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  MY LAST KISS

  Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York 10010

  Copyright © 2014 by Bethany Neal

  All rights reserved

  Printed in [name of country;]

  Designed by [TK]

  First edition, 2014

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  macteenbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  TK

  Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945 x5442 or by email at [email protected].

  Dedication TK

  MY LAST KISS

  MY FIRST KISS

  “HOW OLD WERE YOU when you had yours?”

  I leaned my hands on the sun-warmed railing of the old covered bridge and hung my head low, so Ethan wouldn’t see the corner of my mouth twitch the way it always did when I lied. “Sixth grade,” I answered.

  “Really? I didn’t kiss anyone until eighth.”

  I smiled a little to myself. “Who was it?” I pressed onto my toes, squinting against the summer sun, so I could see the family of brown bats that roosted between the wooden beams under the bridge. My best friends, Aimée and Madison, and I spent almost every night that summer before freshman year on Aimée’s roof watching the bats flap and dive in the indigo sky as we debated whether or not the food would be better in the high school cafeteria come September.

  “Layla Moore,” Ethan answered.

  I jerked my head up and grinned at him. “You made out with Lay-me Moore?”

  He held up his hands. “She wasn’t like that in the beginning of the year, and we only kissed once behind the dugout after baseball practice.”

  “Ooo, behind the dugout,” I teased. “Were you in uniform?”

  He rolled his eyes and crossed his arms. “All right, I told you mine. Now tell me yours.”

  “Some other time.” I turned my head and watched the river babble below us. A heady summer breeze that smelled of honeydew and grass blew my skirt flat against my thighs.

  “Oh, come on. It can’t be that bad.”

  It was worse, way worse. I was finally hanging out with a cute guy—alone!—and I’d lied so massively that I couldn’t even think of another lie to get out of it.

  “Okay,” he started, “I’ll guess.” He bent down and leaned his elbow on the railing so he was eye to eye with me. “He definitely goes to our school because you’re scared I’ll know him.”

  “I’m not scared,” I retorted, trying to hold together a decent poker face, but I couldn’t stop smiling. Every time I met his rich umber eyes my mouth curled up uncontrollably.

  He squinted at me. “I definitely know him. Let’s see.” He tapped his chin. “Was it Luke Newman?” I shook my head. “Mica Torrez? Drew Ridelle?”

  “It’s not any of your friends.”

  “Hmm.” He thought a minute. “If you don’t tell me, I’m going to spread a rumor that you kissed all those guys in sixth grade before they had their braces off.”

  “Mica never had braces,” I said. “And you’d never start a rumor.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, I suck at lying. Besides, rumors are lame.” He opened his mouth to say something else, then started over. “When I was little my grandpa used to tell me this story about the river. He said if you looked into the reflections from the sun long enough the water would reward your patience with the face of your true love.”

  “That’s a sweet story. Have you seen your true love’s reflection yet?” I asked playfully.

  He held my gaze long enough to paint a blush on my cheeks. “I’ve been very patient.”

  I glanced down at the water, hoping to catch a glimpse of what he saw. And there it was, a wavy version of him reflected beside me.

  He wrapped his arm around the crossbeam between us and leaned out past the railing, peeking back at me. “You’re lying, aren’t you?”

  My heart jumped into my throat. “About what?” I stared at the shiny spikes of golden-brown hair sticking up from his forehead. If I met his eyes, I’d probably confess everything. Ethan had that effect on me. I wanted to tell him everything about myself. I wanted him to know me better than anyone else did, even Aimée, who I’d known since we were embryos.

  “You’re not going to tell me some other time, are you?” he asked.

  An airy, relieved laugh escaped my lips. “Doubtful.”

  He leaned closer, and my eyes moved to his lips. I’d never really paid attention to boy lips before. I was used to full, glossy girlie lips. His were uneven—full on the bottom and chiseled on top—and they looked dry.

  “So you’re a woman of mystery then?”

  I wasn’t sure which word caught me up more, woman or mystery. Either way, I didn’t answer and I didn’t look away from his lips.

  He tilted his head toward mine and a slow rush of heat spread through me. When his lips touched mine they weren’t dry; they were soft and warm and the kiss was everything I’d never thought to dream a kiss should be. It only lasted a moment, but the tingling in my toes and low in my stomach lingered.

  When he pulled back, I answered his first-kiss question. “Ethan Keys.”

  “What?” he asked softly.

  I pressed my fingers to my giddy grin and shook my head. “Nothing.”

  “You used my last name. I thought I was in trouble or something,” he said, and laughed. I did too.

  He took my hand, and I was certain, in that moment, that I would never kiss anyone else for as long as I lived.

