Kiss List

Left.
Right. Fake right then a spin. The Churchill girl was coming at me like a purple rocket. I was ready for her. I had seen this show before. I had forced her against the sidelines and if she tried to go through me I was going to lay her flat on her preppy little back. That meant there was only one place for her to go.

When she came out of her spin both the ball and I were gone.
Tough luck, girl. Next time focus less on the tricks and go for speed. That’s what I do. Churchill girls sprinted for me as fast as they could but I knew they were no real threat. I was too fast for them. As I reached the last defender I didn’t try anything fancy. I just kicked the ball past her and sprinted after it. I think she had been expecting a fake out attempt. Too bad for her; there would be some tough words from her coach after the game.

The goalie came out to meet me.
She looked nervous. She had reason to be. I threw my right shoulder forward as if going in for the shot. Her eyes widened and she began to dive. That’s when I went in for the kill. One more half step and then my left leg swung forward. Poor goalie. Nobody told her that Sadie Anderson, star captain of the Lakeville Pirates varsity girls’ soccer team, could shoot perfectly with either foot. The ball soared into the top right corner of the net even before the goalie had fallen to the ground by the opposite goal post.

Moments later I felt bodies slam into me.
I was buried under a pile of girls screaming and cheering in excitement. With less than a minute left in the game, the goal clinched our victory over our arch nemesis, Churchill.

My ears were still ringing minutes later after we had shaken the Churchill girls’ hands and I was pulling on my sweats.
The sun was just beginning to set and the field lights were slowly waking up.

“Sadie!” someone called.

I looked up and smiled as Alyssa, one of my best friends, approached.

“Great game!”
Alyssa said enthusiastically. “Two goals and an assist, pretty impressive.”

“A hat trick would have been more impressive,” I answered.

Alyssa rolled her eyes. “Okay Miss All-State,” she said. “Come on, you killed it out there and you’re still just a junior. Imagine how good you’ll be next year.”

“Next year I’ll be much better because I’ll have you to back me up,” I said.

Alyssa smiled. “I know, right? It will be so much fun.”

Alyssa was a good soccer player.
Good didn’t cut it at Lakeville. You had to be great. Alyssa was on the junior varsity team and I had no doubt that she would be called up to varsity next year. She already played varsity occasionally when we needed a backup. Alyssa would never be the star of the team but she was a solid player. She just didn’t live the sport. Not like I did, at least.

We were walking off the field when Alyssa gasped.

“What is it?” I asked, looking around in confusion.

“Two o’clock,” she said.

“What?” oh right, the direction. Where would two o’clock be again?

Then I saw it.
It was the most beautiful thing ever to grace the face of the earth. Aaron Caldwell’s shirtless body. Toned six-pack abs, tussled dirty-blond hair, and a gorgeous smile… he was a vision walking towards us. He just had on red soccer shorts and a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He was one of the sexiest boys I had ever been blessed to lay my eyes on. And then, for a moment, his beautiful blue eyes made contact with mine. I gave him my best smile.

That was when the world decided that I had gotten my tiny allowance of coolness for the day and that I needed to return to my awkward, clumsy, terrible-with-boys reality.
I walked right into a bench on the sidelines and let out a frantic squeal as I pitched forward. The next thing I knew, my legs were flailing about in the air as I lay on the ground wrestling with my sweats and bag.

Alyssa panicked.
She leapt over the bench and I felt her hurriedly trying to pull me up. Alyssa was far too little to be able to support my entire body weight, though, so when she tried to yank me back to me feet she only got my body halfway off the ground before we both fell back. Together we made one mess of tangled limbs and squeals, like some sort of bumbling two-headed monster.

When we finally extricated ourselves we encountered incredulous looks and the occasional snicker.
Several of our teammates were pointing and laughing. I knew there would be all sorts of painful jokes at practice tomorrow. At least I could get even with the girls. Coach Dumfy, however, was shaking his head in exasperation. Worst of all, Aaron was already on the field, clothed and warming up for practice. Now the last image he would have of me would be of an airheaded blonde who had gotten upended by a stupid bench.

“Don’t worry about it,” Alyssa said as we climbed into her yellow Volkswagen Beetle with the pink flower decals on the doors.
“I don’t think that many people saw it.”

“Everyone saw it,” I said.
“Aaron certainly saw it.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”
Alyssa said. “Oh well.”

I shook my head.
Alyssa was far too easy going. She had just helped me commit social suicide. She should at least have the decency to be a little embarrassed. Instead, she seemed to have brushed the whole incident aside. She never let her emotions get to her. Maybe that’s why she was so nice all the time. Alyssa was easily the nicest person in our school and probably the nicest person I had ever met. She could have matched Mother Theresa smile for smile. Nobody was going to mock Mother Theresa. The clumsy star of the soccer team who was the first junior to be elected captain in years, however, was another story. I was the biggest target around.

We got back to my house in time to scarf some dinner down.
Dad grilled us on how the game went and, once he had satisfied himself that we had delivered a sufficient whopping, he excused us. My younger sister Caroline had two of her little friends over as well so he had plenty to keep him busy. My mom had passed away years ago so my dad worked long hours and then came home to run the house. It’s part of the reason why I got rides from my friends everywhere and didn’t give him a hard time for missing my games.

We got up to my room just in time to hear the doorbell ring.
“Got it!” I yelled and slid back down the banister. Unfortunately, dad must have just put some polish on it because I slipped off the end and collided with the wall. When I finally got the door open, my two other best friends Payton and Olivia were laughing in each other’s arms.

