“So when do you want to go make out with this guy?”

“You put it so crudely. I feel like a whore,” I said into my phone as I opened my locker Tuesday morning.

“Shit, if whoring is all it takes to get into this thing, then I’m all for it.” I laughed. Andrea was lying; I knew that for sure. She had always been kinda squeamish about doing anything sexual and I wasn’t even sure she’d make it through this.

“What time does Steve work?” I asked, shoving some books into my locker.

“One to six. Do you have ballet after school?”

My schedule ran through my head. I had reception desk at 4:00. “Yeah, but not till four. I can get Will to cover for me, anyways.”

“Good. Let’s go right after school then. I heard some girls talking about skipping tenth period to do it, so they can get him warmed up for us,” Andrea said gleefully.

“That’s gross,” I said, cringing. “How do we know this isn’t some old pervert who gets his fix when all these teenage girls come to make out with him?”

“Everyone says he’s hot as hell.”

“Hot as hell?”

“Like Heath Ledger hot, God rest his soul.”

“Amen,” I said, looking up at the filth-encrusted school ceiling, just because it felt like the right thing to do.

“And apparently he’s a great kisser too,” said Andrea. I could hear the squeal in her voice.

“Well, yeah, because he gets to practice on all of us. Andrea, I know I’m certainlyready to make out with a guy who’s hot as hell, but are you?”

“Make-out countdown will start commencing at fifteen hundred hours! Meet you at your locker. Over and out!” I counted in my head quickly to figure out that fifteen hundred hours was 3:00pm. Oh boy.

“Talking about me?”

I turned around to find myself looking at Joey Bateman, an overconfident grin on his face, leaning against a locker just a few away from mine. “Hardly,” I said with a humorless laugh.

“Well, you said ‘hot as hell’ and I thought ‘Hey, that’s me’ so…yeah,” he said, managing to keep a straight face through it all, though I could tell he was joking.

“You’re so full of yourself,” I said, trying to sound disapproving, or even angry, but it just came out with a smile.

Joey smiled and shrugged, as if it wasn’t his problem. “So what are you doing now?” he asked.

“I’m taking books out of my locker,” I said slowly as I did so.

He gave me a look. “Duh. I meant, what are you planning on doing? Going to class?”

“Probably,” I said, shutting my locker and zipping my backpack up.

“It’s 7:00.” I had gotten an early start that morning because Mom thought I had a dentist appointment at 6:45(which I didn’t) but I had been up anyways, and so I just went to school.

“And?”

“And you’re going to sit in an empty class with Ms. Barnschlop for twenty minutes?” He said it drawn-out and with a southern accent, which made it sound even worse than it already did.

“I’ve got homework I can work on. And Ms. B’s not so bad,” I protested. And she wasn’t, despite her choice of literary material that sent shivers down my back when she smiled.

“No,” he said, refusing to let me do it. “You can come with me.” He took my hand and started pulling me down the hallway.

“And do what?” I asked, getting slightly scared. Was he going to take me in a dark corner and ravish me?

Okay, Ms. B needs to stop reading paperback romance novels. They’re constantly putting ideas in my head.

“We’ll find something…”he said with a large grin, still gripping my hand.

He dragged me through hallways that I don’t think I’d ever passed through before(EMHS is kinda huge) and down a set of stairs, to what was probably the most secluded corner in the entire school(I saw a few spiders). There were no students down here whatsoever and some of the lights were off and others flickering with a low buzzing sound, creating a very eerie atmosphere.

“Joey, I don’t think- ”

“Shh!” He said, putting a finger to his lips to shush me. He walked along a dark wall, feeling for something. He found it, and pushed it downwards, letting a large metal door open with a huge sucking sound of the rush of air being let into it. He opened it wide enough to a person to fit through and slipped through it, pulling me after him.

It was a shop classroom. There were a number of wooden table, and saws, and complicated machinery that I didn’t understand all over the room. The floor was covered with a very light coating of what looked to be sawdust mixed with actual dust. Most of the machines looked like they hadn’t been used in a long time.

After we were both inside, he started to close the door.

“Joey, do we have to- ” I didn’t want him to close the door all the way, in case…gulp, I needed to run away.

“Shhh!” he said again. “Someone’ll hear you.”

I was about to protest that no one would hear us because no one was anywhere near us, but then he started fiddling with his pants, and my heart starting pounding.

This was it. I was going to be raped by Joey Bateman in a shop classroom.

Goodbye cruel world.

He suddenly pulled a key out of his pocket. “Bingo.”

