At the Creekside Market, we bought two bottles of Sun Drop and a handful of grape bubble gum. We checked the bulletin board and our poster was still there. When I stared at it, the poster turned wavy, like a mirage. I reached into my book bag, and when the guy working the counter looked away, I put up another poster, right on top of the other one. I felt the aura double, maybe quadruple, and I got a little dizzy. I drank half of the Sun Drop right there, standing in the market, just glug-glug-glug like I was dying of thirst, and then I stumbled outside, into the heat. This was the beauty of obsession, I realized. It never waned. Real obsession, if you did it right, was the same intensity every single time, a kind of electrocution that kept your heart beating in time. It was so good.

Zeke was waiting outside for me, and we clinked our bottles together. He reached into my bag, grabbed another poster, and folded it into a paper airplane. He waited a few seconds to make sure no one was watching us, and he flicked it toward an empty car in the parking lot whose windows were down. It caught the wind, sailed toward the window, and we held our breath at how perfect it was, and then the paper plane did some weird loop-de-loop and crashed to the ground. Zeke quickly crab-walked over to the paper airplane and chucked it through the open window, into the passenger seat, and we giggled. Zeke grabbed my arm and pulled me closer, and we kissed. But I hadn’t been entirely ready and our teeth clicked together and that made me hiss a little, thinking I’d cracked one of my front teeth. I wanted to try again right away, now that I was expecting it, but I was afraid that I’d still ruin it, like somehow I’d end up biting his nose off.

It was our first kiss in public, which, to my mind, made it official. I didn’t know what was official, what we were announcing. We weren’t dating. He wasn’t my boyfriend, or I didn’t think of him that way, not truly. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, like maybe they could tell us what all of this meant, but we were invisible. We didn’t matter. So I kissed him again. That’s what was official, that we were invisible to everyone in the entire world except each other.

A lady banged the door of the market open and came out with a handful of Little Debbie snack cakes. She was heading right to the car that now had one of our posters in the passenger seat. We hopped into my car and drove off, not looking back to see what would happen.