I wonder what our total was.

God. V-Day has infiltrated my brain.

The first person I ever kissed on the lips was a boy by the name of Nathan Thaddeus Dillinger II. I was 14, and Nate was the kind of guy whose parents bought him a sports car for his 16th birthday, which he would total (but survive to tell the tale) before he got halfway to 17. He was tall, dark, and handsome, wore designer jeans, and had one of those high-wattage smiles that made the female teachers go easy on him.

Yes, he was hot. Yay for me.

But for all his many qualities, Nate Dillinger was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

He was failing algebra.

You see where this is going.

The first kiss happened in a study room of the Williams Branch public library. I was teaching Nate about the systems of equations. We were doing a story problem:

John buys 3 goldfish and 4 betas for $33.00. Marco buys 5 goldfish and 2 betas for $45.00. How much would Celia spend if she bought 6 goldfish and 4 betas?

Our heads were close together, bent over my notebook, where I had just finished writing out the equations

3g + 4b = 33

5g + 2b = 45

when suddenly, without any kind of warning, Nate Dillinger kissed me.

Hmm, I remember thinking as his lips moved over mine. This is not entirely unpleasant.

Then he tried to stick his tongue in my mouth, and I thought something like, Ew, no, gross, and pulled away.

“Sorry,” Nate said, smiling in a very non-sorry way.

“That’s okay,” I said, stunned. I mean, he had just stolen my first kiss. I was never going to get it back. That was it.

He took my “that’s okay” for permission to do it again, and leaned in. I leaned away.

“Wait, do you even like me?” I asked.

He frowned, confused. “What do you mean?”

“Do you find me, well, I don’t know, attractive?”

He shrugged. “You’re all right.”

Be still my heart.

“Just all right?” I snorted. “Then why did you kiss me?”

Another shrug. “I was bored.”

He was bored. He stole my first kiss because he was bored.

Oh, the horror.

I sighed and resisted the urge to say something hurtful. He was a boy, thus biologically engineered for stupidity of this type. We could get past it, I thought. I could still get through this tutoring session and receive the $50 I’d been promised. “Let’s get back to John and Marco, okay?” I suggested. “Now, the first thing we want to do is multiply the second equation by -2, so then we have a +4b and a -4b, which will cancel each other out, and then we’ll add—”

That’s when he tried to kiss me again.

And that’s how:

Nate Dillinger + bloody nose = me - $50

Yeah, so my first kiss was no big deal.

My second kiss, the one that matters, didn’t happen until last summer.

That day I was supposed to meet the gang at the SouthPointe Pavilions Barnes & Noble to chill for a bit, then go see a movie at the theater next door. As usual, Steven arrived early; he was already there when I showed up. But El had texted that she had one of her headaches (read: Downton Abbey marathon) and Beaker had called to report that she and Antonio were “having car trouble” (as in they were busy in the backseat of her car) and she didn’t think they’d make it out before the film started.

“It looks like it’s just going to be you and me today,” I told Steven when I found him flipping through a Scientific American in the magazine section. “The others are flakes.”

“Good,” I remember he said, with a quiet, knowing kind of smile he gets sometimes. “It’s been too long since I had you all to myself.”

I laughed, but I was suddenly, inexplicably, nervous at the idea of having Steven “all to myself.” Maybe I could sense that something was going to happen. A change in the equation.

I told myself I was being silly. Steven and I were friends. We’d known each other since we were 12, when we decided that the smart-kid types in our middle school were better off sticking together. Safety in numbers, you know. I thought Steven was cute even back then. But his attractiveness wasn’t really about how he looked, because there were periods when he had bad acne and braces and he was skinny as a beanpole. There was just something about him. The way he got excited about stuff like Tolkien and quantum physics and Doctor Who. He still had a sense of wonder that gets shamed out of the majority of the teenage population by the time we turn 18. He still loved things about the world. I found that inherently sexy.

That and I could always tell he liked me. There’d been the paper flower on Valentine’s Day, and sometimes I caught him looking at me in a way that went beyond friendly. Interested.

But Steven was too reasonable for romance, I thought. Like me.

We wandered over to the science fiction and fantasy section and bonded over our adoration of Ender’s Game and discussed how Hollywood hadn’t screwed up the film too badly but it would never come close to the experience one gets reading the book, and I relaxed. Everything felt the same between us as it had always been.

Then Steven pulled out Contact.

“You should read this,” he said.

“Carl Sagan, as in the astrophysicist?” I squinted at the cover, which had a picture of Jodie Foster on it for some mysterious reason. “He wrote fiction?”

“It’s an amazing book,” Steven said. “It shows how the belief in religion and the belief in science are fundamentally alike. We believe, even when we can’t prove it, even when we can’t see.”