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The name almost didn’t even look familiar.Ava Jenson. They couldn’t meanme.
I blinked once, twice, but it didn’t change.
When I looked up, Maisie had already gathered her things and walked away from the table, leaving Alex, Rachel, and me all engrossed in our phones. In my chest, my heart pounded erratically, following a beat to a heavy metal song or something. My insides had the screaming part down. “I’m on the list,” I whispered, but my words boomed in my ears.
“You are?” Rachel squinted closer. She must not have gotten that far yet. “Oh. Wow, they gave youthatone?”
“What other one would they give me?”
“I mean, I can’t believe they put you on the list at all. You can post anything on your blog, and since the whole school can see it, you’d think they’d treat you like a queen.”
Like a queen.Ha. I’d started Brentwood Babble because I’d thought it would help me break into the Top Tier. They collected only the coolest kids at Brentwood High, the way one collects rocks, and though the clique mostly consisted of jocks, they weren’tallinto sports. When I’d started the blog my sophomore year, I’d thought I’d be part of the exception, and they’d welcome me in with open arms.
Nope. Instead of treating me like a queen with her cell phone shaped scepter, they treated me like I was the court jester.
The cafeteria started humming with voices, the gossipy whispers that hinted I’d have a busy night ahead of me wading through email submissions. I wondered which label captured the most attention this year,whothey were talking about the most. Usually, the relationship-centric ones got the most hype. Labels like Most Likely To: Fail A Classor Most Likely To:Get A Ticket weren’t sensational enough to linger on for long.
Most Likely To:Never Have Their First Kisswas a relationship one, which meant that everyone would be talking about it. Talking about me.
But why would they voteme? I smacked my lips together, but they didn’t feel chapped. My teeth weren’t perfect—my two front teeth were slightly bigger than average, an insecurity I’d long since gotten over. Well, for the most part. But they weren’t abnormally big. Not big enough to prevent someone from wanting to kiss me.
Right?
Rachel, sensing my tooth-related crisis, reached over and rubbed my arm. “It’s okay, Ava.”
No,okaywas being voted for something stupid, like Most Likely To:Break Their Wrist.Okaywas not being on the list at all. “What about me is unkissable?” I demanded, staring straight into her dark brown eyes.
“Apparently, your mouth,” Alex replied, and when I went to shoot him a glare, he was too busy engrossed in his phone.
“Ava. Seriously. They probably heard you haven’t had a kiss yet and put you down.”
Yeah, fine, it was true that I’d never had my first kiss. Not that opportunities hadn’t risen. I’d almost had it in the second grade when Cameron Gilson wrote me a note and told me to meet him at recess for a kiss behind the slide. Of course, I’d never gotten the chance to decide whether or not to go through with it. My mom found the note and called the school, who then had a teacher monitor follow both of us around for the next week. By then, Cameron had moved on to Riley Huntington.
Your first kiss is special, Ava, Mom had said then.You can’t waste it.
So, I took the advice to heart. Kept the first kiss protected like it was worth a million dollars. And now here I was, a first kiss-less senior, and the entire school knew it.
“They saidnever, Rachel,” I said, shaking my phone at her for emphasis. “Never isforever. I’llneverhave a kiss?”
She rolled her eyes at my dramatics. “Of course, you’ll have your first kiss. It’ll happen when it’s supposed to happen.”
That sounded like another way of sayingdon’t hold your breath.I pressed my fingertips to my frowning lips. I was the opposite of Maisie. This kind of stuff might not have hurt her feelings, but it absolutely decimated mine.
And her next words, though I was sure she meant them as comforting, only caused my skin to grow cold. “Stop worrying, Ava. You’ll have your first kiss, and it’ll be magical, and you’ll fall deeply in love. It’ll happen, trust.”
I stared at my best friend as she resumed trying to eat her pasta, horrifyingly afraid of her being right.
My phone started buzzing, the emails and comments and opinions already pouring into Brentwood Babble, so fast that I had to switch it on silent mode. Two years of constantly refreshing my inbox in hopes for the next juicy gossip thread, and here I was, purposefully putting my phone on silent. For the first time since the birth of Brentwood Babble, I couldn’t even bring myself to look.
Rachel’s bedroom was the definition of organized chaos.
The space looked like our favorite antique store, Timeless Treasures, threw up in it. Knickknacks littered every surface. An old stained-glass lamp sat on her desk, surrounded by little figurines that a grandma would collect. She even had a shelf in the corner of her room for creepy, probably possessed dolls.
And then her bedspread was bright blue with little daisies and rainbows on it. Darkness to sunshine. Balance.
But it wasn’t just the knickknacks taking up space. Her closet had exploded onto the floor in front of the double mirrored doors, and it looked like she’d attempted to sort things into piles, but got distracted halfway. Or bored.
When I looked up from my laptop, I could’ve sworn one of the piles moved. “Is there a mouse under there?”
