Lessons From the Kissing Booth

1.)
His left hand scrabbled through the needles on the table, looking for one still capped, while his right hand cinched the tie-off. It was a dance so often practiced that it had become a reflex, as easy as breathing.

2.)
Driving home from the beach with the windows open, late at night, left foot folded up against the dashboard. A car pulled up next to me at a stoplight and I looked over, surprised to see a heavily deformed face looking back at me. The cheeks bulged, bubbled, the eye sunken in a deep mound of flesh. I blinked in shock and when I looked back over at the car the face had changed, was no longer uneven, was recognizably human. Or perhaps I had changed. A trick of the light, or of my eye, or both.

3.)
We kissed on the hill, near the tracks where during daylight the child-size model train ran. The stars shone the way they only can in the glow surrounding the first boy you ever thought you loved, and as we paused, lips still warm and eyes promising, the sprinklers turned on. We ran for cover, the glistening sky already forgotten, unimportant.