Who Kissed Charlie Fine?

Chapter 2

He decided to walk home, to let the dull palette of the city blur as he climbed his mind's steps in order to disappear into his head and sort through various collected data and compare notes. Thus was his custom after each of these surprise visits. Paid upfront and supplied with a constantly updated itinerary, the various agencies around the city would make sure that every month or so a different woman would appear unannounced to ask the question and deliver the kiss, co-ordinating with each other, of course, to avoid overlap.

Sometimes the kisses were too reluctant, affectedly coy or unrealistically aggressive. It was no great revelation that better results came with the friendlier messengers, more sporting and less judgemental. Distracting factors, such as too many witnesses, heavy fragrances, or any physical impediments such as cosmetically plumped lips or overdone veneers could also make it more difficult to find what he was looking for. The day's kiss was fairly pleasant, but nothing to write home or anyone else about. He filed it away with so many others under 'Close, but no cigar'. After the standard text requiring confirmation, he would respond that today's girl had fulfilled her duty and done so satisfactorily, earning her five stars and a generous tip. Only one had received a two star rating and that was for chewing gum.

It was a ritual that went beyond kink, but perhaps just barely. Try telling this to Charlie's accountant and behold the face of a man after his own heart; one which permitted every demonstration but wasn't buying anything. It was useless to try to explain that Charlie was spending so much money conducting his most ambitious study, searching for the answer to a twenty-year old mystery which was, of all his interests and intrigues, an obsession which eclipsed them all. Who had given him the greatest kiss of his life and why could it not be replicated? The enigma was his most constant companion, the answer a constant stranger, and he was unwaveringly devoted to them both.

The original kiss had occurred in the fall of Charlie's last year of high school, during a senior's party thrown at the home of popular jock, Graham Dear. That Charlie had been invited didn't mean he was popular too, just that in a small town like Messengers, with community ties too tight for exclusive cliques, if you weren't exactly in demand you were still more or less included. It also helped that Charlie was the only classmate who could score the good stuff from his mother's liquor storeroom by the case.

In a corner away from the thirty or so party goers, he had been perusing Mr. Dear's vinyl collection, trying to deduce the reason for a single Ethel Merman LP in a collection of AC/DC, Chicago and Eric Clapton albums, when he was summoned to a circle of peers seated on the floor of Graham's basement waiting to spin a bottle. The game was a blindfolded version of Seven  Minutes In Heaven and in the case of The Infamous Kiss the suspects were not these: Graham Dear, Eric Saxon, Adesh Varma, Calvin Lucas or Robin Tam. For one thing, they were all straight males as far as anyone knew, and not mature or progressive enough at the time for anyone at the school to have heard the end of it if one of them had kissed Charlie, even as a joke. For another, Charlie had heard a female voice right before the kiss took place which meant it could have only belonged to one of the following six girls:

Sweet Jean Peterson, a flighty daydreamer with a Kewpie doll's voice who never said a bad word about anyone except for the villains of history class and even then her condemnations were a struggle to express, Cherie Warner, the loud and seemingly fearless school flirt, an equal opportunity smoocher with a reputation for way worse, though Charlie estimated she wasn't guilty of doing a third of the things she confessed to, Rose King, one of the most popular girls in school, head cheerleader until she fell out of her liberty stunt and had to sit out the team the first half of senior year. Her best friend and second fiddle, Opal Green, also a suspect, took Rose's place on the team and just about everywhere else including being named Prom Queen next to Rose's boyfriend, Calvin Lucas' Prom King. As far as Charlie knew they had remained friends, at least up until Calvin broke up with Rose and began dating Opal in University.