“Oh, sorry. Yeah, Murray’s at my place.”

“Musical beds again, is it?”

“As always. He originally fell asleep at Lola’s. Possibly on the kitchen floor. Possibly with a kangaroo. Your son is a miscreant.”

“And that’s why we allow him to hang out with you lot. Because you use words like miscreant in general conversation,” Sonya said, mussing my hair and pouring me a glass of orange juice.

We ate breakfast together in the too-bright sun, and then the girls dragged me into their playroom to watch Avatar: The Last Airbender until my parents brought Murray home. I let the girls paint my fingernails with silver glitter in exchange for them covertly fetching me snacks from the kitchen. They tried to braid my hair, but none of them were good enough at it yet to get it to stay.

Finally, Mom and Dad arrived to trade children with Muz’s parents. Murray wandered in barefoot, still dressed as a pirate, carrying an empty baking tray and a sign around his neck that read FREE HUGS AND COOKIES.

I didn’t ask. I didn’t need to.

My folks decided to stick around for lunch, so I lay in Murray’s bed for the next hour and a half, slipping in and out of sleep as he tidied his room and told me about how he’d made up with Sugar Gandhi (twice) in my bed. Which I wasn’t very happy about, but he pointed out that my sheets were offensive and long overdue for a wash anyway, which was true. And I told him about Grace, about the kiss, about the message she’d sent me afterward. I wouldn’t have chased you if I didn’t feel the same way. About how, all this time, when I thought she’d been indifferent, she’d actually been pursuing me in her own strange, quiet style. It wasn’t the sort of thing Murray and I normally talked about, because it wasn’t the sort of thing I normally did, but I liked it. It was nice to have something to share for a change.

“Look at us—two fools in love,” Muz said as he flopped down on the bed next to me, wrapped his leg over my hips, and nuzzled into my neck like a shaggy dog, as he was wont to do.

I wasn’t sure about the love part yet, but the fool part, certainly, was true.

AND THEN THERE was nothing.

I don’t know exactly what I expected. I knew a single, drunken kiss didn’t mean Grace had to pledge herself to me body and soul, but I at least thought we’d be more, like, obvious about our feelings. That, now that I knew she liked me, it would be easier to draw her out of herself on the days when she switched off, easier to be around her even when she pretended she was the only person in the world, easier to accidentally brush her arm and not have her go rigid, like an electric current was twisting through her spine. I thought that after people made out with each other, things kind of fell in place around them. I was, naturally, very wrong.

The week after our first kiss went something like this.

SATURDAY

When I got home from Muz’s in the early afternoon, I sent Grace a message (after I’d peeled the sheets off my bed and stuffed them in the washing machine while wearing gloves and a surgical mask).

HENRY PAGE:

Ugh. Woke up feeling like I gargled a dead hamster. I heard Heslin got grounded, poor kid. How is Grakov? Let me know if you wanna hang this weekend.

GRACE TOWN:

I am feeling all right this morning. I will let you know about this weekend. Have a good day.

SUNDAY

Despite what she’d said, Grace Town did not let me know about that weekend. I know, because I spent most of the those forty-eight hours waiting for her to message me, but she didn’t, so I went to bed at eight p.m. on Sunday night but didn’t fall asleep until the sky was turning pale pink with sunrise through the basement windows.

MONDAY

Grace Town walked into the newspaper office in the morning before class, nodded at me, collected a stack of papers off her desk, and left. It was at this point that I became fairly certain that The Kiss (as it would come to be known) had been little more than a hallucination caused by mild methanol poisoning from the punch. I spent the day wanting to go home and research new schools that didn’t frown on senior-year transfers.

Unfortunately I had to stay after school to finish (read: begin) my first English assignment for Hink, catch up on my math homework, open my Spanish textbook for the first time, and start thinking about college applications, which is why I was still in the library when I received Grace’s message and felt my heart kick up into my neck. It was much, much worse than I thought it would be.

GRACE TOWN:

Do you want to play touch football Thursday nights? Hink is putting a rec team of teachers and students together “for fitness” and wants to know if you’re in? Sounds like everyone else (i.e., all the teachers) is. I won’t be playing, but I’m gonna come and cheer you guys on.

I’d been expecting a “Friday night was a mistake” or “I don’t want things to be weird” type message, but this? This was torture. On the one hand, joining the teachers’ recreational football team had two benefits:

 Grace Town, obviously. Obligatory social events meant more obligatory time spent together, outside of school and the newspaper office and Grace’s car.

 The chance to prove to my teachers, especially the ones who still thought I was Sadie Page’s male equivalent, that I was neither criminally devious nor psychotically brilliant.

On the other hand, there was one massive downside:

Sports.

The cons almost won. The thought of Grace having to witness my fumbled attempts at hand-eye coordination made me cringe. But I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spend more time with her. So I typed:

HENRY PAGE:

I guess I could use it as an opportunity to get within three feet of Mr. Hotchkiss. In class he makes me sit all the way at the back, but he won’t be able to hide from me on the field!