I Thought About Giving You a Serious Excerpt

But this one is more fun.

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From that point on, all I can think about is kissing. And it’s like it’s everywhere. Noah and Melinda in the rain. Mom and Dad after they fight. Even in Gideon and Lucy’s stupid cartoons, kissing! The only person who isn’t kissing is Claudia; I would have expected she’d be on Shannon by now, but he’s apparently devoted to his girlfriend back home, and Claude’s making this big deal out of being heartbroken.

Bella never made me feel this way. Bella was just lips. We’re talking about whole bodies, now. We’re talking about lungs.

I’m just confused. Suddenly everything has this subtext. I’m beginning to understand what Noah meant about foreplay. I think my whole life is foreplay. The girls lying on their stomachs on the beach every day? It doesn’t matter if they’re six or sixteen or sixty. It’s sex. Girls are sex! I feel like I’ve opened up a Pandora’s box of adolescence full of sunlight and lip gloss and Camus.

Noah says, “Seriously, Chase, what’s gotten into you?”

“The idea that the female race extends beyond Bella and my sisters.”

Noah laughs. “The things you discover when you live your life on beaches.”

I know I’m only fifteen, but I’m going to bed every night terrified that I’m going to die a virgin if I don’t have sex right now. I don’t think I’ve ever needed anything this badly. It’s almost terrifying. I’m addicted to something I’ve never tried.

“Do you want to borrow a magazine?” Noah asks. “Or, like, an internet connection?”

But seriously, I’m afraid there’s something wrong with me. There’s this girl I work with, and before I would have thought she was cute and that would have been okay, but now? I feel like doing things with her. To her!

Her name is Joanna, and she always wears pink shirts underneath her white apron. She must have at least twenty pink shirts, I swear. She wears her hair all on top of her head, like every girl in the world, but it looks better on her. She doesn’t wear makeup.

Once, when she was reaching for the gummi worms, and I was going for the wax bottles, the inside of her wrist touched the top of my hand. I got an erection immediately. It was horrible. I had to serve the next set of customers with my crotch pressed against the cash register.

And that’s just one of the things that’s hard about working.