Kissing Tommy MacNeill was like eating a bag of Skittles. Magic Skittles.

Because he was sweet, yes. So sweet. But the magic part was that kissing him made me sweet, too. Every time his lips touched mine, we got sweeter together.

We were delicious.

I can be honest—I was obsessed with kissing Tommy MacNeill.

“Beth,” he said, as I led him toward the art room at school. The art room was deserted at lunch and it was where we made out. The art room was pretty much the best place in the world. “We can’t keep doing this.”

“But we can.” I grinned at him over my shoulder and his hand twitched in mine and I knew he was excited.

Because Tommy—stoic, silent Tommy—had a tell.

The tips of his ears glowed red when he was excited. Or embarrassed.

But he wasn’t embarrassed right now—oh no, these were his excited ears.

LOTS of people could know this about Tommy—they only had to spend five minutes with him and it was obvious. But Tommy didn’t spend a whole lot of time with anyone that wasn’t from St. Jude’s Home for Court-Placed Juveniles.

And really—these days—he only spent time with me.

And really—these days—I only spent time with him.

Because of the Skittles and his ears and the way his hands on my body made me feel warm and cold and light and heavy all at once. Tommy didn’t say much, I did most of the talking, but he listened. I mean…really listened. And maybe that wasn’t a big deal to the rest of the world.

But I’d never been listened to. Not once. Not even a little.

And this was the shittiest time in my life, by like a mile, but it was also the best.

Because of Tommy.

The art room door closed behind us, shutting us in its turpentine-scented hush, and he put his hands on my waist, turning me so I faced him.

“Ahhh,” I said, getting a good look at his face, “not so eager to stop now, are you, Tommy?”

Silent, with his glowing ears and his white-hot eyes, he walked us back into the corner where we spent most of our lunch hour. The past few days we didn’t even have our lunch first, we just came right here. And part of me felt guilty because Tommy needed to eat.

Like for real.

Tommy was tall but he was so thin. When his shirt pushed up against his back in the wind, I could see the outline of his ribs against his skin. And his skin was always dry, like he was parched on the inside. Every day when he got to school, he stood at the drinking fountain for like ten minutes, sucking down water. Filling himself up.

It broke my heart.

I wasn’t sure why The Pastor and His Wife didn’t feed Tommy like they should. They had to give him lunch when he went to school, and most of us from the home gave him part of our lunches too. But at St. Joke’s (we called St. Jude’s, St. Joke’s, which wasn’t funny, but it’s what we had) they barely gave him anything. Made him sit at the table without a plate while we had a regular dinner—a gross one, but still.

Tommy said it was punishment but when I asked him what he was being punished for he didn’t have an answer.

And it was only one of the many crazy things that went on in our foster home.

But the way Tommy was looking at me right now, his blue eyes hot and his lids all heavy…who needed food when we had this thing between us. This art-room thing.

“Some day, we’re going to get caught,” he said, and my back hit the corkboard wall.

“I don’t care,” I whispered because I was breathless and my heart was beating funny.

He touched my hair, the big thick bun of it, held in place by the ponytail holder. He kept asking me to take it down, but my hair was a situation. And putting it back up was a process.

No time for situations or process when we had kissing to do.

I grinned at him. And he grinned at me, but his grin…it didn’t have any joy in it. He was nervous and I didn’t want to be nervous. We had hours of nervous back at St. Joke’s. Looking over our shoulder’s and being as small as we could be and still survive.

Here at school, here with him—this was where we were happy. This was where we were ourselves. And speaking for myself, I was more me here than I’d ever been in my life.

I was me squared. Me times a thousand.

I used my fingers to push his lips around, to lift the sides a little higher like that might give him some joy. “Smile,” I said. “For real.”

I crossed my eyes at him and finally he laughed, the breathy harrumph of a laugh that made me happy. He pretended to bite me and I pulled my hands from his lips to his hair. The thick white buzz cut felt like an old-fashioned brush against my fingers. Back and forth I rubbed it, smooth and bristly in turns.

“Do you look like your mom or your dad?” I asked. I was a little obsessed with this. With the way we looked like other people in our families. My family was just my mom and me and Mom had pale skin with blonde hair. I had my mom’s straight hair – and lots of it, that was the situation and process with taking it down and putting it back up. But it was bright red. And my light brown skin was covered in freckles that came from a mutation in the MC1R gene. I didn’t just have a few cute freckles on my cheeks.

I had a ton.

I was an anomaly. In a whole bunch of ways.

And that wasn’t as fun as it sounds.

But Tommy, he looked like a Viking, or something. Like his size (big) and his eyes (blue) and his hair (white) had been passed down from hundreds of years ago. There’d been some kind of fur-covered dude, in the bow of a boat, sailing around the North Sea who looked just like Tommy.

Is it obvious I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this?

