How to Make Out

by Brianna Shrum

  After I gather myself, I walk off back to math, just in time to answer one more question and duck out with April.

  “So,” she says. “You, uh, okay?”

  “Fine. Why?”

  “You were being all distracted and bizarre,” she says, linking arms with me.

  “Yeah, it’s just … mom stuff. Okay?”

  April nods. She knows not to push me when it comes to certain things, this being one of them. We head outside to her brother’s car. He’s parked out front, windows down, blasting something from ten years ago.

  Seth spots me from across the parking lot and raises his hand in a wave, and I smile and half wave back before I duck into the back seat of Keith’s car. April raises an eyebrow at me, but I just say, “It’s nothing,” before we drive off.

  “So. How was numbers, punk?” Keith asks with a bright smile. The sun is doing nice things to his white-blond hair. Moments like this, I’m often struck by the sharp difference between them. Keith is this tall, tan, clean-cut All American, where April’s hair changes color every couple weeks, and she’s tiny and pale and has more than one piercing in her face.

  “Fine,” says April. “Hey. Buy us some beer before we get home.”

  Keith laughs. “Right.”

  “Come on.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I need on my record right now. Providing liquor to underage ladies. Can’t do it. Not even for you,” he says, shooting a glance back at me and winking.

  I giggle and he grins. He’s a fake flirt. Cute, but nothing more than April’s older brother. And a pseudo-adoptive one to me. April heaves a sigh of long-suffering and I lean back in the seat. Keith does stop by a drive-through and gets us a couple malts to make up for it, though, which works fine for me. Beer tastes like crap anyway.

  “Hey,” he says to me when we pull up to their house and hop out of the car, “that dude you were waving to in the parking lot. He a Levine?”

  “Yeah,” I say. April side-eyes me. “Why?”

  “No reason. Just thought I recognized him.”

  I frown. “How?”

  “Oh. I just … I liked to hang out with his sister back in the day, from time to time.” A wicked grin lights up his bright blue eyes.

  April hits him with her backpack. “Gross, Keith!”

  He holds his hands out in surrender and backs up, laughing. “No, it wasn’t like that. Their family is super religious. We just made out a few times. No harm, no foul.”

  April rolls her eyes grandly and walks ahead of him, and I shrug, then follow her. He’s still laughing when we go in. April pretends to still be disgusted, but then we all plop down on the couch together, and Keith tosses us both PlayStation controllers. We hang out and play Call of Duty for a while before I have to go home.

  I don’t check my phone while I’m there. Or my blog. I just chill and wonder if maybe, someday, Keith won’t be the only one to have gotten to first base with a Levine.

  6. How to Get Your Flirt On

  It takes me a few days, but after several tragically maimed Pharaoh-esque makeup attempts, my cat eye efforts come to fruition. I actually look pretty put together this morning, more so than usual: hair in curls that are just this side of perfect, eyes that are actually highlighted by the bold makeup attempt. This may be the first time since early freshman year that I haven’t shown up to school in a thrown-together ponytail and ChapStick.

  I meet Drew outside my house, and he whistles when he sees me.

  “It’s almost a shame for us to run to school when you look like that.”

  I grin. “I’m not gonna lie to you. I look really sexy today.”

  “You’ll get no arguments from me there.” He flicks a glance from the top of my head down to my feet and back up again. “Yeah, we’re taking my car.”

  Normally, I would protest. But for some reason, the idea of keeping this sudden hotness intact is appealing. So I go to his little car with him. I slide inside, head almost hitting the ceiling. It’s clean in here, but with the distinct feeling of “old.” Peeling silver paint on the outside, a ratty stick shift between the seats. The kind of car that keeps your adrenaline pumping the whole time you ride because you’re not entirely sure the brakes won’t give out. He could afford to trade up, but he doesn’t. I’ve never figured out why.

  “Checked your blog stats lately?” he asks as the car chokes and shudders to life. He jerks it into gear and we roll into the street.

  “Not since last week.”

  “They’re way up today.”

  My eyes widen in slight surprise, then narrow. “Is it because you’ve visited five hundred times in the last two days?”

