First Kiss

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An imprint of Little Bee Books, Inc.

  251 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10010

  Text copyright © 2019 by Dan Richards

  Jacket illustration by Simini Blocker

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Yellow Jacket is a trademark of Little Bee Books, Inc., and associated colophon is a trademark of Little Bee Books, Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America LAK 0419

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-4998-0891-9

  yellowjacketreads.com

  To the Tighty Writeys—you know who you are.

  Thanks for everything!

  CONTENTS

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  Truth is, I don’t know much about girls. Not that I should. I’m only thirteen and I still keep a lightsaber tucked under my bed. Until recently, I was just a typical middle school kid without a care, or chin hair, in the world.

  But sometimes life throws the unexpected at you. Like when a new girl comes prancing into your school and turns everything upside down. A girl unlike any girl you’ve ever known, who makes your mouth go dry, your words jumble up, and your thoughts go all wacky every time you see her. A girl who convinces you to do things, strange things you would never in a million years have done before, like agreeing to see Unbounded Love, the story of a soldier who loses his legs in the war, and the nurse who helps him learn to walk—and love—again.

  “Don’t they make a perfect couple?” Becca asked, leaning close.

  I mean, I love going to the movies. But maybe I should have paid more attention to the title before agreeing to spend the first day of summer vacation trapped in a theater watching a war movie turn into a romantic pile of—

  “Yeah, perfect,” I lied.

  Ben leaned close on my other side. He wiggled his butt until a wet, squelchy sound shook my seat.

  “Here’s what I call—”

  He scooched again. Another squishy sound gurgled up.

  “—a perfect couple!”

  I should explain that Sequim, pronounced like “squid” but with an m at the end, is too small to have a real theater. Our only movie house is a converted Presbyterian church located next door to the library. The seats came from some famous turn-of-the-century theater that was being torn down in Seattle. They’re so old they still have real leather covers with real metal springs that make real intestinal noises—if you know how to slide around just right. Ben’s an expert.

  The two ladies seated in front of him turned with looks of disapproval. Kirsten punched his arm.

  “You’re disgusting,” she whispered with a giggle. She slid back in her seat until a curdled hiss seeped out from beneath her.

  Ben and I doubled over. Sometimes Kirsten was better at being Ben than Ben, especially when it came to intestinal noises.

  I sat back up just in time to catch the climactic moment of the movie. The two main characters were locked in an embrace, their lips pressed together in an act of undying love.

  Something primal stirred at the thought of Becca sitting only an armrest away. I glanced over. The curve of her lips perfectly matched the heroine’s lips on-screen. The zombie warlord in my chest immediately woke up and pounded out a message in Morse code on my ribs: R-U-N W-H-I-L-E Y-O-U S-T-I-L-L C-A-N.

  I agreed wholeheartedly. If only my feet were listening. As usual, they were sleeping peacefully at the end of each slumbering leg, blissfully unaware of the danger looming above. I reached for my kneecap to slap some sense into it, but instead my hand brushed against Becca’s. It froze there as if held by some magnetic force. Ben’s fist bumped my leg. I looked over to find him grinning.

  “You the man,” he whispered.

  Easy for him to say. Kirsten’s hand had been locked in his since the movie started. Seeing them that way made my stomach churn. Shouldn’t we be doing something more productive right now? Like finishing level thirty-three of Death Intruders 4? Personally, I’d rather face a ravenous army of the undead than sit here trying to stop my hand from fluctuating between arctic cold and Saharan sweaty.

  At last, the movie ended. Becca’s knuckles slipped away from mine as we got up to leave. I let out a breath. I’m not saying I didn’t like the electric charge of my hand being so close to hers. I’m just saying next time I needed more warning so I could steady my nerves or at least slather my hands with antiperspirant.

  We exited into the warm afternoon. My hand still tingled from where her skin had been in contact. Things were happening too fast. I needed to go home and think things over. Maybe if I could slow it all down I could make sense of how a guy could be lured to see a war movie and, instead, end up almost holding hands during a kissing scene.

  “Let’s go get ice cream,” Kirsten suggested.

  “Yeah,” Ben and Becca agreed.

  So much for thinking things over.

  It was a short walk to the ice cream parlor, just long enough for Ben to pull me aside.

  “Dude, you and Becca are getting serious.”

  “Shut up.”

  He bumped my shoulder. “No, for real. You know what comes next after holding hands?”

  Technically, we hadn’t held hands. And anyway, of course I knew what came next: a long period of staying as far apart as possible. Far enough to figure out what was going on and how to make it stop. That would probably mean moving. Maybe overseas.

  “Shut up.”

  Ben eyed me closely. “You don’t know, do you?”

  He seemed to be trying to make a point, but not one I wanted to hear. The short walk suddenly seemed impossibly long. At the rate we were going, he’d make sense before we got there.

