The International Kissing Club

by Ivy Adams

  Once again, Autumn patted her on the hand. “You’ll feel better now that you’ve expressed your grief.”

  “I guess,” Izzy muttered. What she really felt was adrift. She took a sip of the tea. The pungent brew felt like it was stripping the lining from her sinuses. Forcing herself to swallow it, she set the cup aside.

  But hashing out the relationship couldn’t be any harder than drinking the tea. So she started talking. “On paper, River and I looked like the perfect couple. I thought we were alike in every way.”

  Autumn nodded sympathetically. “I know, honey.”

  “And now he’s off in Lubbock.” She shot a sideways glance at Autumn, not sure how much she could say. “Have you seen his Facebook updates lately?” she asked tentatively.

  Autumn’s smile wavered and her head bobbed. “He is expressing his freedom uniquely.”

  “So you’ve seen his page. Why aren’t you freaking out about it?”

  Autumn sighed, but the placid nurturing never left her expression. “He has to find his own way.”

  Suddenly Autumn’s unending acceptance grated against Izzy’s nerves. “He’s betraying everything you raised him to believe,” she pointed out.

  “Honey, I know you’re having a really big experience of anger right now—”

  “I’m not having an experience of anger.” Izzy gritted her teeth. She hopped out of the chair and away from Autumn’s touch. “I’m frickin’ pissed.” Finally she settled on why Autumn’s attitude annoyed her. “And I don’t understand why you’re not pissed, too.”

  “Honey, did it ever occur to you that you and River were too much alike? Sometimes when people fit together too well, a relationship can become confining. Smothering.”

  Izzy’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re saying I smothered him?”

  Before Autumn could answer, another customer came over to buy a candle. Instead of waiting for her to come back, though, Izzy left the earrings beside the god-awful tea Autumn had tried to poison her with. Then she slipped out the back of the tent and made her way through the market.

  She realized now, she’d honestly thought Autumn would take her side. Which was stupid. Of course Autumn would stand by her son, even if he was going against everything the woman believed in. She wasn’t like Izzy’s parents.

  It sucked that Izzy didn’t have any adults in her life willing to defend her no matter what, but that was all the more reason for her to find her own inner strength. When she went off to college, she knew she wouldn’t reinvent herself completely. She didn’t love everything about herself, but she certainly liked the person she was enough to know that she wasn’t going to trade her in for a newer model the second she left Paris. She had too much self-respect for that.

  One thing was certain—regardless of what Autumn or River thought, she certainly hadn’t smothered him. She had more follow-through than that. If she’d smothered him, he’d be dead by now.

  Izzy spent a few more minutes wandering around the farmers’ market. Now that she wasn’t dating River, she wouldn’t be coming back anytime soon. She bought a smoothie to chase away the horrible taste of the ginger maté tea, then she wandered over to the gourmet candy booth, needing chocolate therapy. Her relationship with River was truly over. Though after the visit with Autumn, Izzy wasn’t even sure she felt sorry about it.

  She’d always thought of Autumn as such a kind, nurturing soul. Today, she’d been too laid-back. Too easygoing. Too … what was the word for it?

  Mei was right. Izzy needed to spend more time studying for the SAT. Her vocabulary was crap if she couldn’t think of the words to describe how annoying someone was.

  She was nibbling on a spicy mango truffle and contemplating whether she could inflict her mother’s cooking on innocent farmers’ market vegetables, when she heard someone calling her name. She looked up and scanned the thinning crowd.

  At first she didn’t recognize anyone. But just as she decided she must have imagined it, he called her name again, and she spotted him coming toward her. Tanner.

  “Um. Hi.” She popped the last bit of chocolate into her mouth and rubbed at her lips self-consciously with the back of her hand. Then she added, “If it isn’t Tanner Smith and Wesson.”

