Cover

Dedication

For anyone who’s ever wanted love from someone in pain

“Love is never any better than the lover.”

—Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

The Very First Kisses

CARLI

Nobody ever warned me about love. Nobody ever warned me that when the greatest thing in the world hits you too hard, too fast, the blast can crush the organs in your belly, send heat flying up the right side of your face, and make your heart forget how to beat normally.

I’m trying to stay in my body, on the sidelines of the gym, but the pain in my belly is making the sound of the bouncing basketball grow fainter. The fluorescent lights keep giving way to darkness.

The boy is the only one who can see the pain. The boy at the free-throw line in his high socks with his high-top fade and his inverted triangle face, drenched with tenderness. The boy who just came out of nowhere, blowing me a kiss in the middle of his game. Who even blows kisses these days? But it wasn’t corny like you’d think. It came from somewhere deep, like all of his years and hurts and hopes were attached to it—his whole history.

And now our histories are mixing.

Pain on high, feeling like I’m about to die, an old fact flickers at the front of my mind:

The very first kisses were blown in Mesopotamia as a way to get in good with the gods.

Tacked that up on my bedroom wall after Bradley Dixon blew me a kiss in the fifth grade. The next day he told everyone the kiss wasn’t meant for me.

The boy drops the basketball at the free-throw line and runs toward me, just off the court.

Darkness briefly takes me, but the sharp sound of a whistle blown scares the darkness away. I bite some skin peeling on my bottom lip and try to stay in the gym. Keep my focus on him.

He’s wearing number twelve—ten less than the number on the jersey underneath my warm-ups. I need to take off these stupid polyester pants, this jacket. I’m burning up, drenched in sweat. Zipper. Where’s the zipper? My fingers fumble to find it, but the pain . . . the darkness . . . I can’t fight it anymore. I’m losing myself to it . . . falling.

His arms around me, and my insides light up with his down-slanted, hooded eyes. It feels so good the way they’re staring into mine. For a second I’ve never felt so alive. Then I’m gone.

REX

I miss a shot. An easy shot. My mid-range jumper always drops. Always. But man, I can’t stop thinking about that girl. About how she passed out in my arms. How, for a second, I thought she might’ve been dead, and it was somehow my fault.