  He leaned close. “You’re going to kiss,” he whispered.

  A bead of sweat ran down my forehead. In fact, I think my face literally melted and dribbled into the gutter.

  “Shut up!” I said for the third time. I was beginning to wonder if those were the only words I knew. Around Ben they seemed to be all I needed.

  “Seriously,” he continued. “That’s the way it works. You start going out, you hold hands, and then you kiss. I figure Kirsten and I got one or two weeks max before it’s going to happen.”

  Ben’s voice rose with the same excitement it always did when sharing a bit of news bound to make me retch. Usua
lly it involved something he had read in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, like the guy who had two heads that were always finishing each other’s sentences. But this was going too far. I could feel the words snaking inside my skull like a boa constrictor slowly squeezing my brain to death.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He gave his best conspiratorial grin. “You’ll see.”

  We followed the girls into the ice cream shop. The sweet smell was enough to temporarily distract me from Ben’s words.

  “I love bubble-gum ice cream,” Kirsten bubbled.

  “Ooh, with licorice gumdrops,” Ben bubbled, too.

  Becca stuck out her tongue. “Yuck. You like licorice gumdrops?”

  “He loves anything that makes others want to vomit,” I explained.

  Ben nodded eagerly. “I’m all about the puking.”

  Kirsten rolled her eyes like the expert eye roller she had become. “Don’t listen to him,” she said to Becca. “He’s just being Ben.”

  That girl seemed custom-made in heaven for that boy. Who else could ignore his puking jokes while licking bubble-gum ice cream? Not even I could pull that off, and I’d been best friends with him my whole life.

  We slumped down at a table in the corner. Kirsten stabbed at her bubble-gum ice cream with a spoon. Ben slurped rainbow sherbet out of a cone. Becca nibbled at the marshmallows in her scoop of rocky road. And I attempted to inhale a mountain of chocolate chocolate-chip in a single bite.

  “You must like chocolate,” Becca observed.

  “Yep,” I agreed. “Ben’s all about the puking, and I’m all about the chocolate.”

  “I’d rather be you,” Becca said.

  “Wouldn’t everyone?” I agreed.

  Ben took a massive slurp of sherbet. “Boring.”

  “True,” I had to agree. “If puking’s your thing.”

  Kirsten turned to Becca. “Isn’t boy talk fun?”

  Ben leaned across the table, a dribble of sherbet running down his chin. “Is it the puke talk? We can talk about something else, like embalming fluids. I once read that the Egyptians kept a dead pharaoh’s fluids in a coffee mug so he could drink them for breakfast when he got to the afterlife.”

  “Pretty sure you’re making that up,” Becca said. She licked a chocolaty drip before it escaped from the bottom of her cone. “But I learned at my old school that they used to embalm the pharaoh’s organs and store them in clay jars next to the sarcophagus, and sometimes even put them back in the pharaoh’s body before wrapping it.”

  Ben’s jaw dropped, which unfortunately revealed a large glob of sherbet still in his mouth. “No way,” he sputtered. “That’s so cool. I have to look that up.”

  Kirsten pushed her bowl away and leaned back. “I hope our grades don’t come in the mail today. I got an A-minus in both history and math.”

  “No, not two A-minuses,” Ben said, slapping his hands to his cheeks in horror. “I’m with stupid,” he quipped, motioning his head in her direction.

  Kirsten and Becca froze. Neither spoke for what seemed like minutes. The social temperature dropped from warm banter to ice-cold awkwardness.

  Abruptly, Kirsten got up. “I gotta get home.”

  “Me too,” Becca whispered. She tried to give me a parting smile, but her mouth seemed permanently locked in an O shape.

  The door to the shop banged shut, and Ben and I were left sitting alone.

  “Want anything else?” the teenage girl behind the counter asked, oblivious to the sudden chill in the room.

  Ben stared at the door like a lost puppy. “What happened? I was just kidding.”

  My mind whirled, trying to replay the last few moments. The mood had changed from teasing to sinister in seconds. Something had gone horribly wrong, but I couldn’t quite put a finger on what. Did Kirsten really care that much about her grades? “I don’t know.” And I was pretty sure neither of us was going to figure it out.

  I arrived home to find my mother waiting for me in the kitchen. Her face was all scrunched up like a whole sandwich that’s been squeezed into a single sandwich bag.

  “Stu,” she began. “There’s something I need to tell you—”

  “Grandma fell and is going to die,” my little brother, Tommy, announced as he ran into the room holding a toy plane in one hand while wielding a plastic sword in the other.

  “Wh-what?” I stammered.

  My mother directed him back into the living room. “I didn’t say she was going to die. I said you are going to be the death of me if you don’t get your shoes on.” She turned back to me. “Your grandmother fell this morning and broke her hip. Your father’s already at the hospital. I’ve been waiting for you to get home so we can go meet him there.”

