Evidently everyone seems to be kissing now. No one made a big announcement of it. It was almost like a prolonged holiday I’d forgotten to observe or join. I mean really forgotten. Because no one had yet kissed me.
My friends talked in class about their kisses. The chapped lips. The smells of the boys. All while I nodded and played a Duran Duran song in my head.
I wondered secretly why no one had kissed me. They said it was because I was religious. But we were all Catholic! And my parents were no more devout than theirs.

I think they were lying to me. But why? I wasn’t ugly or fat. But it did bother me for some time, to be left out of this new experience. And then it finally happened. With a new boy who’d just moved from Killeen, who smelled funny and gave me chapped lips, I wasn’t really impressed. I just felt sad. I wondered who else had not been kissed. Who else was playing 80s songs on in their head, nodding, while the rest of us whispered? But I know that once I found those unkissed girls and looked into their eyes, I would give them the same spiel as that  the kissed girls had give me. I would be lying to them too.