Kissing in America by Margo Rabb Read Free Book Online

lay buried, like an underground spring.
    Little things he said in passing encouraged it.
    We should hang out at the Strand over the summer.
    I’m supposed to write an essay for college freshman English in August. You’ll have to help me. No one else will tell me the truth about how much I suck.
    We exchanged phone numbers, though he never used mine. (I’d texted him once when he missed tutoring:
    Hope you’re ok—are you coming today?
    but he never wrote back.) He didn’t find small things important: returning texts, charging his phone, being on time, punctuation.
    I brought him a brochure of summer classes that the Poetry Society was offering for free to high school students—I planned to take a three-week one starting in late June. He signed up also.
    The end of school wasn’t the end but the beginning. Gia would be gone and things would start over. Start new. Annie still said that after Gia left for the summer, I should tell him the truth about how I felt about him, but I knew I could never go through with it. Loving someone seemed like offering your soul on a plate— Here you go! You can have me! —and they could so easily say, No, none for me. No thanks . If my dad hadn’t died, if my insides weren’t filled with quivering Jell-O, maybe I could handle the rejection. But his death had scrubbed off a layer of my skin. It made me feel scared that at any moment the world might throw something else at me that I couldn’t take.
    I loved romances because when you opened the first page, you knew the story would end well. Your heart wouldn’t bebroken. I loved that security, that guaranteed love. Sure, a minor, usually unlikable character might drop dead from typhus or consumption or starve to death in the brig, but bad things were only temporary in those books. By the end, the hero and heroine would be ecstatically in love, enormously happy.
    In real life, you never knew the ending. I hated that.
    I knew if I told Will how I felt about him and he said no thanks I’d have a stomach bug day that I’d never get out of. It would become a whole stomach bug life.

I measure every grief
    I ’d taken Will’s advice: I wrote a poem, the first poem I’d written since my dad died, and submitted it to the contest.
    (It wasn’t exactly “writing”—I’d scrawled it really fast on the back of a Fresh Direct receipt while I stood at the kitchen counter at midnight. It was the night after Will asked, “Are you afraid?” I’m not afraid , I told myself. Then I ate an entire package of Chips Ahoy.) I hadn’t written anything else since.
    It didn’t win the contest, but in June I found out that it received an honorable mention.
    â€œThey’re printing it in a book and giving me a certificate,” I told my mom. “At this festival held at our school. It’s called Urbanwords. It’s next Friday.”
    We were sitting at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning, eating breakfast. We lived in an old brick building with peeling green paint and cracked mirrors in the lobby, and hallways that smelled like overcooked cabbage and Mr. Clean. Out the kitchen window, the pink neon sign of Mega Donuts blinked on and off, though the “n” was broken. Mega Douts. Mega doubts , I always thought.
    I had Cowboys on Fire (book 8: Cousin Bryce ) propped in front of my fried eggs and potatoes. The New York Times lay in front of my mom’s spinach omelet.
    My dad used to be the cook in our family—pastas, roast chicken, and eggs were his specialties, and I was his assistant. Now I was the cook. My mom had never asked me to (for a long time, we’d order takeout when she came home from work, and scarfed down cold cereal for breakfast every morning), but I liked cooking. I liked going to the store and stuffing the fridge and cupboards full of fresh bread and cheese, eggs, ripe peaches, berries, cantaloupe, and other