Kiss Crush Collide by Christina Meredith Page A

“Hey,” he says, his eyes softening, sparkling even in the dark car, “you chased me down. Remember?”
    “Oh, right,” I say, and I dive in, losing myself again in the warm pulse at the base of his neck. I did.

    My parents are secreted away in our cozy family room when I finally arrive home, late and looking downright manhandled. A sneak peek in the mirror by our front door reveals that my hair is loose and wild, tumbling over my shoulders. My lips are raw and bare. I am not even wearing a shirt over my suit.
    My mother is curled up in the corner of the sofa, her small feet tucked under my dad’s splayed legs. His head is back, and a light snore rumbles from his slack mouth as a movie plays on the large screen across the room, the sound turned down low and quiet.
    “Shane couldn’t come in?” my mother asks without looking up. The harsh light from the TV flickers across her face, actually making her look her age for once.
    “Nope,” I say from the arched doorway, bare feet on the cool tile, pausing long enough for her to turn and look at me, and wondering, when she doesn’t, what else I could have gotten up to that she wouldn’t notice.
    I head for the stairs, feeling a bit robbed, as if I had put in all these years of fending off Shane for nothing since she couldn’t even be bothered to notice when I managed to stray. I never really understood why everyone, Yorke especially, was so into boys and always sneaking away in the night and making out. I get it now.
    Pulling myself up the polished staircase railing toward my room, I make a vow never to wear this red suit again, at least not as underwear, even though I am certain that tonight my virtue was saved by its impenetrable skintight Lycra.
    Who knows what could have happened without it? I shiver to think. I could have been seriously plundered, taken to places Shane has never even thought of. Long live the maillot, as Freddie would say, but I feel a little let down and a little bit trapped by the typical end to this rare Saturday night, so I vow, safe and sound inside my own house, never again to mistake a bathing suit for an undergarment. That, and I will always wear lip gloss. I can guarantee, the lip gloss my mother will notice.
    There are voices coming from Freddie’s room. I assume it is Freddie and her French friend Gérard, rolling through some late-night French phrasing. But no, the intonation is off, and there is a lot more mumbling and whispering than you would expect from a language lesson.
    Yorke is lying on Freddie’s bed. She’s wearing a tiny U of W T-shirt and striped underwear, combing through her hair with her fingers, inspecting any split end she comes across under the dim glow of the shawl-covered lamp at the head of the bed.
    Freddie is there, too, facing the other direction, flat on her back with a thick paperback resting on her stomach.
    Stopping in the dark hall, just outside the pink pall cast by Freddie’s lamp, I wonder what happened tonight to lead them here, head to toe and toe to head, all sisterly and snuggly.
    At the old lake house, in the blue-wallpapered room they shared, the best games and tea parties and secret ceremonies always seemed to take place on the round braided rug. Without me. I remember them walking off hand in hand in matching ankle socks to summer camp, while I stayed at home in my ankle socks with my mother, consoled by a new doll that had a tiny backpack full of miniature camping supplies.
    Or later, their golden hair long and loose, when they both moved past braids and barrettes and into high school, leaving me alone and adrift in the pimply world of eighth grade. My dad always says that girls work better in threes. I think three always leaves one left out.
    Freddie looks over at me. Yorke notices Freddie and stops talking mid-sentence. Yorke gives me a cool look, as if I had stumbled onto something private and secret. I instantly feel about six years old.
    Freddie rolls over onto her side and flips up on