  1

  IT’S SNOWING OR MAYBE it’s raining … no, it’s snowing. I can feel the wet flakes gathering in the corners of my eyes, melting down my cheeks like tears. The warmth from the sun I felt on my face only an instant before is gone. When I blink, the only things I see are blotchy white bits of trees and clouds and lights. Where are those lights coming from? I stumble onto my feet and my legs feel Jell-O-y, like I’ve been swimming for a really long time and now the ground feels too rigid.

  I take one step and suddenly my whole body stings. I fall to my knees and clutch my middle. The worst pain I’ve ever felt invades my limbs, like when your foot falls asleep except it’s my entire body and it’s epically stronger. I’m screaming and gripping my sides, writhing in the fluffy white snow. And then the pain stops; as fast as it came, it stops. Filled with relief, I do a quick once-over of my body. I even pinch my arm to check if I’m dreaming. How dumb is that?

  I manage to open my eyes enough to see a silhouette standing above the waterline among the trees in Dover Park. He—at least I think it’s a he—is staring at me, but not at me, me. He’s staring at the bloody, twisted mess of me on the rocks along the riverbank.

  Why are there two of me?! And how did I get in the river?

  I run toward my other, mangled body. I must be having a nightmare—but it’s like there’s a force field around me. I sort of melt into the air, then get flung back. I land on my butt in a massive snowbank at the water’s edge, waiting to feel the cold from sitting in waist-deep snow.

  A jagged chunk of ice floats by, sparkling in the early-morning moonlight.

  I still haven’t felt the cold.

  The silhouette is talking now. I hear him, but the words are muffled as if he’s talking underwater. I press my hands to the sides of my face and squeeze my eyes shut, concentrating. His voice comes clearer … He’s telling me he didn’t mean to.

  Mean to what?

  Now he’s telling me this isn’t how it was supposed to go. This is her fault.

  Is “her” me?

  I open my eyes to check if he’s talking to me, me
. He’s not. I look at my Other body, broken and folded in ways a body should never bend over a mound of gray rocks. In one of my Other hands I’m holding something, maybe a piece of paper, but I can’t see it clearly. Snow piles high again around my eyes and my cheeks and now on my shoulders. It comes down, harder and harder, until I feel buried in it. I can’t even see it and I’m buried in it so deep that I can’t breathe.

  Slowly a thought creeps in, settles in the front of my mind. It tugs at something I feel like I know but can’t quite remember. I open my mouth to speak it, but I don’t see my breath the way I should in early March. I glance up at the silhouette. He’s crying or maybe he’s yelling; either way, I can see his breath.

  I’m not breathing. I don’t need to. The words float past my lips like a rehearsed chorus: “I’m dead.”

  2

  FOR FOUR HOURS I’ve been trying to remember how I died. It’s not going very well. No matter how hard I think, I can’t bring a single memory of last night to mind. It doesn’t help that I’m standing next to the biggest distraction in the world: my body—my Other body. God, that’s weird to say. I want to scream or cry, but nothing feels real to me. I keep thinking if I can just get back inside my own flesh, all this will be over. I’ll wake up from this creeptastic dream and everything will go back to normal.

  But I can’t.

  The force-field thing is getting stronger. I don’t even melt into it anymore. I just smack against it. It’s like my own body is rejecting me. It makes me feel horribly unwelcome in this sterile dark room, but where else am I supposed to go?

  Finally, a woman enters the room. She’s wearing a surgical mask and a long green medical coat over her matching scrubs.

  “Excuse me, Doctor, can you help me? I—” She switches on a light above Other Me, and my words catch in my throat. Harsh fluorescents flicker, illuminating a room I’ve only seen in episodes of Buffy: the morgue. I stagger back away from the metal table I’ve been standing next to since 1 a.m. My eyes jump from trays full of glistening tools to industrial-looking scales and sinks to the tile floor with a wide drain in the center. I pull my arms in tight to my sides, terrified to accidentally touch anything in this place.

  The woman starts examining all kinds of embarrassing, totally exposed body parts. I want to reach out and stop her, hit her hand away and scream that she has no right to touch me, but I’m paralyzed where I stand. She jots down a few notes, then pokes and prods at my right ankle, then pinches my knee.

  “Careful, I—” I start to tell her about the tender bruise above my knee that I got during ballet practice last week, but by the time the words are out they don’t seem important anymore. Nothing does except getting my body back.

  Another woman walks in. She has a clipboard. “What do we have today?” she asks.

  I glare at her. It’s bad enough one person is violating my naked body. Plus, she asked her question like I’m the breakfast special on some morbid menu.

  Coat Woman answers, “Miss Cassidy Haines joins us in her seventeenth year.”

  “Only seventeen?” The woman tsks and sets her clipboard on a small table near one of the sinks.

  “And for only three days. According to the report, she had a birthday on Thursday,” Coat Woman says.

  It’s infuriating the way she says my name and talks about me. Especially since I can only see her molasses-brown eyes and wide, arching black eyebrows above her surgical mask while she sees all of me.

  She continues. “Seems the darling couldn’t keep her head above water this early morning to bear another year.”