“I never met my Dad,” he said, closing his eyes and letting me pet him. He liked this. He really liked this. So I put both hands on the job, using my nails a little, and he groaned in his throat. I never met my Dad either. He’d been a donor in a sperm bank when my mom was forty and decided she needed to have a kid. “Barely remember my mom.”

“What about your grandparents?”

His eyes flew open, his blue eyes so startling every time. Like at night when we got locked into our separate rooms at St. Joke’s, I’d think, “there’s no way his eyes are that blue. No eyes are that blue.” And then in the morning when The Pastor let us out, there was Tommy in the hallway, with his blue, blue eyes.

“Why are you talking about this?” he asked.

“Because we never have before.”

“I have a grandfather. A farmer or something near Santa Barbara. When I got put in the system he filed paperwork relinquishing all rights.”

“He…gave you up?”

“Without even meeting me.”

“I’m sorry.” I’m not sure how I kept getting surprised by how shitty people could be. I’d been at St. Jude’s for three months and I thought I’d heard it all, every awful thing that an adult could do to a kid.

But there was always more. Endless, heartbreaking more.

He shrugged like it was no big deal. “What about your mom?” he asked.

“You really want to talk about this?”

“You started it,” he said with a genuine laugh. “And you never talk about your mom. I don’t even know how you ended up at St. Joke’s.”

“Because it’s boring and dumb.” I lifted his hand and looked at his watch, because the last thing I wanted was to talk about my mom and how I ended up in our court-placed foster home. “We’ve only got fifteen minutes of lunch left.”

“I wish…” he said and I almost stopped him. Kids like us…we had no business wishing anything. I learned that a long time ago. Simon, Tommy’s roommate, that guy wished. He wished and he wished and it got him nowhere.

But Tommy never told me what he wished and I knew I was part of whatever it was. Just like he was part of all my wishes that I could never say out loud.

“I wish we were five years older,” he said. “And I could take you to a movie or something, and we could…we could just be normal.”

“I wish we were five years older and we didn’t have to make out in the high school art room.”

“I wish you’d take down your hair.”

“I wish you’d take down your pants.”

His mouth fell open, my so easily shocked Tommy. And I laughed, wiping my hands over his face, closing his mouth.

My mother would die if she knew I was doing this. In fact my mother had done everything she could to make sure I’d never do this. She’d tried to make me scared and answered questions about my body with clinical doctor answers that didn’t answer anything at all.

She wanted me to believe that girls who liked the kind of stuff we did in the art room—those girls were bad.

But my body knew she was wrong. There was nothing bad about what me and Tommy did in the art room.

“I like what we do here,” I whispered.

“Me too.” His lips moved beneath my fingers and I felt the simmering, waiting tension in my body.

“Remember?” I swallowed, an audible gulp. I could feel myself blushing and I stared down at the chipped red Formica of the counter top next to us. “What you did last time?”

Against my stomach, he was hard. And where he was hard, I was soft and that felt like the best thing in the world.

“Oh, I remember,” he said. “I think I’ll remember for the rest of my life.”

“I want to do it for you,” I said, finally brave enough to lift my eyes to his face. “I want to make you come.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re in an art room at lunch, Beth. Because someone could walk in any minute… Fuck,” he breathed. No one in all my sixteen years swore around me and I loved it when he did it. I loved how real it was. And how every time he swore it was like the word came up from his belly. He swore like he meant it. It was dirty.

And I was really beginning to love dirty.

He kissed me. Hot and sweet and more exciting than I knew what to do with. It hurt between my legs, not like an ouch hurt. But…you know, an ache. And I could feel how wet I was. I would feel how wet I was for the rest of the day and I wasn’t sure if that was gross or not. Seemed like it might be? Like were my panties supposed to be…so wet?

But last time, when he put his hand under my skirt and felt how wet I was…he said I was perfect.

His tongue touched mine and I stopped worrying about anything. I could barely think. His chest pushed up against me and I moaned low in my throat because he felt so good like that.

And this was fun. And Skittley-delicious. But I knew there was more than kissing and pushing up against each other. Last time showed me there was so much more.

So I reached for him again, my hand to the front of his jeans, and I got the impression of him beneath the denim. Really big. Too big, maybe. Was that a thing? Not for us, I decided.

We, when we finally had sex, we would be perfect.

And I could not wait. I imagined us in a hotel room. Crisp white sheets that didn’t smell like bleach. Sunlight and all the time in the world.

And no fear. Not ever again.

I squeezed him through his pants, pressed the heel of my palm against the top of his dick. God, even thinking that word was exciting.

He grabbed my hand, slapped my palm down on the counter beside us. And held me there. “You gotta stop that,” he said. “For real.”

I tried to pull away but he wouldn’t let me. And oh, God…oh God, I liked that. I really liked that. I mean, it’s not like I thought he meant it. He wasn’t really going to hurt me. Or hold me there against my will. Not Tommy.

