Her inky brown eyes meet mine in the rearview for a second, and I finally remember to put on the rock-star face. I raise my chin. Lower my eyelids.

It’s stupid, yeah. I know why Frankie likes me.

But I still want her to like me.

“I was at Jezz’s,” I say.

“Oh, yeah,” says Sasha. “That big article just came out.”

My chest tightens. “How did you know?”

“Jezz just shared it. He tagged you.”

The back of my neck starts to prickle. I have the stupid urge to look out the rear window, just to see if someone’s staring in. This freaking town.

We pull up to Sasha’s house, which looks like something you could order out of a catalog. Frankie turns into the driveway, and Sasha hops out and runs inside.

“Come up here,” says Frankie, patting the passenger seat. “Unless you’re actually going to pay me for the ride.”

I climb out and into the front, leaving Yvonne in back, hiding my raw knuckles in my pocket. Frankie waits for a moment, her perfect face turned toward me. She’s wearing this funny little smile, like she knows something I don’t. Her hand rests on the gearshift. There’s a beat, while she just smiles at me and I try not to smile back at her, and then Frankie puts the car in reverse. I realize only as we’re bumping out of the driveway that she was waiting for me to kiss her.

God, I’m dumb.

I guess I should have known. I’ve kissed her before.

Once.

Once, if you go by number of sessions.

If you go by number of seconds, or by number of individual lip-to-lip contacts, it’s a lot more than once.

It was December, at a party at Blake Skoglund’s, way out in the country. It was one of those parties that nobody was actually invited to but that everybody knew about anyway. By nine o’clock the crowd got too big to fit inside the garage and started spilling out into the sheds and the snow and the woods, getting drunk and loud and frostbitten.

I’d never spoken to Frankie Lynde before. She came to the Crow’s Nest every Friday night, but so did everybody else at Greenwood High School. She was always in the middle of a whirlpool of loud, laughing friends who were way more interested in one another than the music. They probably wouldn’t even have noticed if we’d launched into a medley of Disney songs.

But suddenly, there she was. By herself. Walking across the Skoglunds’ garage, straight toward me.

I was standing beside a metal tub packed with snow and cans of pop.

Frankie pointed down into the tub. Her fingernails were painted silver. “Would you hand me something?” she asked.

If I hadn’t been leaning against the wall, I would probably have looked over my shoulder, just to make sure she wasn’t talking to somebody else. I looked down into the tub instead. “Which one do you want?”