I breathed an immense sigh of relief as he rushed over to a wall, inserted it into a keyhole, turned it to the side and…

A door slid open with a ding.

An elevator?

Joey motioned for me to go inside, so I did. He stepped in after me and pushed a button that I couldn’t see. It lit up, the door closed, and we suddenly were transported upwards.

“Do you do this a lot?” I asked him in a whisper.

“On occasion,” he said in a normal voice. It startled me so much that I flinched. He laughed at my jumpiness. “You can talk normally. We’re safe in here.”

“Good to know,” I said, taking off my backpack and setting it on the ground.

The door opened to reveal the roof of the school.

“Wow,” I said, stumbling out. The ground was covered completely with stones about as big as golf balls, but they were surprisingly easy to walk on. The sky was not extremely dark, but off in the west, I thought I saw a few stars glistening. The sun was just a glint of light coming up from the east, but nevertheless it was still beautiful.

I ran to the edge and looked down over three stories to the main entrance. Students were piling in now, albeit slowly, because after all, the beginning of a school is still just that: the beginning of a school day at 7:15 in the morning.

I ran around the building, probably wreaking havoc on my ballet flats, but I didn’t care. It was such a thrilling feeling, to be on top of it all. I never had had any fear of heights, and so I could go on the highest building or thrill ride and still have a blast.

“This is incredible!” I shouted over the rooftops, not caring if anyone down below heard me. “Wheee!” I shrieked, spinning around in a circle with my arms open wide, just like people always did in movies.

I heard laughter behind me, and I spun around to see Joey standing just outside the elevator, watching me with his rather toned arms(hey, I notice these things…) crossed, laughing.

“What?” I asked, as if there was nothing wrong with what I was doing. And there wasn’t.

“You’re like a small child,” he said with a smile. “Literally. A very graceful small child.”

“Well, I am a ballerina,” I said as I walked over to him, my fantasy done for the day. “I should hope I’m graceful.” I picked up my backpack and threw it over my shoulder.

“You are,” he said, following me into the elevator. We were silent for a moment as he pressed the button and we started moving down. “Is that why you’re so skinny?” he asked quietly, more serious now. “Because you’re a ballerina?”

I paused, not knowing what to say. He was the one who had originally teased me about this, and I didn’t know how I felt actually discussing it with him and not making a snide joke back, as I was accustomed to doing. “Yeah.” I said, softly.

We were silent the rest of the way back to math class.

LINE

“Alright people, new project today,” said Mrs. Grey that afternoon over the commotion of the English room. We had all grabbed out books when we came in, but as soon as the bell rang she announced that we wouldn’t need them.

We all groaned as soon as she said it. Mrs. Grey’s projects were always long and boring and mostly busywork. You had to look deep into the assignment to separate the parts you actually needed to do versus the parts that just might “be helpful”, as Mrs. Grey often put it.

She started handing out the dreaded projects sheets covered in confusing and misleading vocabulary to everyone in the class. “This is a project that culminates our studies over the poetry and prose of the Renaissance period. You and a partner will be assigned an author. It is your duty to research this author, learn about his or her life, the style of writing as well as the format he or she prefers, and take this information to write a ten page paper about how he or she has influenced our writing today.”

As soon as the class heard “ten page paper”, I literally saw a collective “slump” of everyone in the room.

“You will then set out to write a work in the same format and style as said author, only you will contemporize it. Feel free to interpret this as you will. You will be working in partners alphabetically, and-”

I didn’t need to hear any more. Alphabetical partners meant I was with Drew. I knew it. Mrs. Grey arranged us in seats due to our last names for the first few weeks of school so she could learn them. After that we were given free reign. Drew sat in front of me for the entire time and I couldn’t read a single thing Mrs. Grey wrote on the board because of him.

“The partners are: Lucy Baker and Drew Cook, Phillip Dougherty and Lainie-”

I looked across the room and connected eyes with Drew. He motioned for me to come over to his side of the room, pointing to a spot on a table where I could sit.

I just shook my head, refusing to move. I did the exact same motion, only pointing to Philip Dougherty’s desk, which had just been vacated. Drew sighed, glared at me, and reluctantly slugged his way over to the desk.

“I will be handing slips of paper to you with your author’s name on them. Do with them as you will,” called Mrs. Grey to the entire class. She walked over to my desk and handed me our slip of paper.

William Shakespeare

You’ve got to be kidding me.

I handed our slip to Drew, who looked at it and then smiled, his face brightening.