  He laughs and shifts and the car picks up speed. “No. I mean, I check up on it. Mostly to get some fabulous hair and makeup tips. But check them out. That little view tracker at the bottom of the page is going nuts. This whole thing might actually work.”

  I lean back and smile, pictures of the Empire State Building and Broadway flashing through my head. Screw Mom. New York will be amazing enough without her. When we get to school, I hop out of the car before he does, toss him a wave, and head off to calc with April. She links arms with me and chatters about my sexy makeup and New York, which is pretty unsurprising. And then she shoots a look back at Drew.

  “Are you guys hooking up yet?” she asks.

  “April,” I say, rolling my eyes. She laughs and drags me through the doors and down the hall. We’re in class way early, mostly because I rode to school.

  “Hey Renley,” says Mr. Sanchez. “Hear about the New York trip yet?”

  “Of course.”

  “It should be pretty dope. Happenin’. All the cool kids are going.”

  I laugh out loud. Mr. Sanchez is the math club coach and pretty much everyone’s favorite teacher ever. (Except the kids in remedial math, who hate anyone associated with numbers. But he never really had a chance there.)

  “You gonna come?” he asks, pulling up a chair and sitting in it backward, facing April’s and my desks.

  I glance over at April, whose beaming face is giving away the answer. “Planning on it,” I say.

  “Awesome. I didn’t think you’d send April here out into the concrete jungle by herself.”

  “It’s the sacrifice a good friend has to make,” April chirps, tossing her jet black bangs out of her face and grinning.

  “Right,” Sanchez says, raising an eyebrow. He gets up out of his chair and heads back to his desk, rustling his papers and getting into the “professional teacher position” before the rest of the kids show up.

  April fiddles with her lip ring, twisting it around and around, and my teeth grind against each other as I watch her. Metal on teeth. Shudder.

  “So,” she says, leaning over onto my desk, “I had a date last night.”

  “You did?” I lean in closer to her. “With who?”

  “Cash.”

  “And?”

  “Movie was weird. So we made out through the whole thing. It went well.”

  “Was he good?”

  She leans back in her chair and smiles. “Oh yeah.”

  Cash walks in seconds after. He’s the stereotypical math geek: thick, square glasses, unkempt hair, smart. But, I have to admit, kind of charming. (And apparently a deceptively good kisser.) He steals a glance at April and turns back around, sitting in his chair, obviously trying to hide the spark. April and I laugh behind our hands at one another. If guys had any idea what girls knew about each other …

  Calc today is stuff April and I could both do in our sleep. So I switch my calculator to keyboard mode.

  Is Cash going to NY?

  I slide it over onto her desk. Sly. Most kids only know that if you type in 8008 on a calculator, it spells BOOB. But if you have a fancier one, and you switch to keyboard mode, you can pass notes forever. If a teacher figures it out, you can delete the whole conversation in one keystroke. Most useful thing either of us ever learned in math.

  She raises an eyebrow at the messag
e, purses her lips.

  Who cares? It’s forever from now. We’re barely an item even.

  Fair enough.

  I wanna go see Phantom, she writes.

  Or Hamilton!

  Or ooh, a sexy show. Strippers! Man thongs!

  I laugh obnoxiously loud in the middle of Sanchez’s lecture and he frowns at me. I erase the calculator. Now seems to be the appropriate time—snort-laughter, strippers, and man-thongs all considered.

  The rest of calc drags on. After, April prances off to her next class, and I have a free period. Why I chose a free period right before lunch instead of after is beyond me, but at least I know the error of my ways now.

  I slide down the wall in the empty hallway and turn on my cell phone. I enter the school’s Wi-Fi password (one they don’t really give out, but that I’ve tortured out of Mr. Sanchez. Mathematical torture.) and log in to my blog. Drew was right. The thing has skyrocketed in views since I started blogging about makeup and hair and other crap I don’t know anything about.

  So, I do the thing that will make or break New York, and, in turn, make or break April’s heart: I monetize. After a few minutes, and a post introducing my brilliant scheme, I link it up to PayPal and wait for the questions to fly in.

