The Girl Who Kissed a Lie by Skylar Dorset Page B

my date with Brody begins, but it doesn’t feel meaningful to me. “Yeah. Okay.”
    They walk off, holding hands. Andy says something to her, and Kelsey smiles again.
    I don’t even ask what the deal was with the cotton candy. Andy and Kelsey have all sorts of shared history from before I joined them at school. Brody shares it too. Brody probably knows all about the cotton-candy incident. Kelsey usually doesn’t let them talk about the past too much, which I know she does for my benefit, and I appreciate it. I wonder if I’m not as naturally comfortable with all of this as Kelsey is because she’s known these guys forever—and because I’m fighting with the only guy I’ve known forever.
    Brody says, “Want to take a walk out to the pier?”
    I can’t think of anything else for us to do. I don’t want to follow Kelsey and Andy; that would just be awkward.
    I shrug and follow him toward the pier. It stretches out from the little mini-forest grove of willow trees that gives the place its name, out into the cove. It’s a gorgeous summer day. Behind us little kids shriek on the crescent moon of beach, but the pier is quiet and relaxed, with only a few fishermen positioned along it. It should all be incredibly romantic, standing out on the pier, surrounded by blue water and blue sky. I feel keenly aware of how romantic it should be, which is terrifying.
    And then Brody grabs my hand, stilling me, pulling me back to him. I turn to face him and he smiles at me, and in that moment he is gorgeous . He is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. His eyes are beautiful and his hair is beautiful and his nose is beautiful and his smile is beautiful. His mouth is beautiful.
    “Selkie,” he says to me, still smiling, and my name is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard anyone say before.
    I blink at him, feeling dizzy and off-kilter, like my mind has gone all fuzzy around the edges. Somehow, I am closer to him than I was just a moment before, drifting toward him. His hands move up and catch my face, framing it, his thumbs brushing along the corners of my mouth.
    “Selkie,” he says again, his voice barely higher than a whisper, a murmur breathed out against my lips.
    I hear myself give a sharp little inhalation, trying to gather my wits, to feel a little less upside down and twisted all around, and then he kisses me, his lips brushing against mine, and when I gasp again, it’s into his mouth. He catches my gasp, pulls me closer, wraps his arms around me—
    And I feel a moment of sudden, claustrophobic, suffocating panic. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe . I push, wriggling, tearing my mouth away from his, trying to get air.
    “Selkie,” he says, his face still very close, still dazzling in its beauty, and I squeeze my eyes shut against it.
    And I can see Ben in my mind’s eye, clear as day. Ben, who is in many ways incredibly obnoxious, but it would have been much righter for Ben to be my first kiss.
    I open my eyes again, and that’s what I intend to tell Brody, that this was a mistake, that he is the wrong boy, except that when I open my eyes, it’s not Brody I see in front of me. It’s a terrible monster. It’s hideous. It has paper-white skin covered in warts that are so enormous that they themselves have warts. It has no nose; instead it has two huge, gaping nostrils that quiver as it breathes. It has eyes that are an unearthly swirl of black and crimson. It has pointed ears that reach up above its bald head, and there is hair sprouting out of those ears, the only hair on it. It has an open, snarling mouth, filled with gnashing teeth, and it is drooling some sort of disgusting neon-green drool. And it smells terrible, a stench that overwhelms me, rotten and sickly.
    I stare, and then I try to kick myself free. Whatever it is that is now holding me snarls and snaps at me, and I panic against its grip, which is too tight for me to do much. My hand happens to be near my pocket though, and in my pocket is a