“We heard you coming, girl,” Payton said.
“How can you be such a great soccer player and such a klutz?”

“Clumsiness has little to do with aggression,” Olivia in her professorial voice.
“Sadie is great on the soccer field because she terrifies everyone. That doesn’t make her coordinated."

“Oh
shaddup and get in here,” I said.

Alyssa, Payton, Olivia, and I had been friends for years.
We always hung out together. It was sort of strange how we all fit together so well because we were completely different people. Payton was the extremely attractive cheerleader and dancer while Olivia was the brilliant nerd. I was the jock and Alyssa was, well, the saint. We joked that together we would have made one super hero. After we had become friends, it almost didn’t feel right to be apart.

Alyssa had the idea for us all to join the yearbook club.
It would give us something we could do together, she said. Little did we know that there was really no one else in yearbook. The club consisted of us and a photographer named Doug who smoked pot and needed the gig to put some experience on his resume so he could get a job as a professional photographer when he graduated. We only brought him in when we needed we needed a team or club photo taken. The rest of us had agreed to meet every Monday night. We usually didn’t spend too much time actually working on the yearbook, especially this early in the year, but at least it gave us an excuse to hang out that we could give to our parents.

Soon we were all joking around and laughing in my room.
“Okay everyone,” Alyssa suddenly called out. “I got something today. The first pictures of the year for the yearbook were dropped off at the office for us.”

Alyssa pulled out of a thick packet and dumped the contents onto my bed.
We all stared at them in surprise.

“Who sent them in?” Payton asked.
She sounded like she was annoyed that someone else had beaten her to the punch. We all knew that the person with the most photos would look the most popular many years from now when we looked back at the yearbooks. That was another reason we had all agreed to be a part of this.

“Missy James,” Alyssa replied.
Payton, Olivia, and I groaned in unison. Missy was the closest thing we had to an arch nemesis. She was the reigning queen of the most popular clique in the school, a senior, and a shoe-in for homecoming queen.

Payton sniffed.
“Well, we don’t have to put in anything we don’t want to. Let’s all agree that Missy gets no more than four pictures in the yearbook this year.”

“Hah!
Good luck with that,” Olivia said. “Last year the page numbers that Missy was on occupied three whole lines in the index. We’ll be lucky if she doesn’t force her way onto every page.”

I was sorting through the photos.
“What kind of name is Missy anyway?” I said. Her photos were good. They looked like a professional photographer had taken them.

“It’s a stripper name,” Payton said as she snatched up a few of the pictures.
“Look at this,” she said. “She’s sucking Troy Grover’s face in this photo. I was probably still dating that sleazeball when this was taken. She actually thinks we’re going to put it in the yearbook?”

“
Eww,” Olivia said, looking over my shoulder, “she’s making out with Graham Knight in that photo.”

“What?” I exclaimed and snatched up the photo Olivia was looking at.
Sure enough, Missy had her arms wrapped around Graham, the quarterback of our football team, and their lips were locked. He had obviously just finished up a game and was still in his uniform. I was instantly jealous.

“She’s certainly friendly,” Alyssa said mildly.

“That’s one way to put it,” Payton said.
“She’s wearing a bikini in this photo with Troy.”

“Why would she want us to put photos of her kissing different guys in the yearbook?” I asked.

“To show she can get whatever guy she wants,” Payton answered. “This is just the beginning. A photo of a hot football jock and the captain of the swim team is nothing. I’ll bet you that by the end of the year we have enough photos to make an entire page of Missy making our with cute boys.”

“Ryan Brady,” Olivia said.
The hot saxophone player in the band. Olivia would go for the artsy type.

“Jamal Jackson,” Payton said.
A star of the football and track teams.

“Aaron Caldwell,” Alyssa said as her eyes darted to me.

“Enough!” I blurted out. The thought of Aaron and Missy was too much for me. “We’re not giving her a kissing page. Not when I haven’t even…”

I trailed off as all the girls fell silent and stared at me.
There was a sudden tension in the room.

“When you haven’t even what?” Payton asked.

I was tremendously uncomfortable but I couldn’t think of any plausible lie. “When I haven’t even kissed a boy before,” I finished reluctantly.

That wasn’t entirely true.
I had kissed my dad plenty of times but that didn’t count. Little Jimmy Duncan had kissed me when we were in kindergarten but I was pretty sure that didn’t count either because I had pushed him down and made him cry after it happened. Hopefully real kisses didn’t end that way. I think that Logan Mille, my date to the homecoming dance sophomore year, had been trying to work up the courage to kiss me but the best he could manage had been an awkward hug. I had never really had a real romantic kiss before.

The other girls were as silent as mimes.
“Well,” I said. “Say something.”

“I’ve never kissed a boy either,” Olivia said.
She sounded as if she was confessing a crime.

“I haven’t either,” Alyssa said with a shrug.
“I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. We’re only 17.”

All eyes turned to Payton.
She looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable. “What are you looking at me for?” Payton said. “Oh, alright. I haven’t really kissed a boy either.”

The rest of us all gasped in unison.
“What?” I exclaimed. “But you and Troy dated for months last spring.”

“I know but the only time he kissed me was after parties when he was drunk,” Payton said.
“It wasn’t a real, meaningful kiss.”

“What was it like?” Olivia asked.

“What?” Payton said.

“The kiss,” Olivia said.
“What did it feel like?”

“A bit like kissing a slug.
Or maybe a wet fish,” Payton said.

We all giggled.
Inside, I was stunned. Payton was one of the most beautiful girls in school and she gave off an air of confidence and worldly experience. How was it possible that she had never had a real kiss before?

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