Chapter 1: The Kiss CHAPTER 1 THE KISS
WORD ALWAYS TRAVELS FAST AT Oread Heights High.

But this latest nugget of gossip probably shattered the sound barrier. Or at least a school record.

“MillieMillieMillie,” Hannah squeals from behind me, bouncing up and down in her Vans, giant water bottle sloshing in the side pocket of her backpack, out of breath like she’s sprinted down the hall. I eye her upside down from where I’m bent over, trading a massive geometry textbook for an equally massive biology textbook. We really need to switch to ebooks. “You’ll never guess what just happened!”

“I won’t have to guess, because you’re about to tell me.”

“True,” my best friend agrees as I zip everything up and straighten. I sling the backpack onto my shoulder, and agile Hannah artfully dodges to the side to avoid both the swinging bag and a likely concussion. “I’m about to combust. Are you ready?! Please tell me you’re ready!”

I elbow my locker shut and lift a brow. “Does it matter if I am?”

“Not in the slightest,” Hannah confirms, bright brown eyes dancing. She clamps a hand onto my wrist and points us down the hall. Logan Lockhart, a boy from my study hall, grins at me while coming from the opposite direction, and I manage a quick wave as Hannah yanks us into motion. “Walk with me.”

I laugh. “We have the same biology class in four minutes and lunch after that. Walking with you is literally what I do every day at this time.”

“Stop snarking and start listening.”

Shoulder to shoulder, or as close as five-foot-nothing Hannah Silverman-Perez can manage on tiptoes next to me—because even though I’m only fourteen, I’m taller than nearly every female teacher at the school—the gossip flows like a fire hose.

“Cassidy Briggs and Aiden Thompson were just caught making out in the janitor’s closet by the gym!”

I scrunch my nose. “The one with the extra basketballs and the pommel horse with suspiciously leathery skin?”

“No! That’s the supply closet.” Hannah violently waves a hand in front of us, knocking both of us off-balance enough to drill her shoulder into one of the Spring Fling fliers taped to the brick wall. She bounces off like it’s nothing, today’s pink cotton dress fluttering prettily. “The janitor’s closet is next to that. Anyway, do not focus on the closet, focus on the actions in the closet and the people involved. The head cheerleader of the freshman squad and the captain of the Mathletics team who is not her boyfriend were caught kissing.”

“Okay—”

“I know! It’s hard to believe, but there’s a video! Check it.”

Hannah whips out her phone and shoves it under my nose before I can ask her not to. And yes, that really is Cassidy, in full cheerleading gear, caught with geeky Aiden among teetering jugs of bleach and a few knocked-over brooms in the janitor’s closet.

“They’re not kissing,” I point out. Sure, they’re in the closet, but they aren’t actually touching in any way. They could’ve been in there conspiring to cheat on a math test or something nefarious but nonphysical. There could be several reasons they’re being marched to the principal’s office by the PE teacher.

Hannah snorts. “They obviously were. Look how disheveled they are.” Okay, they are disheveled. Cassidy’s ponytail is usually effortlessly perfect, but she’s got random pieces dangling from her bow, and her mouth is very pink. Meanwhile Aiden looks like he wants to melt into the industrial-grade school tile as he straightens his rumpled hoodie. “It’s not hard to fill in the blanks, even without independent verification from two people who were there in the hallway—which I have.”

She scrolls up, and yes, two texters on her thread confirm they were there when the door opened and saw Aiden and Cassidy in the act before they sprang apart.

Secondhand mortification turns my stomach in knots. The way Oread Heights chews through gossip, this will be everywhere soon. I just want to make sure Hannah isn’t the one hitting the button. “Please tell me you’re not going to send that video to anyone?”

“Did I send it to you? No.” She scoffs. “I waited to tell you in person.”

That’s when I notice the time stamp. “Waited? This happened barely a minute ago.”

“I know!” Hannah exclaims. “That video landed in my texts before they’d even finished their walk of shame to the principal’s office.” She thrusts both hands in the air, phone gripped tightly, triumphant. “The yearbook spy network is vast and undefeated!”

“Does that earn you some sort of award or…?”

Hannah rolls her eyes. “And now you’re one of the first to know, BFF o’ mine.”

I’m not convinced that’s a good thing. “Thank you?”

“You’re welcome. This is groundbreaking ninth-grade information,” Hannah agrees, dead serious. “Not everyone has immediate, real-time access to the most important stories this school has to offer.”

But by the time I arrive at study hall two periods and a lunch with Hannah later, not only has every single member of the freshman class heard about the kiss in the janitor’s closet, a few lightning-fast rumors have already outpaced reality.

