“Close your eyes.”

His voice is gruff and thick and different. This time, I surrender.

I know what’s about to happen, and I’m letting it happen anyway.

My first kiss.

I always thought it would happen with a football player or a pop star or a European exchange student. Someone outside of the small borders of my sheltered, Instagram-filtered world. Not with a kid who has a hole in his shirt. But I need this. Need to feel desired and pretty and wanted.

His lips flutter over mine, and it tickles, so I snort. I can feel his warm breath skating across my lips, his baseball cap grazing my forehead and the way his mouth slides against mine, lips locking with uncertainty. I forget to breathe for a second, my hands on his shoulders, but then something inside me begs me to dart my tongue out and really taste him. We’re sucking air from each other’s mouths. We’re doing it all wrong. My lips open for him. His open, too. My heart is pounding so hard I can feel the blood whooshing in my veins when he says, “Not yet. I’ll take that, too, but not yet.”

A groan escapes my lips.

“What would you have asked of me if I took the sea glass?”

“To save me all your firsts,” he whispers somewhere between my ear and mouth as his body brushes away from mine.

I don’t want to open my eyes and let the moment end. But he makes the choice for both of us. The warmth of his body leaves mine as he takes a step back.

I still don’t have the guts to open my mouth and ask for his name.

Ten, fifteen, twenty seconds pass.

My eyelids flutter open on their own accord as my body begins to sway.

He’s gone.

Disoriented, I lean against the trash can, fiddling with the strap of my mother’s bag. Five seconds pass before Mom loops her arm around mine out of nowhere and leads me to the Range Rover. My legs fly across the pavement. My head twists back.

Blue shirt? Ball cap? Petal lips? Did I imagine the whole thing?

“There you are. Thanks for the coffee. What, no iced tea lemonade today?”

After I fail to answer, we climb into her vehicle and buckle up. Mom sifts through her Prada bag resting on the center console.

“Huh. I swear I took four letters from the mailbox today, not three.”

And that’s when it hits me—she doesn’t know. Via got in, and she has no idea the letter came today. Then this guy tore it apart because it upset me…

Kismet. Kiss-met. Fate.

Dad decided two years ago that he was tired of hearing all three girls in the household moaning, “Oh, my God,” so now we have to replace the word God with the word Marx, after Karl Marx, a dude who was apparently into atheism or whatever. I feel like God or Marx—someone—sent this boy to help me. If he were even real. Maybe I made him up in my head to come to terms with what I did.

I open a compact mirror and apply some lip gloss, my heart racing.

“You’re always distracted, Mom. If you dropped a letter, you’d have seen it.”

Mom pouts, then nods. In the minute it takes her to start the engine, I realize two things:

One—she was expecting this letter like her next breath.

Two—she is devastated.

“Before I forget, Lovebug, I bought you the diary you wanted.” Mom produces a thick black-cased leather notebook from her Prada bag and hands it to me. I noticed it before, but I never assume things are for me anymore. She’s always distracted, buying Via all types of gifts.

As we ride in silence, I have an epiphany.

This is where I’ll write my sins.

This is where I’ll bury my tragedies.

I snap the mirror shut and tuck my hands into the pockets of my white hoodie, where I find something small and hard. I take it out and stare at it, amazed.

The orange sea glass.

He gave me the sea glass even though I never accepted it.

Save me all your firsts.

I close my eyes and let a fat tear roll down my cheek.

He was real.

Question: Who gives their most precious belonging to a girl they don’t know?

Answer: This motherfucker right here. Print me an “I’m with stupid” shirt with an arrow pointing straight to my dick.

Could’ve sold the damn thing and topped off Via’s cell phone credit. Now that ship’s sailed. I can spot it in the distance, sinking quickly.

The worst part is that I knew nothing would come out of it. At fourteen, I’ve only kissed two girls. They both had enormous tongues and too much saliva. This girl looked like her tongue would be small, so I couldn’t pass up trying.

But the minute my lips touched hers, I just couldn’t do it. She looked kind of manic. Sad. Clingy? I don’t fucking know. Maybe I just didn’t have the balls. Maybe watching her three times a week from afar paralyzed me.

Hey, how do you turn off your own mind? It needs to shut up. Now.

My friend Kannon passes me the joint on my front porch. That’s the one perk of having your mom live with her drug-dealing boyfriend. Free pot. And since food is scarce these days, I’ll take whatever is on the table.

A bunch of wannabe gangsters in red bandanas cross our side of the street with their pit bulls and a boom box playing angry Spanish rap. The dogs bark, yanking on their chains. Kannon barks right back at them. He’s so high his head might hit a fucking plane. I take a hit, then hand Camilo the joint.