Kiss Me Again by Rachel Vail

against each other, so anybody could see if they looked.
    As we rounded the corner coming up to school, Kevin held out his hand to me. In his palm was cradled a pear, the last one, ripe, from the fruit bowl. I took it, held it against my chest, and let it slip into my bag before we got off the bus. I didn’t say thank you out loud, but I could tell he heard it anyway.
    I passed Tess a note in bio that my mother had lost her mind or at least changed it because of her husband, so my sleepover was canceled. She didn’t write back, but she did wait for me, to walk through the hall together.
    “Hey, sorry I didn’t tell you I was trying for the job at Cuppa. I …”
    She shrugged. “Think you’ll get it?”
    “Yeah, I did, actually.”
    “You get a discount?”
    “Twenty percent off.”
    She looped her arm through mine. “That’ll help.”
    My face unclenched. I may even have taken a note in class.
    At lunch, all the girls gathered around me, commiserating as I told them about my mother’s horrible new flirtiness and mind-changing, and how Kevin’s father was almost always there , in my house, and how I can’t even ever leave the bathroom door open anymore.
    “Does Kevin walk around in a towel?” Felicity asked, leaning close, her hand on my arm.
    “Yes,” I whispered, and everybody shrieked.
    “He is such a slut,” Tess said. “I’m sorry, Charlie, I know you’re stuck with him in your house, which has to be the most horrid, awkward thing, but I just have no use for him anymore.”
    “I’d find a use for him in a towel,” Felicity whispered.
    As she said the word towel , Kevin appeared in front of us like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and we all shrieked again.
    At least he wasn’t in a towel. His feet in their scuffed sneakers were spread wide apart, his jeans a bit frayed at the back edges. His dusky, gray-blue T-shirt was untucked, and over it he wore an unbuttoned, blue-and-white-striped button-down. His arms hung lankly by his sides, with his crumpled-top lunch bag gripped loosely in his left hand. When I finally let my eyes wander up to his face, I saw, as I expected by then, that peculiarly Kevin-ish look of patient curiosity, his head tilted slightly to the side and forward, his soft, red lips almost curving into a smile but not quite, his right-cheek dimple hinting at indenting. But his eyes were not vague or hinting. They were unwaveringly staring right into mine.
    “Hi, Kevin,” I said, striving for normalcy but apparently missing, because all around me, the girls other than Tess were giggling and collapsing onto one another, gasping for air, repeating, Hi, Kevin! Hi, Kevin!
    Tess’s eyes were pinched nearly closed, looking back and forth between me and Kevin.
    “I got your lunch,” Kevin said.
    “You what?”
    “Cheese sandwich?”
    “Maybe it’s your cheese sandwich,” I mumbled.
    “Nope.”
    I grabbed my lunch bag, or what I’d thought was mine, and opened it. There was a huge, round mound wrapped in tinfoil instead of my normal flat sandwich.
    “Turkey and tomato?” Kevin asked.
    “I don’t know. It’s huge.”
    “That’s what she said,” Darlene whispered behind me.
    Kevin didn’t glance over at her, or at anybody but me. “I like it on a roll. You should try it.”
    Darlene and Paige were giggling behind their hands.
    “Ignore them, Kevin,” Felicity said, which shut them both up.
    I stood up to trade bags.
    He leaned toward me and let his fingers brush mine during the lunch bag exchange. “Did you eat the pear yet?”
    “About to,” I answered. “Thursday pear.”
    “Mmmm.” He walked away, back toward the boys.
    When I sat down, trying to look normal, Tess was glaring at me. “What the heck was that?”
    “I must have grabbed the wrong—what?”
    “Thursday pear?”
    “It’s a …” The words family joke strangled in my throat. “It’s a pear. It’s Thursday. What?”
    “You guys sound like you’re …”
    “What?”
    “Married,” Tess