  “Hey, Isabel.” He grinned, stopping a few feet away. Tanner was usually pretty well dressed. He had that all-American clean-cut thing going for him. But today he was wearing a flannel shirt open over a dark blue T-shirt. His jeans were faded. His Dingo work boots scruffy and worn. Somehow she liked him better for looking less like he modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch. She smiled at the thought.

  Tanner’s grin slowly faded and he seemed to be studying her. Suddenly she was aware that she’d been crying her eyes out not too long ago, and she probably looked all red and blotchy. She didn’t particularly mind his seeing her red and blotchy—he was just Tanner, after all—but she hated anyone knowing she’d been crying over River.

  Turning back to the vegetable stall, she pulled her shopping bag from her purse and started mindlessly loading it up.

  Beside her, Tanner chuckled. “Wow, your family must really love acorn squash.”

  She glanced down at the bag. Acorn squash? Was that what these things were? “Yum,” she muttered. “We love the …” And then her mind went blank. The what? The … ? The … ? “Fiber,” she finished lamely.

  Note to self: There’s a fine line between not caring what someone thinks of you and purposefully making a fool of yourself. Let’s not cross it again.

  “You need any help with that?” he asked, looking like he was trying not to laugh.

  “Don’t be silly.” But then she could barely lift it. Okay, study SAT words and hit the gym. Before she could protest—or more logically, put some of them back—he’d hefted the bulging bag and carried it over to the clerk.

  Izzy fished out her wallet and paid the lady, carefully hiding her shock at how expensive eight acorn squash were. Now she really wished she had put them back. Her family was not worth emptying out her cash reserves. Plus, now she was stuck with Tanner walking the bag to her car.

  Even though he seemed to be at her house constantly, they never talked much. She found herself unsure what to say to him. “So … ,” she began awkwardly. As if anything could be more awkward than talking about dietary fiber. “What are you doing here?” Then she cringed. That sounded so accusatory. “I mean, you don’t seem like the farmers’-market type.”

  “My parents sell fruit here.”

  She laughed. “No really, what—” Then quickly realized he wasn’t joking. “Oh. Fruit, huh?”

  “Yeah. Sun Valley Orchards.” He pointed to a stall near the entrance.

  Izzy glanced at it. “They have great stuff!”

  “I know.”

  “I had no idea. I love that jam.”

  “The apple ginger, right?”

  “Yeah. Now that’s how ginger should be used.” Not in a tea strong enough to choke a horse. “I guess I should have stocked up. I doubt I’ll be back anytime soon.”

  “I guess not.” He looked over his shoulder toward the back of the market where Autumn was packing up her T-shirts. “River always was a pretentious douche.” Tanner’s voice was low and harsh as he said it.

  There was something in his tone that surprised her. It must have shown on her face, because when he looked over at her, he smiled again and shrugged. “I’m sorry. I know you dated him for a while. I’m sure he’s a great guy.”

  “No,” she said, suddenly feeling better than she had in weeks. “He is a douche.”

  When they’d reached her car, she opened the passenger side door so he could deposit the squash.

  “So what’s next for you, Isabel?” Tanner asked as he closed the door.

  She looked pointedly at the bag he’d carried. “I’m going to go home and eat a lot of squash.”

  He chuckled. “No, I meant for the semester. With Mei, Cassidy, and Piper out of town—”

  “And my idiot ex in Lubbock,” she added, j
ust because it felt so good to joke about it.

  Tanner let it slide. “You’re going to have to find something else to keep you busy.”

  “Well, since I’m bored and broke, I think I’m going to get a job. If I can knock my self-respect down low enough, I’m going to apply at Dairy Queen.”

  “Ouch.” Tanner gave an exaggerated wince. “If you want a job, you don’t have to work there.”

  “No, I really think I do. Nowhere else is hiring experience-less teens.”

  “You could get a job working for my parents.” He pointed back toward the stall. “I know they could use someone to help out around the farm. With football practice I’m not there much.”

  “Don’t your parents live in Oklahoma?”

  He sent her a “well-duh” look. “No.”

  “Then why do you live with your uncle?”

  “So I can go to Paris High. Play ball for your dad.”

