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in a movie. It just sort of was —a long moment of moist facial proximity that smelled like spearmint gum—and then it was over. Instead of seeing stars or fireworks or whatever was supposed to happen, my truest feeling was gratitude. Walter had given me a small but important gift, opening the door just a crack to what it would someday be like to actually want to kiss someone and be kissed. I smiled and said, “Thanks, Walter.”
    He smiled back, showing naturally straight teeth, and said, “You’re welcome. So, uh . . . later,” and walked back to his friends like he’d conquered Mars single-handedly.
    I made a beeline for Gina and told her what had happened.
    Five minutes later, the room had broken into small groups of whispering kids.
    Ten minutes later, everyone at the party knew Walter had kissed me.
    The problem was that the information changed as it moved kid-to-kid, like that game at camp where a story travels around a bonfire and at the end it’s completely different from the beginning. Some crucial fact about the kiss had been altered in that whispering merry-go-round, because the next thing I knew, Mandi Fishbaum and her little gang of look-alikes—each a variation on the theme of perfect hair plus expensive clothes equals bad attitude—were marching toward me. Mandi was well known for having rich parents, a body that was a decade ahead of every other girl in seventh grade, and being the perennial girlfriend/ex-girlfriend of Walter J. Thurber. Although they’d broken up a month earlier, Mandi acted as if she owned not only Walter but the air he breathed and the ground he walked on, and woe to any girl who trespassed.
    She stopped in front of me with her look-alikes fanned out behind her.
    Mandi crossed her arms and spit a single word in my direction.
    “Slut.”
    The terrible word echoed around the basement until it hit me with stinging precision, igniting something low and chilly in my gut—I was furious but completely in control as a small blue flame flickered and leapt. It had been three years since I’d experienced the cool, sizzling internal phenomenon while doing sidewalk battle with Caterpillar Girl, and I’d nearly forgotten about it. But when it reappeared, I registered it as natural as breathing or fighting, while the idea of doing something violent to Mandi filled my brain and crept behind my eyes.
    As the blue fire roared in my belly, I realized how different it was than at age eight and ten. This time, it was as if I could command her to do absolutely anything through the power of my gaze.
    She must have seen it on my face, because her own face filled with fear—in fact, I felt like I could feel what she was feeling, which to her was terrible but to me was, well, pleasant. But then, just as quickly as that cold fury rose, it faded, and the only things my eyes projected were tears. When Mandi saw them, she smiled and turned away with her look-alikes in tow, mission accomplished. As a thousand needles pierced my heart and voices whispered around me, I felt a tap on my elbow. I wiped my eyes and looked down at a small boy—much shorter than me, and even skinnier. He had curly hair, metal braces as huge as a bear trap, and warm brown eyes behind a pair of glasses.
    “Ignore her. You can’t argue with knuckleheads,” he said, looking at me closely and smiling. “And Mandi and her friends are world-class knuckleheads.”
    That was the first time I met Max Kissberg.
    I wouldn’t see or talk to him again until high school.
    In fact, I didn’t talk to Max then, just nodded, trying not to cry any harder. I hadn’t done anything, certainly hadn’t made a move on Walter, and what made it worse was that I was the center of terrible, unwanted attention. I’d been encoded from birth never to make precisely the type of scene that I was starring in now, and the weight of the stares and glares crumpled my heart. By then the room was blurred by tears, so I rushed from the basement and ran all