For a moment, total silence.

Then I start laughing. Imogen’s eyes are wide behind her half-broken glasses, like she can’t believe she just did that, her pretty face smudged and dirty.

“That bad, huh?” I ask, still grinning.

It didn’t hurt. She’s got thick gloves on, plus it’s pretty clear that Imogen’s never slapped someone before, so honestly, I hardly even felt it.

“What the hell?” she whispers.

I stand, brushing my knees off, shifting her pack on my back. She does the same, unsteadily, glaring at the hand I offer her. Even though she just slapped me, not that it did any harm.

“What do you mean, what the hell,” I tease her, stepping closer.

My whole body is tingling with danger right now, that combination of adrenaline and endorphins, the constant rush of being alive and right here. We could both plummet to our death on the rocks below, sure, but the fire behind Imogen’s eyes right now is about ten times as potent as that possibility.

“I mean what the hell are you doing,” she hisses.

I grin again, jam my hand back into my glove. I want to reach out again, touch her like I just did, but I’m afraid she’d jerk away and fall down a mountain.

“Only what you’ve been thinking of since you saw me again,” I tell her. “You can play quiet and shy and angry all you like, Squeaks—”

She slaps me again. It hurts exactly as much as the first time she did it, but this time I grab her wrist on the follow-through, afraid she’s going to go off-balance and tumble again.

“Hit me when we’re on firmer ground,” I tell her. “Don’t worry, it’s close.”

I turn without saying anything else, carefully walk the last few feet to the embankment and climb up it, slinging her pack onto the ground next to mine before I turn to watch Imogen jump, trying to hoist herself up onto the other side.

I let her try a few times before I walk over, offer my hand. She doesn’t look me in the eye as she takes it and I pull her up in one quick motion.

“Thanks,” she says softly, not looking me in the eye. A muscle in her cheek twitches, and she look away at the gray smudge against the rocks, the trickle of water that’s the whole reason we came over here.

We walk over, fill our water bottles, guzzle. The water’s cold and clear and tastes wonderful, and even though I know that nasty stuff can still live in it, I know that dying of dehydration would be far worse.

As we put on our pack again, getting ready to keep up the long downward trek, Imogen pauses. She sighs, then comes right up to me, shoving her glasses up her nose, and stares me down like she’s thinks I’m some sort of aggressive predator.

“I don’t want you to kiss me,” she says, her voice clear and firm.

Liar.

“No?”

“No.”

“You kissed me back pretty well for someone who didn’t want to be kissed,” I say.

“I was surprised.”

“Are you sure?” I ask, tilting my head to one side, studying her face. Her jaw’s set, her eyes stubborn, her mouth a flat line across her face. “It didn’t feel like surprise, Squeaks.”

She flinches. Just barely, but I can see it: she blinks, a muscle in her neck twitches. In her pocket, one hand curls into a fist.

“It felt like you’ve been waiting for me to do that since I walked over to you at the airport,” I go on, taking a step forward. “It felt like—”

“At the airport when you were standing next to your girlfriend?” she asks, her voice barely audible.

It stops me in my tracks, the way she says it, not even angry but just sad, like a kid who’s just found out that Santa Claus isn’t real.

“Amy’s not my girlfriend,” I say quickly. “She’s just some girl, we see each other now and again, but it’s nothing.”

“Does Amy think that?” Imogen asks. “Or would Amy get her heart broken if she knew you kissed me?”

She turns, starts walking. It’s mid-afternoon, the clouds coming and going, light slicing through the trees sometimes, the whole forest going dim sometimes. I’ve got the urge to catch up to Imogen, tell her that Amy’s doesn’t matter to me, but that’s a losing argument and I know it.

“That’s because Coach Jackson’s a fucking dick,” Trevor says, shoving a chicken nugget into his mouth. “The hell does what you do off the field have to do with what you do on it? You can still fuckin’ run, can’t you?”

“Fuckin’ pre-calculus, man,” Jake sighs, poking at some sad, boiled vegetables on his plate with a plastic fork. “I’m never gonna need that shit ever, you know? And Coach is letting it fuck up my whole future and he doesn’t even care. It’s bullshit.”

The fork clatters to his tray and he leans back in his chair, looking around us at the Solaris High School cafeteria. It’s a Friday, the day after my biology test. Two days after I made out with Imogen.

It’s game day, so we’re all wearing our football jerseys and the cheerleaders are parading around the school in groups of two and three, hair in high, curly ponytails and tiny, tiny skirts on.

Trevor watches a group of them go by. Next to him, his girlfriend Nina glares holes through his head.

