“Wait,” Zeke said. “If we put our faces side by side, it’ll be like those optical illusions where you see either two faces in profile or a vase. Yeah?”

“Oh,” I said, “okay, yeah.”

So we put our faces against the glass, our mouths so close together. “Wait,” Zeke said, seemingly unfazed by the proximity of our lips, “I’m trying to find the button.”

What resulted didn’t really look like an optical illusion. It looked like two dead people, two kids who had suddenly been pulled into a black hole or something.

“It’s cool, though,” Zeke said. “It looks like an album cover for a death metal band.”

“Let’s try again,” I said. I felt resolute. I felt like we were making something important. I felt like, I don’t know, I was in control. I was making the decisions. And as long as I was choosing, it was okay.

So we put our faces next to each other, but this time, when he pushed the button, I inched forward and kissed him, our mouths touching, this light slowly streaming past us. It didn’t feel real at all, which is what I thought kissing would be like. And we had to hold it, until the copier finished humming. My first kiss.

“Um,” Zeke said, bumping his head on the copier. “What did you do that for?”

“I don’t know,” I said, which was true. “I’ve never kissed anyone before.”

“Me either,” he told me.

“And this felt like a nice way to do it,” I said. “Like, you know, art.”

We looked at the copy that the machine spat out. We looked so ugly, our faces smashed together, but the blackness around us made it seem like a fairy tale. Was this what people looked like when they kissed? I guessed it wasn’t. It was what people looked like when they kissed against the glass of a copier. It’s what, I imagined, art looked like. Ugly and beautiful at the same time.

“I’m sorry I didn’t ask first,” I said, now very embarrassed. “I just, I don’t know, wanted to finally do it. So it wouldn’t be so scary. So I could move on and be normal.”

Zeke didn’t say anything. I thought he might kiss me for real, not for art but for real. But he didn’t. He smiled, sheepish, like he couldn’t control his mouth, and then said, “This could be fun.”

I thought he was talking about kissing but realized he was looking at the copier. “We could do something weird with this,” he went on.

“Weird,” I said, like it was a magic word, like all I had to do was say it out loud and my world would change.

Four