“I heard,” Owen King whispers to our corner of study hall the second Ms. Walker slips out to refill her SWIFTEA coffee mug, “that Cooper hid an AirTag in Cassidy’s cheerleading bow and tracked her to the closet.”

“That’s complete bull,” Madison Mendez scoffs with a pop of her off-limits gum. She’s not a cheerleader, but she is on the dance squad, and so I guess it does figure that she knows more about the structural integrity of ponytails and decorative bows than Owen.

“How do you know?” Owen shoots back.

Next to him, Logan just shakes his head with a grin that actually isn’t all that different from the one he shot me in the hallway earlier. He’s Owen’s BFF and backs him in all things—including spreading rumors, apparently. Okay, Logan’s not spreading the rumor, but he isn’t stopping Owen’s nonsense either.

This is the fourth version of the story I’ve heard against my will since Hannah’s gossip ambush. Two others also involve Cooper Tsai, Cassidy’s boyfriend (ex-boyfriend?), while the final one inexplicably includes a cameo from Thelma, the ageless lunch lady who’s reportedly worked the Oread Heights cafeteria since the school’s founding fifty years ago.

For personal, Mom-shaped reasons, I hate both lying and liars to the point that Hannah has been known to call me Honest Ashford and suggest that I dress as “Honest Abe” Lincoln for Halloween. I can’t just listen as the tale spins further away from the actual truth, so I do my best to ignore the three other people at my table.

I start typing in the same quote from Lord of the Flies that I’ve been trying to transcribe for the past two minutes as Madison begins counting on her perfectly manicured fingers. “Cooper’s not in the video, for one—”

“Because he’s out of frame,” Owen argues. “Dude is just stunned that his girlfriend would suck face with the king of nerds.”

“Please don’t call it ‘sucking face.’ That’s just crass.” Though I’m trying really hard to keep my eyes on my school-assigned laptop, it’s hard to miss the blur of Madison’s hands flying up to cover her face in disgust in my peripheral vision.

This only seems to encourage Owen, who laughs and mashes his fists together in an obvious impression of what was going on in that closet. “Crass, but you know it’s accurate. Word is that it was Aiden’s first kiss, and even if that’s wrong, I guarantee that guy had no idea what he was doing—I’ll bet that mouth has more suction than a vacuum cleaner.”

From the next table over, Hudson Fisch bursts into a guffaw. “Like you’ve ever cleaned anything in your life, Owen! I’ve seen your room, bro. There are undiscovered organisms flourishing under the piles of clothes.”

Motivated by a number of giggles from his own table, Hudson continues in a solid impression of a David Attenborough nature documentary voice, “The natural world is indeed wondrous, but few places on earth compare to Owen King’s bedroom when it comes to the sheer number of newly discovered species—”

“Huddy”—Logan cuts off Hudson with a good-natured shove—“I was there when you didn’t shower for a week at eighth-grade Boy Scout camp. Don’t come at Owen about bacteria.”

“Ugh, stop it with the bacteria,” Madison sighs, waving a hand. “Kayla just sent me a clip shot from a different angle.” Suddenly all three boys are both quiet and leaning in, Hudson totally out of his assigned seat to peer over her shoulder as she hits play at full volume. “See? Cooper isn’t there.” Madison stabs her screen. “This is taken from the other end of the hall—”

They devolve into further arguing over a shadow in the frame. Like, don’t we all have a paper due Monday in English? How is one supposed to explore the themes of Lord of the Flies with this mess going on? Not to mention, literally everything beyond the video—including this newest one—is speculation, even if the kiss was witnessed before the phones came out.

I’m over it.

“Guys, it’s just a kiss.”

I say it to the table, and I don’t actually expect anyone to respond, because they’re clearly as obsessed as Hannah and her yearbook buddies, but then Logan looks me right in the eye and announces, “It’s not just a kiss—it’s a scandal.”

“A scandal?” I scoff. Because seriously, not him, too. “How so, Lockhart?”

Logan grins. Like he’s thrilled I challenged him. “The quarterback losing his cheerleader girlfriend to the king of the nerds? Scandal.”

I squint at Logan. I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic, not with his expression. I smirk. “Cooper’s not the quarterback—he’s third string. He just stood on the sidelines in his jersey, chewing gum, watching us lose.” As a tuba player in the marching band, I’ve spent a lot of time watching the school’s dreadful football team, so I know my stuff.

“Ouch, Ashford. Kick the guy while he’s down.”

“It’s the truth.” I shrug, Honest Ashford to a T. “As is the fact that you guys are wasting stupid amounts of energy on a kiss that you didn’t take part in.”