It was just…exciting. Like…so exciting. Because I felt so safe with him. I’d never felt so safe with anyone in my life. If I said stop, he’d stop. If I said no, he’d let me go. If I said yes, well…

Rosa, my roommate at St. Joke’s, was pregnant. Sixteen and pregnant. And the way she talked about her boyfriend I knew they had this thing between them.

Lust and like and trust and probably love all mixed up into one big wild, out-of-control feeling. And it was bad, what was happening to Rosa, being pregnant and at St. Joke’s. But she told me all the time that she was lucky, too.

Because she knew what real love was.

And that was a really lucky thing.

It was weird to feel lucky in all this shit we were in…but there you go.

Tommy’s breath was hot against my face. His free hand—the one that wasn’t holding my hand down—burned through my shirt right to my skin. He shifted and his knee pressed against me there and I saw sparks. Real sparks behind my closed eyes and they were coming from between my legs. Like embers off a fire.

I pulled him against me, opening my legs so his knee went between them.

His knee…his hand holding me down. I felt it happening in my body. Like last time. I pulled back, looking at Tommy. Were we supposed to talk about this? I wanted to. I wanted to tell him what I needed. What I felt.

“Like that?” he whispered pushing up higher against me.

I nodded, gulping air.

That look on his face, in his blue eyes…the way he stared at me, watching me. Oh, God, he knew. He knew what he was doing. He knew what I wanted. With the hand he wasn’t holding down, I reached for him—grabbed onto him like I was in a storm-tossed ocean and he was a piece of wood floating by to save me.

My fingers slipped up under his shirt, to the smooth skin of his sides. And he twitched away from me and I wasn’t sure if it was because of his ribs or the old scars that crisscrossed his back.

The Pastor did that, too. Put those scars on him.

For a second, I stilled, the weight of everything. The awfulness of how we lived was too much.

“Hey,” he said, leaning away from me, “you want to stop?”

“No.” I shook my head.

“You went someplace else there for a second.”

“No. I’m here. With you. I’m always here with you.”

He kissed me again, soft and sweet.

“Spread your legs wider,” he said and I did. I would do anything he asked.

“Students!”

Tommy jerked away from me so fast, he bumped into the counter and sent a bunch of student perspective drawings crashing to the floor. He bent and picked them up, probably trying to hide his boner and I stood, petrified, staring at Mr. Mendoza.

The Principal.

My body dried up in heartbeat. That thorny exciting feeling between my legs vanished. Leaving only fear.

We’ve been caught.

“Mr. Mendoza,” I said, trying to make my voice steady. Trying to make my whole body steady but this was serious.

And this was bad.

“I can explain.” My voice was too high and I laughed nervously. My mother would tell me that I was broadcasting my insecurities and that no one would take me seriously this way.

She was probably right.

He lifted one side of his unibrow. “Oh, I think it’s clear what you were doing.”

“But—”

He lifted his hand, and I shut my mouth.

“I have to say, Ms. Renshaw.” God, I hated when he called me by my last name. It made me feel even more guilty. Mr. Mendoza wasn’t a bad guy, he just didn’t seem to know how ineffective he was. “This behavior is not at all what I expect from you. Your transcripts when you transferred here were exemplary. Honor roll grades. Student Council. Choir. Theater. But in your three months at Cedar High, you just don’t seem to care.”

I don’t, I wanted to shout. Caring gets you nowhere! It gives you ulcers and makes your hair fall out and your mother just abandons you anyway, so why care?

But I didn’t say any of that.

Mr. Mendoza’s eyes shifted over Tommy like he didn’t even deserve a lecture. This kind of thing was what people expected from him. And that wasn’t fair either. Because Tommy cared more than I did. Tommy cared more than anyone I knew.

“It’s my fault,” Tommy said as if he knew the line he was supposed to say. “I convinced her to come here.”

“Is that true?” Mendoza asked, going on full alert like a sexual assault hound dog.

“No,” I said very evenly and clearly. “I am here because I want to be here.”

There was a loaded moment while Mendoza decided whether or not to believe me.

“Just clear out of the art room.” Mr. Mendoza sighed like we were just so disappointing.

Tommy, having put the artwork back on the counter, looked at me, eyes wide. And I knew what he was thinking—is that it? No punishment. No telling The Pastor? I started to smile, relief making me dizzy. Tommy grabbed my hand and began to pull me out of the corner, like he was saving me from a fire. And maybe he was because if The Pastor found out about us being together, it would be bad for everyone at St. Joke’s.

He’d punish all of us.

“Tommy,” Mr. Mendoza said as we got to the door. “This is against the conditions of your court placement. You know I have to notify your guardian.”

We both turned toward him, my stomach in my shoes, and Tommy’s face went completely pale.

