Kiss Me Again by Rachel Vail

none of his business and had nothing to do with him. So there was no reason to tell him.
    “You want to come in?” he asked at his door. “We could, you know …”
    I raised my eyebrows.
    “Read Hamlet together. What were you thinking of?”
    I laughed. He does make me laugh.
    “Because, if you had other ideas … ?”
    I shoved him into his room but stayed in the hall and said, “Rain check.”
    “Yeah?”
    “No,” I said, and walked away, toward my room, feeling him watching me.
    Behind me, Kevin groaned like he was in delicious pain.
    I closed my door but not totally.
    There was no way I could settle down enough to read about Hamlet’s scheming stepfather and how awkward it was for Hamlet to deal with a blended family. Uh, no.
    I put in my new earbuds to block out the world and listen to some show tunes while doing math, but that felt really crappy. I did love those earbuds—which were such a thoughtful gift, and maybe I had made a huge, inexplicable, unfixable error by dumping George—but now I kind of had no moral right to use them. Also, it is very hard to focus on equations with Next to Normal blasting in your ears.
    Is everything about weird family dynamics?
    I took out the earbuds, hid them under my pillow, and opened my science notebook to today’s page. It was blank other than “Science Fair Project Proposal” and my name. Nothing else appeared magically under it, so I gave up on that and texted Tess:
    today at lunch I was happier than I have been
    since the night I wrecked everything
    or maybe even before that
    Over the next half hour of not coming up with any decent science fair ideas, I checked my phone about eighty times. Nothing. I decided to hate myself for texting her such unsubtle, needy, clingy crap and then checked Facebook, in case she was on and wanted to chat. Nope. She was still listed as one of Felicity’s many sisters, and Felicity as one of hers. I had no siblings. Urgh. I signed out and closed my computer. Then I opened it again and shut it off. Better. I closed it, tucked it into my bag, buckled it up, and shoved the whole thing under my bed. I wanted to make it impossible to casually stalk Tess’s page or request that she be my sister, too.
    Why was she not texting me back?
    I finished my math and moved on to force myself through the Hamlet reading. I was annotating Why would Ophelia put up with that crap from him, even if he is a prince when I almost fell off my bed. I thought it might be an earthquake, but no, it was my phone buzzing.
    The text from Tess, which I read until I had it memorized and then a few times more, seemed more poetic to me than anything ol’ Willy Shakes had written in the book in my other hand:
    ok good.
    hey, i love you okay?
    and i forgive you and stuff
    obviously
    and dont feel bad
    if you still do
    okay … thats probs it
    xoxo
    I waited until I had finished doing the Hamlet reading before I allowed myself to text back:
    Thanks, Tess. U r the besssssttttt.
    She texted back a winking face, and so we went back and forth making faces out of numbers and signs for a while in between finishing our homework, and parsing what George had said and whether I had handled breaking up with him well. She said I just had to move on, because if you aren’t in love with a boy, you shouldn’t string him along.
    I guess u r right , I texted her.
    She wrote back immediately, I am always right u no that.
    I went with emoticons for a response. Because what else could I say? I was just feeling bad. Especially because I had the earbuds in again, so I could listen to music while we texted some more, until Tess wrote that her mom was doing her nightly prowl to make sure she and her sisters were off their phones, so she had to flop down and fake sleep.
    I said I would do the same, in solidarity, even though she and I both knew that my mother didn’t do a nightly prowl.
    I was surprised when my phone buzzed again, but when I saw the text was from Kevin, I was even more