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looking great and handsome. His hair was perfect. He smelled of aftershave and power. (If you could smell power. I mean, is that a thing?) He’d managed to turn a plain white button-up shirt and jeans into cutting-edge fashion.
    “Long time no see,” he said to me, as if it were an opening line people actually used. (Fail!)
    But his eyes were like these deep, brown pools of handsomeness.
    “I wasn’t expecting to see you here,” I said dorkishly. (Oh, come on !)
    “Well, you know. I’ve gotta spread myself around.” And he laughed. I laughed. We laughed. Hahaha.
    Anthony knew I had a thing for him. (I don’t know if he knew about my trailing him at school like Harriet the Spy.) But he knew about my thing for him. Ever since the seventh grade when I’d go over to his house to do homework with his sister Jessie. I fell in love with him then.
    He was: handsome, older, confident, in charge of things.
    I started going over to do homework with Jessie more often, hoping to accidentally run into him on purpose (which I’m a little ashamed to admit). Nothing ever happened between us though. Nothing until that moment in Chelsea’s family room.
    “You look really nice tonight,” he said.
    It must have been Becca’s shirt. Or maybe it was the shoes. (Nah.) Maybe it was the shady modeling school makeup tips and tricks I’d applied to my face and hair.
    “Thank you,” I said, since all the clever and witty things I usually have rolling around in my head had left me.
    “Why don’t you come over anymore?” he said, smiling playfully at me like he was the cat and I was the scared, little mouse. “I miss having you around.”
    You mean you noticed? You actually noticed?
    “Um, I don’t know.” (My lack of eloquence was appalling.)
    It was just the two of us and Ms. Pac-Man. And some guys in a little group off to the side of the room. His eyes penetrated my soul, and I think I might have stopped breathing when he took my hand. His was rough and warm. It was bigger than mine, and I hoped he didn’t notice that my hand was starting to get sweaty.
    “Do you want to go outside?” he asked.
    It was a simple request, but time warped again. One one-thousand, two one-thousand.
    I asked myself: Why does he want to go outside ? I answered myself: Oh, you know. One deep breath, trying to slowly exhale.
    “Outside?”
    “Yeah, let’s go out to the balcony. We can look at the view, get some fresh air. Shall we?”
    He was very smooth. So smooth that I couldn’t argue with the logic of his ridiculously sexy face. So we walked outside onto the balcony. It was cool out, and the lights from the Valley below were twinkly like stars. It was all pretty spectacular, the whole thing. I stood next to him near the heat lamp, and he held my hand. He turned, his dark hair falling into his eye, making him look even more handsome. He leaned in, and this is the part where I left my body for a few seconds.
    The kiss. It wasn’t the kiss of an amateur. This was a professional-grade kiss. I mean, compared to all the other kisses I’d had up to this point—all two of them—this kiss had heat and electricity. As we kissed, our life together flashed through my mind—our marriage, honeymoon, dark-haired babies. Whole years passed. I don’t know how else to describe the magic. I would have followed him anywhere—ironed his shirts, washed his car, done his homework. (Except for math.) My body tingled in an every-cell-encompassing-fantastically-incredible-time-warping few seconds.
    But then he had to go and ruin everything.
    The beautiful kiss turned into a grab-her-anywhere situation. His hands explored my body like I was the beach and he was a metal detector.
    Momentary shock, sudden weakness. Sensory overload. Confusion. Brain impulses in an uproar. I was going to pass out or fall over.
    I regained my senses, not being ready for sex. Being fourteen.
    What the heck, Anthony?
    Still, I let his hand rest on top of my blouse—on top of my