  “Oh.” She started digging through her purse, looking for her keys, only to realize they were still in her hand.

  “My parents’ farm is about twenty minutes from Paris. But it’s a one-A district. I could never get a football scholarship going to school there.”

  She didn’t quite know what to say to that. After living in Austin for so much of her life, dumpy little Paris seemed like a place you ran away from. Not a place you ran to.

  This odd, uncomfortable tightness formed in her throat. Not pity, exactly. Maybe sympathy? It seemed wrong, somehow, to feel anything so human for Tanner.

  “Why are you helping me like this?” she asked.

  He slanted a smile at her. The same one that had half the girls in Paris High School crushing on him. “ ’Cause we’re friends. That’s what friends do.”

  She’d spent years harassing and being harassed by football players. She didn’t want to be friends with one. Did she?

  Of course, she wasn’t exactly in a position to be picky.

  “My parents are especially busy right now,” Tanner was saying. “The apples and jams are doing so well, they’re converting the ten acres near the house into organic crops. If you’re interested, I’ll talk to them about it.”

  “That’d be great.” Was it helping with scientific research in the rain forest? No. But it was so much better than sprinkling jimmies on soft serve. She swung open the driver’s door and clambered into the car, feeling upbeat for the first time in weeks.

  Tanner had been—dare she say it?—nice to her. On a day when she’d really needed it. And he’d offered to help her get a non–Dairy Queen job.

  “You know, Tanner,” she said lightly, “for a knuckle-dragging purveyor of violence, you’re pretty easy to talk to.”

  For an instant, surprise flickered across his face. Then he flashed her a smile. “It’s because I know so few words.”

  She thought about what Mei had said about him being the only other person in honors biology to get an A. Izzy had barely managed a B+ in normal biology. “Yeah. Right.”

  She started the car with a shake of her head. Since it was one of those gorgeous warm fall days, she rolled down the windows.

  Just before she slipped the car into reverse, Tanner leaned down and poked his head through the window. “You can drive a tractor, right?”

  IKC Fan Page

  The Official Fan Page for the International Kissing Club

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  Chapter 12

  Mei

  Mei tried not to feel sorry for herself as she stared at her laptop screen, reading the Facebook updates on the IKC page. It was hard, especially when Piper and Cassidy seemed to be having so much fun.

  Both of them had already racked up points—Piper more than Cassidy, big surprise—but still, Cassidy was holding her own with some hot guy named Lucas. She’d promised to post a picture soon and Mei couldn’t wait to see what kind of guy had managed to get past the No Trespassing signs Cassidy usually kept at full mast.

  Even Izzy seemed to have found her groove. No kissing action, but she’d gotten a new job on Tanner’s farm. Knowing her, she’d be knee-deep in compost by the end of the week. And at least everyone in Texas spoke the same language she did, which was a lot more than Mei could say about China. Here, even the girls who did speak English went out of their way to ensure that they spoke Mandarin in front of her. God forbid she should forget—even for a second—that she was an outsider here. Again.

  Mei put her head down on her desk and tried to ignore the sadness that beat at her a little more with each day that passed. She was so tired of being the girl who never fit in anywhere. In Paris it was understandable—she was Chinese, adopted, and the daughter of a liberal gender-studies professor and a well-respected journalist. She didn’t have a chance of fitting in there.

  But here, in China, where she’d been born? She’d thought it would be perfect. Instead, she was as much an outcast here—maybe more—than she’d ever been in Texas.

  What did it say about her that she was in a country with 1.6 billion people and she still couldn’t find even one who liked her enough to talk to her?

  Not that they’d given Mei much of a chance. The girls in the dorm had made it abundantly clear that they wanted nothing to do with her—not because she was American, but because she was Chinese. Because her birth parents had given her up for adoption seventeen years before, she was undesirable. Unsuitable. Unwelcome. It turned out, in China the girls who’d been given up for adoption were just above Democratic protestors on the social ladder.