“Easiest project ever,” he said, sitting down at the desk with a thump.

“How so?” I asked unbelievingly, not really assured by his confidence. He is a football player, after all.

“Lucy, there’s an entire chapter on him written in our books,” he said, motioning to the textbooks that were lying on the table in an unorganized heap. “Piece of cake.”

I started looking closely at the fine print on the project sheet (I wondered if I was going to need a lawyer in order to complete this unscathed). “It says we need seven sources, two of them primary.”

“Primary sources?” said Drew, grabbing the sheet out of my hand. “The dude’s been dead for four hundred years. How are we supposed to get those?”

I shrugged, getting out of my seat to grab two English books and bring them back to the desks. “Let’s just start with this for now and we’ll work up to that later. She wouldn’t have given us an impossible project.”

“That has yet to be determined,” Drew muttered as he opened the textbook.

We read in silence for about twenty minutes, me taking notes on what the book said about Shakespeare’s style and him doing Shakespeare’s life. I was getting bored fast. Shakespeare had never really been my forte in English class: I preferred literature where I actually understood what the writer was talking about on my own, and I didn’t need someone to decipher it for me in class.

I heard a book slam shut and looked up to see that it was Drew.

“Drew-”

“I thought about what you said yesterday,” he said bluntly, cutting me off. “And you’re right. It is fake. And I’m not proud of that. Most of my friends are that way, and that’s how they’ll always be. But that’s not why I talked to you yesterday.”

“Why did you talk to me yesterday?” I asked him, frowning. It was all I could do not to look at his lips…the ones that had looked extremely kissable at my house.

“Guilty conscience,” he said, looking me in the eye to let me know he wasn’t scared.

“Elaborate,” I said, staring right back.

He broke the eye contact and looked down at his closed English book. I was free to lip-stare all I wanted. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to hear what he had to say.

“I felt like I was really rude to you at your house, which isn’t excusable even if Janet hadn’t broken up with me,” he said, and I must say I was shocked. Someone’s mother had taught him his manners, even if he didn’t always employ them at the right time.

“And the Monday after, when I blew you off in the hallway,” So he had noticed it. “I was just trying to get her out of my head, and you weren’t really helping with that, because I had talked about her with you on Friday.” He took a deep breath, as though that particular worry had not yet vanished. “So I’m sorry.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Drew Cook not only had excellent manners, but he knew how to apologize graciously and courteously.

Wow.

“I forgive you,” I said, and I meant it.

LINE

With each consecutive period, my heart pounded faster and faster. It hadn’t even existed in English, but in Music Theory and French, I felt like a bass drum in the marching band. Thump-Thump. Thump-Thump.

Then, all of a sudden, as soon as the end of the day bell rang, I was suddenly calm. It was an odd feeling, and as I walked down the halls, it almost felt as if I was in a dream. That subsided the moment I set eyes on Andrea in the parking lot.

Andrea and I both walked into Burger Bite literally trembling. I’m not kidding. After hours of anticipation, both of us were shaking with fear. Although it might just have been the chilly wind zipping past outside.

“You have the camera, right?” I asked her as we pushed the glass doors open. Burger Bite was in its lull, right after lunch and right before dinner, so there were only a few customers sitting at the checkered booths and tables.

Burger Bite is right next to the high school, making it a popular choice for a teenage hangout. I never spent much time there because burgers just aren’t that good for you and restaurants always have huge portions anyways. Nevertheless, after a football game or homecoming, it’s absolutely packed.

Andrea nodded and silently began taking it out of the case hanging from her shoulder. It was the pink video camera that she had gotten for her thirteenth birthday, and that we’d made many a movie with over the years.

It wasn’t hard to find Steve. There was a huge group of teenage girls surrounding him, all laughing for some reason that I couldn’t possibly fathom. They were off in a corner, far from the eyes of any possible Burger Bite customers, but yet still easy to find.

We couldn’t see Steve in action due to the tight line made by five girls around a single booth, but we could hear him.

I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

Andrea and I walked up and sat in a nearby booth, hoping to catch a glimpse of what we would have to do. The moment we sat down, the girl who was with Steve finished, and she left with two of her friends.

And then there were five.

This actually created a space for us to move in, and so I nodded to Andrea that we should go ahead and watch(that sounds so wrong)so that we didn’t end up looking like total fools. We did so, and that is when we got our first look at Steve.

Now, what I don’t understand, and I never have, is how so many good-looking people have ended up in Wisconsin. They all should move to California and leave the rest of us normal-looking people here to lead our boring, cornfield-infested Midwestern lives.