  It’s important to note my grandmother is not exactly my grandmother. She married my grandfather after his first wife died. That made her my dad’s stepmother and my step-grandmother. My grandfather passed away a couple years ago, so technically speaking, we’re not really related other than sharing the same last name. But since she gives me money every year for my birthday, I don’t quibble over the details. Oh, and she can do card tricks like a real magician, which pretty much makes her the coolest grandma ever.

  “Is she okay?”

  My mother jammed a couple bags of raisins and a box of animal crackers into her purse, then dragged my little brother, wearing only one shoe, out the door to the car.

  “Your father called a few minutes ago and said the doctors are discussing options with her right now.” She buckled my brother into his seat, then ran back inside and returned with his other shoe. “Put this on him while I drive,” she said, handing me the shoe.

  So much for riding shotgun. I climbed into the back seat and went to work. Trying to get a shoe on my little brother was like trying to shoe a wild horse. He kicked every time the sneaker came near his foot.

  “Stop kicking,” I commanded.

  That only enraged his My-Angry-Little-Pony act further.

  “I can do it myself!” Tommy yelled.

  “Then why don’t you?” I yelled back, tossing the shoe at him.

  I slouched against the window. First, I accidentally almost held hands with Becca, then Kirsten walked out on Ben, and now I find out my grandmother broke her hip. Pretty sure the day couldn’t get any weirder.

  The only hospital nearby is in Port Angeles, about fifteen miles away. That meant twenty minutes of watching my brother twist, pull, and impale himself with his own shoe. Apparently five is the age when a kid discovers that if you kick like a mule while putting on your sneaker, you get a black eye in return.

  “Ow!” my brother cried, grabbing at his eye.

  “What did you do to your brother?”

  My mother had a terrible habit of assuming things.

  “He kicked himself in the eye,” I said calmly.

  “Stu,” my mother baited me.

  “Seriously, he kicked himself in the eye.”

  She glanced back at Tommy in the rearview mirror. “Don’t kick yourself in the eye,” she scolded Tommy.

  “I don’t like it,” Tommy shouted. He threw his shoe into the front passenger seat.

  “Please help your brother,” my mother said, handing me back the shoe.

  And so round two of shoeing My-Angry-Little-Pony began. This time I got the upper hand by squeezing his leg between my arm and rib cage to hold it steady.

  “Ow!”

  “Just hold still for a moment.”

  “Ow!”

  Seriously? I was the one getting the chipotle kicked out of me.

  I finally managed to jam his foot into the shoe and tie the laces like the expert calf roper I had become. His shod leg dropped limp and sneakered, and I returned to my slouching spot against the window. Whoever decided children should wear shoes obviously didn’t have a little brother.

  A few minutes later, we passed a sign that read WELCOME TO PORT ANGELES. My father liked to say Sequim is a good place to die, but
Port Angeles is the best place to get a job. The city was built next to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a waterway that runs between the US and Canada. It has a ferry that takes passengers across the strait to Victoria, British Columbia, and a port that ships lumber all the way to Asia. People retire in Port Angeles, too, but you almost don’t notice them unless you’re looking—unlike in Sequim, where it seems like everyone is one final breath from the afterlife.

  We turned off the main road and wound our way through streets of little houses before reaching a narrow parking lot with a view of the strait. The hospital stood on a bluff high above the water, much like the hospital Ben and I visited on level twenty-seven of Death Intruders 3, except the power had been cut to that hospital and zombies were roaming the halls. In comparison, this hospital looked pretty normal, like someone might actually want to be sick there.

  My mother hurried us inside and up an elevator to the third floor. A big desk area with nurses behind computers took up the middle part of the floor, surrounded by rows of patient rooms on either side. I tried to ignore the antiseptic smell, and the churning feeling in my stomach. Being around sick people made me feel, well … sick.

  All the more reason not to peek into the rooms as we passed, but I couldn’t help it. What I saw looked right out of Death Intruders. Pale, sickly people in hospital gowns lying in shiny metal beds hooked up to all sorts of computer monitors and bottles of dripping fluids. All that was missing were chain saws, flamethrowers, and a couple dozen zombies roaming about to make the horror complete.

  We reached room 318, and my mother ushered us inside. Behind a sliding curtain, my grandmother lay in bed, my father sitting next to her. I guess I expected her to look all pale and unconscious like the other patients we had passed, but instead, she seemed as fiery as ever.

  “No need for all the fuss,” she told my mother. “I’m doing fine.”

  “She needs surgery,” my father added. “They’re working out the details now, but it will probably be tomorrow morning.”

  “I don’t need surgery,” my grandmother said. “I’m fine.”

  My father patted her hand. “She’s on pain meds. Don’t believe anything she says.”

  My mother took her other hand. “We’re right here and will make sure the doctors take good care of you.”