“You know the rules,” he said. “Pastor Kendrick is explicit about not allowing the students at St. Jude’s to fraternize. You’re not allowed to be in the same classes much less…this.”

“It was a kiss, Mr. Mendoza,” I said, fighting down the blush I could feel climbing my cheeks. I tried to laugh like it was no big deal but all of this felt like a very big deal. Too big a deal. “And it’s not like Tommy did anything wrong. Teenagers kiss, Mr. Mendoza.”

“Thank you for the newsflash, Beth,” Mr. Mendoza said. “But if there’s a reason he’d like to give me for why I shouldn’t tell Pastor Kendrick, now would be the time.”

This was our out! I looked at Tommy, nudged him with my elbow. He could tell Mr. Mendoza what went on at St. Joke’s. How no one fed Tommy. And how Carissa barely talked. How Rosa had to pray on her knees every day, begging for forgiveness for her sins.

And the office.

Simon, Clarissa, Rosa and Tommy, they warned me…all the time. Don’t do anything that would get you taken to the office.

The office was where bad things happened.

Tommy got taken there the first night I’d been at St. Joke’s. And it was my fault he’d been punished, and he’d been left in bed for days afterward with his hands wrapped in bloody bandages.

“Tommy,” I whispered.

“There’s no reason,” Tommy told Mendoza. “Do whatever you’re going to do.”

Tommy said it in just the right kind of voice that made Mendoza shake his head, oozing disappointment. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get any of it.

“Please, Mr. Mendoza,” I said, feeling everything slip through my fingers. I’d just gotten happy. Please don’t take this away from us. “I don’t think you understand what it’s like there—”

“Beth,” Tommy said, his low voice cutting across mine. He shook his head, just a little. A hard no. But I remembered his hands, what The Pastor had done to him. On account of me. And I understood that none of us said anything about what happened there, because we were scared.

Scared of juvie.

Of The Pastor.

Of everything.

And it wasn’t right. Or fair.

“Tommy, Beth.” Mr. Mendoza stepped toward us. Mr. Mendoza dressed like a dad on TV. Khaki pants and button down shirts, but he always wore really crazy socks and when he stepped toward me I saw that they had emoticons on them. Little emoticon socks.

Surely, we could trust a guy who wore emoticon socks, right?

“Is there something you need to tell me? About St. Jude’s?”

He said it like he knew and I opened my mouth to answer, to yell, actually: Yes! Yes! There is! There’s something evil and rotten and none of us talk about it because we’re so scared.

But Tommy beat me too it.

“No,” he said in that serious, far-too-old-to-be-sixteen way he had. “There’s nothing we need to tell you. But when you tell Pastor Kendrick, tell him it was me breaking the rules, not Beth.”

“Tommy—”

The bell rang and he opened the door.

“We need to get to class.” He pulled me out into the hallway, into the river of other kids heading from lunch to their next class. We got caught up in the current and I wished, I wished so badly that we could just keep going. That these kids with their normal lives and regular problems could just sweep us up, out the doors into the world away from everything.

“Tommy,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell him?”

“Because who is going to believe us? He’s a pastor with a church and everything. He’s been running this foster home for years. All we are is fuckups. Trouble kids.”

That wasn’t what we were. Rosa, Carissa, Simon…Tommy. Especially Tommy. We weren’t fuckups. We were kids and everyone who was supposed to take care of us—didn’t.

“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that at all. We should have told him. He knows something is wrong.”

“Carissa tried to tell a teacher once.”

I stopped, because his voice made the hair on my arms stand up.

“What happened?”

“She got sent to some hospital, came back on these meds that fucked her up, and she stopped talking.”

“Why?”

“Did she stop talking? Because talking got her in some serious shit—”

“No. Why did they take her away? Why didn’t they believe her?”

“You’re not like us, Beth. In your world, people believe you when you talk. The world doesn’t give a shit about the rest of us.”

Tommy was wrong. No one believed me.

I never told anyone what my mom did to me. It was a secret I kept because I was sick and untrustworthy and everyone knew it. It was the one thing my mother had taught me over the years. Not that I was loved. Or special.

But that I was broken. And I needed to be fixed.

But that Tommy thought people would listen to me made me feel like a superhero. Even if he was wrong.

“I should have told him then,” I whispered, turning back to the art room, where Mr. Mendoza stood watching us from the door.

“No way.” Tommy pulled me away. “And then you’ll get sent to a hospital. And you’ll get put on some kind of fucked-up medicine.”

I stumbled along after him, scared because my mom was the kind of doctor that put kids on fucked-up meds and I never told Tommy, but I’d been on my share. And I never wanted to do that again.

“I’m scared, Tommy.”

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. And he tried to be convincing, he did and I would love him forever for it. “We’ve got each other. We’re gonna be okay.”

But he was lying.