumpster and stamped on Sigmund.

For the next few days, I did what teenage boys specialize in and acted like a complete douchebag. She was still glancing my way, and I did everything not to look back. I concentrated entirely on listening to the background gurgle of people trying to get the last bubbles of milkshakes through their straws.

It was payday on Friday, and I’d decided I was going to collect my last pay stub and then quit. I couldn’t compete with Joey Monteith. I couldn’t be around her anymore.

Friday came, I collected my pay stub from the noticeboard where Toni pinned them each week. I checked the amount, just in case, and there it was written in a curvy script :

On break, meet me in the alley.

I knew from a thousand orders pinned in the kitchen exactly whose writing it was.

Break came.

Cindy Lauper’s Girls just wanna have fun started on the jukebox as I stepped out into the alley. A heat of waffle and bacon from the hot kitchen condensed in the cold November air and before I could say anything, Debbie Di Marco stepped through the cinnamon-scented cloud and clasped her arms tightly around my neck. My hands fell naturally to her side. I felt the crisp of grease on her gingham uniform as I pulled her state champion gymnast hips closer. I tasted sour cherry Bubbilicous on the tip of her tongue.

At that exact moment, I realized, my life was never going to be the same again. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw a cockroach that looked a lot like an Austrian psychiatrist scurry under a dumpster.