I hope my logic will make them think twice before pouring on additional conjecture. Instead, it seems to make them think harder to justify their obsession.

“Yeah, okay,” Madison admits, even as I pointedly return my attention to my paper, “but that kiss and the fact that they got caught was a total message.”

A message? Seriously? Where can I get this level of dissection and apply it to this English paper?

Owen and Hudson start back up with Madison, deciphering whatever message Cassidy and Aiden are trying to send to Cooper and everyone else in ninth grade. But Logan is still mostly facing me, dark eyes lost in thought, as one of his long legs jangles up and down. At first I think perhaps I’ve convinced him to use his brainpower on actual schoolwork, but it turns out he’s just figuring out another angle to defend his argument.

“I mean, let’s look at it this way—you’ve kissed someone, right?”

The question is a lead-in to whatever else Logan’s planning to say next, something for me to just nod along to. Unfortunately for me, two things happen at once.

One: I don’t nod, because I haven’t kissed someone. And I hate that anyone would think it’s their business. I mean, poor Aiden, isn’t this already bad enough without that speculation?

Two: the second the question is out of Logan’s mouth, the rest of the conversation hits the brakes too. The entire table is suddenly, terribly, overwhelmingly silent.

When I lift my eyes from my computer screen, Logan isn’t the only one staring at me—Owen, Madison, and Hudson are too.

A smirk rises on Owen’s face. Madison’s eyes are wide. Hudson mouths, Well?

Logan blinks. “Millie, I—”

“You seriously haven’t kissed anyone?” Owen asks, a laugh in his tone, matching the quirk of his lips. “Did you just admit that?”

I didn’t admit it, because technically I had no reaction at all.

But this distinction doesn’t matter.

Now the weight of attention comes at me from every single angle, the classroom dead quiet. Waiting. I’ve always been proud of my height, but in this very moment I really wish I weren’t so visible. That I could disappear into my seat.

My survival instincts kick in, overriding every other impulse.

“Yes, I have!”

It comes out as a reflex. Even if it’s a lie.

And though I always tell the truth, the words just keep flowing—lie after lie.

“I didn’t hear you.” I gesture toward the keyboard. An excuse. Then, to the whole group: “I mean, obviously. Yes, I’ve kissed someone.”

Owen arches a brow. “Oh really? Who?”

“Look,” I say coolly, even though my heart is beginning to race. “I’m not subjecting my boyfriend to your Google searches for the next hour.” My boyfriend? Where did that even come from? Apparently, under duress, my mouth operates independent of my brain.

Leaning forward, Owen brandishes his phone like a challenge. “Would it take an hour because the links are never-ending or because he doesn’t exist?”

“You’re impossible.”

“You’re lying.”

“I am not!”

Now my own voice is loud. Panicking, I plow ahead, feverishly hoping I’m digging myself out of this mess instead of deeper in. Good old Honest Ashford is nowhere in sight.

“He’s a junior at Rockfort,” I improvise, name-dropping the fancy private school two towns over from Mount Oread. “You wouldn’t know him. It’s too bad you don’t, because he’s super great. Actually, he came with me to Winter Formal, so you guys probably saw him then.”

Logan’s brows touch. “I didn’t see you at Winter Formal.”

That’s because I didn’t go.

Instead of piling on another lie, I whip my hair over my shoulder like it’s a closing curtain. For a moment the room is silent—so silent I’m terrified everyone can hear my pounding heartbeat—but then Owen sits back, seeming to check his reflection in his phone screen, all nonchalant.

“Well, if you’re so serious and he’s so great,” Owen says, “you’ll have to introduce him to your study buddies at the Spring Fling.”

Though Owen does very little actual studying during sixth period, he gestures between himself, Logan, Madison, and Hudson. Logan is kind enough to glance down at his notebook, but the other three stare at me, waiting. I open my mouth. Close it. Then, because I don’t want anyone to put words into my mouth again, I squeak out, “Maybe.”

Owen squints at me. “What’s his name again—”

“Aw come on, guys!” His words die at the exclamation from Ms. Walker, hugging her steaming coffee cup at the classroom threshold. “This is study hall, not social hour. Owen, whatever you have to say to Millie can wait. Hudson, in your seat now. Back to work, let’s go.”

Ms. Walker sets down her mug and claps her hands, watching everyone shift into serious study mode. Hudson scurries away, Logan straightens in his chair, Owen slips his phone into his pocket, and Madison cracks open her copy of Lord of the Flies.

Absolutely mortified, I face my blinking cursor with flaming cheeks and a sinking feeling in my gut.

What on earth have I just done?