Instead of climbing the narrow staircase to the store, I beelined to the alley beside it, snaking through the small town’s backwater passages like a hungry criminal, until I reached the parking lot behind the Sunoco gas station. I stood beside a black dumpster that smelled like onions and urine and watched the cars enter and exit, making sure my mother’s wasn’t one of them, and that the red Honda mentioned in the Craigslist ad that had been parked three spots from the street wasn’t moving.

Craigslist. That’s where I’d found it. It turns out it was a lot easier than I’d anticipated to hide my father’s cell phone and use it to go on the internet when he was dealing with a “mysterious hole” in the chicken coup. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for when I first typed Craigslist into the search bar—just that I’d read something about it in Seventeen—but my curiosity took over, clicking this link and that until I found myself in the sex section—people asking for it, people offering it, people writing detailed accounts of their wildest fantasies to see if anyone else’s matched.

I knocked on the driver’s side of the red Honda and when the darkly tinted window rolled down, a scrawny boy looked up at me, confused, from behind the wheel. Red acne marks cratered his uneven cheeks and his attempt at a Justin Bieber side-swept flick-fringe covered his eyes like Cousin Itt.

“What—” His voice cracked and he cleared his throat, his cheeks reddening even more than they already were. “What?” he repeated, this time without the lingering hints of puberty.

“I’m here, um...” I wasn’t about to say the word out loud; even just standing there next to the car was risky. I was more afraid of my mother finding out than of any potential dangers involved in meeting a stranger next to his running car, in an unfamiliar town, lying to my parents about my whereabouts. Obviously, the Craigslist Killer news coverage hadn’t hit Seventeen or Cosmo yet. “I think you’re meeting me?”

“Right,” he said, leaning toward the passenger’s door and pulling the knob to unlock it. “Get in.”

The car smelled like skunk, I thought, as I did what he asked and sunk into the seat. Like a skunk had attacked the gray cloth interior and made a home under the hood.

“You swear you’ve never done this before?” he asked. I nodded.

The ad was looking for a virgin French kiss. I wasn’t sure if it was to French kiss a virgin or to French kiss someone who’s never French kissed before, but either way I qualified. The only thing I knew about French kissing was that it involved tongue. How? I wasn’t quite sure.

“You have to pay me first.”