  By lunchtime, one already has. “How to Flirt.”

  I figure I should give myself a decent amount of time to master this one, so I attempt nothing over the next couple days. “How to Flirt.” It’s not something I’ve ever given conscious thought to. And, unfortunately, it’s not something I can really enlist Drew’s help for. I could show up to his house with unbrushed hair and teeth and last night’s mismatched pajamas and he’d still be willing to jump me.

  No. This is something I have to inflict on someone … potentially more embarrassing. So I walk into cooking with my head held high. The information various Internet sites have given me is all floating around in the back of my mind, and I’m sincerely hoping none of it has been written by some old bald guy who’s bored of WoW and has resorted to trolling teens.

  “Hey,” Seth says when I take my place next to him. Damn, he’s hot. I sometimes wonder if he is actually part vampire.

  “Hey.” Step One. Make eye contact. For how long? Thirty seconds? Is that too long? Oh my gosh. Stop. Bat your eyelashes. Look away.

  “You okay?” he says, raising his eyebrows.

  “Uh, yeah. Just got something in my eye. I think maybe I’m allergic to this class or something.”

  He laughs. That’s a good sign, right?

  I head over to the refrigerator to get the pizza dough we made yesterday, and I get Seth’s also while I’m there. I drop it on the table in front of him. He’s already floured my table for me, which is nice. Ever since a few days ago, with the whole batter-switch/calc-tutoring and then the post-bathroom-weeping incident, we’ve had this (minimal, I’ll admit) alliance.

  He unwraps both dough balls while I bend over and reach into the drawer below our station to retrieve a couple rolling pins. And this is where I attempt Flirting Tactic #2: Using Your Assets. I bend over slowly, ’cause these jeans emphasize everything, and then shove my butt out just a little.

  Yeah. This is totally working.

  Then my butt collides with his legs, and he grunts and two giant lumps of something plop onto my back and then the floor. The dough. I snap upright and whirl around. There’s a monstrous smash as my forehead meets his jaw. Blinding pain. BLINDING.

  He stumbles backward, rubbing his chin, and I just stand there, clutching my head, beet red, slowly dying.

  “Hey, sorry, I, uh, I didn’t mean to touch your, um, I’m not like a perv or anything,” he says, avoiding my eyes.

  He thinks this is his fault? Normally, I would say something self-deprecating and take the blame (which really is totally mine). But in this case, well, it’s Seth. And it’s for science. (Science, a blog, same thing.) So I just shrug and say, “Oh no, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

  He scrapes his teeth over his lip and turns back toward the front of the classroom, raising his hand. “Um, Mr. Cole? I dropped our dough. Do you have any extras?”

  Mr. Cole makes a disgusted noise and side-eyes me. “You dropped them, Mr. Levine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Perhaps I need to move you farther from Ms. Eisler. It seems she’s leeching your powers from you.”

  I laugh awkwardly and roll both the pins under my hands. Mr. Cole points toward the refrigerator and shakes his head. “Third shelf from the top. I’ll have to remove several points from your grade for this, Mr. Levine. Ms. Eisler, yours will remain unchanged.”

  I can feel the temperature in the room rising, and the beet in my cheeks deepens to crimson. Stupid assets.

  Seth slinks over to the fridge and opens the door, then retrieves the balls of dough. He heads back to our table and waits for a second. “Planning on bending over or anything anytime soon?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Then the dough should be safe here.” He drops a lump on my table and one on his, then grins at me. I smile back.

  Seth unwraps the ball of dough and grabs his rolling pin, then sprinkles the top of the dough with flour. This is something I most definitely would not have done, but I do it anyway, because if Seth does it, it’s a safe bet.

  Then he starts rolling. I never would have thought that rolling pizza dough could be sexy, but I would have been wrong. His back and shoulders flex as he pushes the pin across the soft ball, flattening and shaping it, and for a minute, I’m so entranced by those muscles I forget to do anything at all to my food.