“Or, like, with English,” Melissa says, sitting next to me. She takes a long drink from a can of diet coke, her half-eaten sandwich in front of her. “I already speak it, why do I have to be able to diagram sentences? Literally no one will ever ask me to that again in my entire life.”

“Literally no one,” Trevor says, his eyes still on cheerleader butts, mimicking Melissa.

She pulls a small, adorable frown, her eyes flicking to me because he’s making fun of her again. Subtly.

Melissa probably doesn’t know the word subtly.

“I’m just saying,” she scoffs. “It’s all just useless stuff. We’re never going to use it, we have calculators and dictionaries and shit, why can’t everyone just chill about this dumb stuff?”

“Why indeed,” Trevor intones, very seriously, looking back at our group.

Melissa pouts. Even though I don’t think she quite understands why Trevor’s making fun of her, she knows he is and that’s enough to piss her off.

“He should definitely let you play,” I say to Jake, trying to change the subject. “If you failed the last test and got a D on this one, that’s improvement, right? Improvement should be rewarded.”

“You did get the D, right?” Trevor asks.

“Fuck you, man,” Jake says, throwing a french fry as Trevor laughs.

“It’s your favorite letter. Guys, Jake got the D!”

I can’t stop myself from laughing, even though I know it’s impossibly stupid.

But Melissa doesn’t. Her face is still in her pouty frown, and when we finally stop, she pulls on the sleeve of my jersey.

“That weird girl is, like, staring at you,” she says, nodding her head toward the cafeteria food line.

My stomach drops.

That weird girl.

Yeah, it’s Imogen.

She’s standing there with her cafeteria tray, back to the wall, shoulders a little hunched like she’s a bird about to take off. When she sees me looking at her she glances at Melissa, then looks away, takes two steps, stops, backs up one step, looks around, shifts her weight on her hips, shoves her glasses up her face, turns to face the other direction.

Looks back at me, an impossible question in her eyes, looks away like she doesn’t know where to look or who to look at. Her face is slowly going bright red, a deeper shade every time she glances over and sees Melissa and I looking at her.

I feel like there’s a fist closed around my windpipe, just watching her flutter awkwardly like this. Melissa sort of shrugs, flips her red ponytail, and looks up at me through thick lashes as she sips her diet coke.

“Is that the girl who’s tutoring you in biology?” she asks, sounding almost bored.

“Yeah,” I say, glancing over one more time. “Imogen.”

“What a weird name,” Melissa says, looking back at her again.

Imogen’s frozen there like she’s trying to fold into herself. She’s wearing a black shirt, black skirt that falls to her knees, fishnets and cargo boots.

I wonder what her skin feels like through the fishnets, little diamonds of soft flesh crisscrossed by black mesh, and then I instantly hate myself for wondering.

“It’s from Shakespeare,” I tell Melissa, only half paying attention to her. “Imogen’s a character in one of the plays no one ever reads.”

“How do you know that?” she asks, and I tear my gaze away from Imogen, look at Melissa again.

My girlfriend. In the cheerleader outfit, with the pouty lips and the skirt that barely covers the tops of her thighs. The one any red-blooded American male should be lusting after right now.

“She told me,” I say.

Melissa raises her eyebrows, and I shrug.

“Dunno, we were studying, and it came up somehow,” I say. “Why, babe, you jealous?”

I grin at her, knowing that it works. Knowing it always works, and it does, because Melissa rolls her eyes and scoffs.

“Of course not, silly,” she says, putting her Diet Coke down on the table and playfully grabbing the front of my jersey. “Why, have I got something to be jealous of?”

She sounds like she’s in a bad teen TV drama as she pulls me in, kisses me long and hard but chastely on the lips. Melissa tastes like marshmallows, like candy, and when she finally pulls back my lips are sticky with her gloss.

I slide an arm around her, glance over her head again. There’s a flash of black disappearing around a corner, and then Imogen’s gone.

Somehow, I feel even worse, even as I squeeze Melissa against my side, lower my face for another sticky candy kiss.

“How could I look elsewhere when I’ve got you?” I ask her, our lips touching.

There’s nothing there, just flesh against flesh, pressed together for the correct length of time to make it a kiss. Not like the conference table, on the biology handouts, lips and tongues and hands and fingers, panting for breath, wanting and needing blindly.

Pressing Imogen against the wall before she left, getting just one final taste. Feeling completely helpless against the weird girl.

“Hey!” a teacher’s voice shouts, and I disengage from Melissa to see Mr. Pike in full bulldog mode, charging over. “There is absolutely no PDA during school hours, you two!”

Melissa giggles, hiding her mouth with one hand.

“Sorry,” I say, and Mr. Pike huffs.

“Next time, it’s detention for both of you,” he warns, shaking his finger at us.