  Her stomach growled loudly, distracting her from her misery for a second, but she ignored it—just as she’d been ignoring it for the last two hours. She was sick of going to the dining hall alone and trying to figure out which of the long lines of dishes were edible and which weren’t. So far, she’d had singularly bad luck in what she’d picked out and had ended up throwing away most of the food on her tray at the end of every meal, which only earned her more dirty looks. But who would have guessed that authentic Chinese food could be so disgusting? She shuddered. She really was a long way from Sherman’s Panda Express.

  A glance at the clock told her she had only an hour before the cafeteria closed, and she knew she needed to head over there to try and eat. She’d only been in China two weeks and she’d already lost so much weight that she’d had to buy a belt to hold up her jeans—and punch a couple new holes in it to actually make it small enough to cinch.

  Her parents were going to have a stroke when they saw her.

  But not even that worry got her moving—it wasn’t like her weight loss was the only thing her parents were going to freak out about. She hadn’t had much luck in finding her birth parents yet, but her ability to speak Mandarin was getting a little better every day. Soon, she was hoping she’d be able to navigate the public transportation system well enough to get to the orphanage in Dalian.

  Mei glanced at her guitar. It was lying on her bed where she’d left it earlier. Part of her wanted to pick it up and play some old Clapton stuff to chase away the homesickness—but it took more energy than she had. Instead, she pulled up the widget she’d been working on in an effort to stop thinking about how hungry she was. It was a silly thing, but cute, and she thought it would give the IKC page a little more panache.

  And something more for visitors to do. She was shocked at how many people had Liked the page already, how many girls were visiting and posting about their kisses—international or domestic. Admittedly, the fans were nowhere near the numbers of Piper’s Kiss the Pig page, but linking the IKC page through it had really paid off. And it was nice to see how many girls were getting into the International Kissing Club. It made her feel a whole lot less alone in her little corner of the world.

  She messed with the widget for a while—it was giving her a little trouble with the whole stick-a-pin-in-the-map thing, almost as if it knew she had no right to be sticking pins anywhere. Piper, on the other hand, was going to turn all of France—maybe all of Euro
pe—red with her little pins.

  Finally, Mei got it to work, and she added one red pin in Sydney for Cassidy, and eight around Paris for Piper—at least she thought it was eight, based on the running tally, but by now it could be a lot more. If so, she’d let Piper take care of that.

  Still unwilling to leave her dorm room—why should she when everywhere she went she ran into Dao-Ming, who was like Germaine times ten? And her group of followers was a lot meaner—and a lot smarter—than the cheerleaders of Paris High. Instead, Mei fooled around on the Internet for a little while, but it wasn’t the same as back home. So much was blocked by the government that trying to surf her favorite sites, or find new ones, was almost impossible.

  Finally she gave up and clicked back to the IKC page to update her status—pathetic—and was shocked when she saw a whole bunch more pins on the map widget she’d just put into place. And none of them were around France, so she knew it wasn’t Piper striking again.

  There was one in Los Angeles, two in Toronto, and five in Miami. New York had a couple pins in it as well, as did Mexico City and Jamaica. She smiled. The International Kissing Club really had gone global.

  Logging off Facebook, Mei switched over to the bus schedule and maps she’d downloaded the day before. She was pretty sure she had figured out the best route to the Social Welfare Institute, where she’d spent the first two years of her life. Still, she ran over the different routes again, making sure she wasn’t missing anything. When she was satisfied that she wouldn’t get lost, she set her computer aside and stretched. Though she wasn’t planning on going for a while, it was nice to know she was ready when the time came.

  A quick glance at the clock had her yielding to the inevitable. If the food was really bad, she could eat a huge plate of rice, right? By itself, it wasn’t the most nutritiously sound alternative, but if it would quiet her stomach, she would go for it.

  Grabbing her sweater—Shenyang got cold at night—she headed for the cafeteria. Maybe tonight she’d get lucky and they’d have egg rolls or orange chicken or a vegetable she actually recognized.