  And then I decide that this is it. Time for Flirting Tactic #3: A Lady’s Wit and Charm.

  “You know,” I say, leaning over to his side of the table and twirling my hair for good measure, “with all the rolling you’re doing there you might as well be …” Oh no. I have no idea how to finish this sentence. Don’t EVER start a sentence you don’t know how to finish. “Might as well … dough … roll …”

  He stops rolling and looks at me, waiting. And … nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  “I’m, uh. I’m sorry. I think I’ve just suffered a small stroke.”

  “Okay,” he says, and he goes back to rolling. At that point, I discover that despite my learning, I’ve been rolling this entire time, and my dough looks like an uneven doughnut. I poke at it for a minute, but nothing I do does anything at all. So I groan and slam my head on my table. Seth jumps.

  “You okay?” he asks, setting down his pin beside what I’m sure is the most exquisite pizza crust ever.

  “I don’t know,” I mumble into the flour-coated steel.

  “Here,” he says. “Let’s start this thing over.”

  I stand up straight, wiping what flour I can from my face, and re-form the pizza-doughnut back into a lump.

  “You want to roll like this,” he says, gently pushing the rolling pin into the center of the dough, rocking back and forth.

  I do the same, or what I think is the same, and within five seconds, the dough is ripping and tearing everywhere.

  “Okay, you’re close. But it needs to be more like this.” And because I’ve obviously slipped into a parallel universe, Seth reaches in front of me, grabbing my wrists. And then he starts pushing and pulling, forcing my arms to move. He’s not behind me or anything; in fact, what he’s doing shouldn’t be a turn-on, shouldn’t be making me dizzy. It’s basically nothing but wrist contact. Somehow, though, I can barely focus on the dough. But I have to. I force myself to feel the pressure, the rhythm, everything. And Drew suddenly flashes in front of my face, chest at my back, wrists at my neck, fingers working at that tie. I cough and straighten into Seth, which is no better for my brain. Dammit, Eisler. Pay attention.

  I make an attempt.

  When Seth steps away, I’m several degrees hotter and my pulse is going crazy, but I’m rolling out a perfect pizza crust.

  He gives me a half-cocked grin and goes back to his dough.

  Hey, one flirting tacti
c I can successfully execute: The Damsel in Distress. But I’m not sure how I feel about that.

  7. How to Give Yourself a Bikini Wax (Or Die Trying)

  I rap twice on April’s front door, not because I have to, but because once, when I decided to take advantage of my “You don’t have to knock; you’re family” status, I walked in on April’s dad in his underwear. He’s not the kind of dad you want to see in his underwear. And who does that, anyway? Either way, I’ve knocked ever since. April has not questioned my decision.

  She yells what sounds like “Come in,” but could honestly be just about anything. Her front door is solid wood and not optimal for sound wave travel. I give it a couple seconds, lest I misheard, and open the door. I breathe a sigh of relief when I see her dad, fully clothed, sitting on the couch. He waves and smiles, and I wave back.

  “Renley? Sweetie?” her mom calls from the kitchen. She comes out in an apron, apricot heels, and red lipstick. I swear one day she was just beamed here from 1943. Which is basically adorable.

  “Hey,” I say back.

  “Do you want some cookies? They’re oatmeal raisin.” Of course they are. I’m surprised there’s no homemade apple pie cooling on the windowsill. (Maybe there is.)

  “I’m good, but thanks!” I say, bounding up the stairs to April’s room. The door is already open, so I just flit in and drop my bag onto her already-cluttered floor.

  “Don’t try the cookies,” she says. “They’re Satan. Oatmeal-raisin Satan cookies.”

  “That can’t be good.”

  “Mom is into this gluten-free living shit she found online somewhere. And like, coconut flour instead of sugar or something? I don’t know. What I do know is that they have come from hell to destroy us; do not give in.”

  I snort and she sits up, brushing her bangs out of her face. “So. We’re highlighting your hair. Bleach blonde?”

  “Yes.” I pull out a cheap thing of dye from the drugstore and toss it over to her. She inspects it, turning it over several times, like she’s a professional stylist.