Kiss Me Again Read Online Free PDF

through dinner. Good. I was starving. I jumped up out of bed and started the dash toward the dining room, but then went back to my room to grab my phone. That unfamiliar number, I realized, was probably Anya from Cuppa. Yes.
    I texted back, YES .
    “Charlie!” Mom yelled again.
    “Coming!”
    “We were waiting for you,” my mother growled when I got there. She never used to growl at me.
    I decided not to look at her, either.
    It was possible if things continued this way, I would never make eye contact with another living person the rest of my life.
    Out of the blue, Joe chanted, “Too much noise! Too much noise!”
    Samantha joined in, and Kevin may have, too, quietly: “Too much noise! Too much noise!” I looked at each of them, despite my recent vow not to, ever, but I mean, what the heck was happening?
    My mother crinkled her nose and tilted her head, her code for Please explain.
    Her husband smiled gently at her, at Samantha, then back at Mom. “Old family joke,” he said, winking, and then asked Samantha, “Right?”
    Mom smiled like, Oh, okay , but I could tell she felt a little left out.
    “It’s hard to be a new family when the old family has jokes some of us don’t get,” Joe said. “Sorry.” He kissed my mother, on the lips. In front of us.
    It is hard to be a new family in so many ways, actually , I was thinking, and then I started wondering when I could slip upstairs and hide in my room, since obviously nobody was about to kiss me and make it better. Hahahaha. As if kissing me ever made anything better.
    “It’s from this time,” Joe started explaining, “when we were living in the city, and these people were marching past our building, protesting something, and we thought …”
    “No,” Sam corrected. “That was ‘We want pastries! Pitzapoddle now!’ ‘Too much noise’ is a different story. Remember?”
    “It doesn’t matter,” Kevin said.
    “No, I thought, wasn’t that the time—”
    “Dad,” Kevin interrupted. “Please.”
    “I embarrass him,” Joe said to my mother. “Goofy Dad Syndrome.”
    “Dad!” Kevin slammed his palm against the table, and we all jumped. “If you have to talk, at least SAY something. Don’t just spew randomly.”
    “Touché,” Joe said. “So, um, well. Your mother called again today.”
    “Why?” Samantha asked after a moment of heavy quiet.
    “She wanted to tell me that she bought the tickets for you guys to come out to Idaho to visit her over spring break.”
    They didn’t respond at all, just sat there. It was silent except for forks clicking on plates. The weird lack-of-talking lasted way longer than seemed at all normal, during which I had plenty of time to wonder what the hell was going on. Again. It was weirder than the Too Much Noise fiasco that had just passed.
    Then, for the Grand Finale (I hoped) of Suppertime Oddness, Joe started quizzing Kevin and Samantha on what they had learned at school that day.
    Seriously, my mother and I had passed entire meals, entire months without anything this peculiar going on. I tried to make eye contact with her to be like, Aren’t we in a strange bit here together, you and I? But she was staring pleasantly down at her plate.
    “We have to come up with science fair projects,” Kevin was volunteering. “Everybody in ninth grade.”
    Oh , I thought . Check. Okay. Thanks. I hadn’t posted my question on his wall, of course. But there he was, giving me the answer to my What was the science homework? question anyway.
    “Have you considered making a non-Newtonian fluid?” Joe asked me and Kevin.
    “It’s all I’ve been thinking about,” I answered.
    “Charlie,” Mom warned.
    “Me too,” Kevin said, watching Sam. She was holding a string bean between her pointer and thumb, observing it. Then she let go.
    “Sam,” Joe said. “Don’t.”
    She slid off her chair to retrieve the string bean.
    “Is that also called—goop?” my mother asked Joe.
    “Yes! Don’t tell me you made goop