Which leads me to Steve, who in my humble opinion, has the looks of Drew Cook, Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Jared Padalecki, and Heath Ledger combined. Impossible, you say?

Oh, it’s possible.

I don’t think I can even begin to describe Sexy Steve(as I had mentally dubbed him), but I’ll try. He was tan as anything, which was displayed to perfection by the tight white t-shirt he had on over his torso, which was as shapely as a statue’s. His teeth were both white and straight, and his hair was brown and short, yet slightly longer in the front so that a few strands of hair fell sexily in front of his forehead.

Abercrombie model? Anyone?

A girl who I didn’t recognize went for the next slot, waving with a smile at her friend who was taping her with a video camera. Steve was sitting in a booth, but his legs were on the outside. The girl just went, sat down on his lap like she was sitting down on Santa and asking for a present, and went at it.

I’ve never been a huge fan of PDA. In the hallways, just a little bit is okay at a time, but more than that and forget it. It also helps if the couple is cute, and not some icky obnoxious goth pair who stick their tongues down each others throats even single time they see each other.

So for this, I sort of just wrinkled my nose and thought of Juilliard and how badly I wanted this. It’s not that Steve looked like a bad kisser; he looked amazing, in fact, but I didn’t know if I was ready to subject myself to such public embarrassment.

The girl made out with Steve for about ten seconds, and then he pulled away, flashed a smile and a wink at the camera, and said “Next.”

The only reason I could think of for him to have that attitude was that he must make out with multiple girls every day.

Stud.

“Hey Luce, can you tape this for me?” I heard someone say, and I turned to see Kate standing right next to me, video camera in hand. I nearly stepped back in surprise. She had been standing there the entire time and I hadn’t noticed her.

“Sure,” I stammered, and I cursed myself for agreeing. Now it was impossible to look away.

Kate walked over to Steve and straddled his knees, which took him by surprise. All the other girls had awkwardly sat sideways and turned, but Kate knew what she was doing. She took her hand and gently brought his chin closer to her as she stared into his eyes, leading his mouth to hers.

At first they were gentle with each other: short, quick kisses that sounded kind of weird. Then, as time progressed, the kisses became deeper, slower, longer. Steve pulled Kate closer to him and tangled his hands in her curly hair, and she did the same, without the tangling, because he didn’t have much hair to tangle.

I kept the camera steadily in place and took my head away from the eyepiece to see what Andrea’s reaction was. It turned out to be what I’d define as an intricate mixture of shock and awe.

All of a sudden, Kate stopped in the middle of a kiss, letting it linger and then slowly pulling away, dragging Steve’s lip with her. A small smile played on Steve’s lips as she did so, and it made me wonder whether they knew each other from somewhere before.

“Thanks, doll,” she said to me as she got off of Steve’s lap and walked towards the video camera. “Do you need me for this?” I looked over at Andrea, who was still in a rather catatonic state.

“Actually, that’d be great,” I said slowly, my heart pounding quickly with each second I thought about it. “Let’s just get this over with.” I really hoped Steve, since he had so many other perfect qualities, hadn’t perfected that thing that dogs have that senses fear.

I went over to Steve and did that straddling thing, which really just ended up being more awkward and uncomfortable. He just looked at me doubtfully, as if I could never measure up to Kate, the make-out genius.

Which I can’t.

“So, I’ve never done this before,” I said quietly so the camera couldn’t hear me. “Not really, anyway.”

Steve smirked. “I could tell,” he said, nodding.

Damn. Was it that obvious?

“Just relax and go with it.”

And before I knew it his lips were on mine and we were making out. (I’m such a junior-high girl at heart…) His mouth was warm and tasted like Dr. Pepper. I did my best to mimic what he was doing with his mouth and pretty soon we were in sync. I placed my hands around his neck and tried deepening my kisses, just as Kate had. He responded to that with a grunt and did the same.

And all of a sudden, it was over. We both were breathing hard, trying to catch our breaths. “Not bad,” he said, nodding at me. I smiled. What a compliment.

I suddenly realized that Kate was still taping and I scrambled off of Steve, embarrassed that all these people were watching. Another group of girls had come up behind Andrea and were all staring at me curiously, as if they had never realized that I could do something like that. I never realized I could so something like that.

Well, you learn something new every day.

Kate smiled and nodded her head as she closed the viewfinder and handed the camera to me.

Andrea just stared.

A/N: Your thoughts?