  So that’s how I died; I drowned. The stillness in my chest is an eerie reminder that I have no memory of my lungs seizing and burning for oxygen. “Do you know anything else?” I ask her, but it’s more out of blind habit than to get an answer since neither of them has acknowledged my presence. Still, without thinking, I step forward, anxious to hear even the smallest detail about what happened to me.

  Coat Woman doesn’t answer. Instead she asks the other woman for a tool that looks disturbingly similar to the X-Acto knives Mr. Boyd lets us use in Art class and starts slicing into my body on the table.

  I jump back and cry out, “No!” I instinctively clutch the spot above my breastbone where her blade cuts, anticipating pain and blood will burst across my chest, but not one drop of red beads up on me. Or on Other Me.

  “Stop!” I shout at her. “This isn’t right—I’m not supposed to be here for this.” I wave my hands in front of her face and let out a scream that should shatter the lightbulbs.

  She asks for a sharper blade.

  Suddenly it dawns on me: No one can hear me. Or see me. I guess I expected they couldn’t—disembodied at the morgue and all—but there’s something about the casual, almost cheerful way Coat Woman asked for that knife that hits me hard with awareness of how unreal I truly am.

  My floaty limbs feel heavy. The abrupt sense of loneliness is like nothing I’ve felt before. It runs through me like blood used to in my veins. I look down at my body, desperately hoping for some small spark of recognition, some link to click back into place connecting us.

  As Coat Woman’s incision travels down to my navel and the phantom pain ebbs away, a slow realization spreads through me. That body—my body—doesn’t belong to me anymore. We aren’t connected. I’m alone in this sterile horror show. My hands fall and dangle loose at my sides.

  When Coat Woman lifts her knife to make a second incision, a drip of some kind of terrible fluid splatters onto her latex glove, and it’s all I can take. I run out of the room.

  The quiet of the hallway settles in around me. It feels right, how it should be. The hallway is empty, but, strangely, I don’t feel alone anymore—far from it. I can sense everything and everyone all around me. It’s like the whole town is in me. Like I could do that I Dream of Jeannie head-bob thing and magically appear anywhere in Crescent Valley.

  I’m desperate enough that I try the head bob. When I look up and I’m not at my oldest, best friend Aimée’s house—the last place I remember being alive—I start to hyperventilate. My chest heaves and I feel like I’m gasping even though I’m still not breathing. I clamp my mouth shut mid-inhale; it doesn’t affect me one bit except maybe to lessen how spastic I look. But what does it matter anymore what I look like? I wasn’t hyperventilating; I can’t.

  But how can I still exist if I’m … dead? Because that’s what you are when you stop breathing, right? When you leave your body behind?

  A tidal wave of emotions rises in me and crashes down against my insides. I don’t want to be disconnected from my body, my life. I want to live it, but I’m pretty sure I no longer have a choice.

  What did I do to deserve this? Why is this happening to me?

  No answers come, no spirit guides mystically appear, like in movies and in books, to help me understand how to deal with the part of dying where you, well, don’t.

  What am I supposed to do now?

  My skin feels like ice as the pain from before comes back in sharp jabs. I bend down and brace my hands on my knees, closing my eyes, wishing for the pain to stop, for this to start over, but with instructions this time.

  Maybe I’m supposed to stay with my body. Maybe I did something wrong. I need to get back to her—to me.

  I run for the room where Other Me is and throw open the double doors. The two women don’t turn from the large stainless basin they’re scrubbing their hands in, side by side. Other Me is still on the metal table, but I look different. I look like someone gave me reverse Botox, then stitched me up for Dr. Frankenstein to experiment on.

  How long was I in that hallway?

  I gaze at my lifeless, marked body for a long time. The longer I look, the more I think I might throw up. I cover my mouth to hold back vomit that never comes. Even though I’m horrified by the sight of my corpse—that’s the only word for it now—I can’t resist the urge to try one more time to make contact.

  My toes bump against the force field as soo
n as I’m within reach. I push against the dense air as hard as I can, but the resistance increases the closer I get to my body. My hand snaps back, and I frown. I want her back—I want my body back! But all I can do is helplessly look on. As I do, the invisible barrier slowly materializes into a shiny film that’s bubbled around the table. My mind is numb, trying to process so many unbelievable bits of my new reality.

  I spread my fingers wide, refusing to give up, and focus on reshaping and pulling apart the film. It’s no use. There’s no edge for me to grip or even any texture to let me know if I’m making progress. I gaze longingly at my layered auburn hair, splayed out on the table, wishing I could move a swath of curls that’s coiled around my left ear. They took out my rosebud earrings. The sight of my empty piercings burrows a woeful hole inside me. I’ve never felt so sad about something so small.

  I position my left hand so it’s next to my lifeless hand resting on the table. Neither of them looks like it belongs to me.

  When the women are done washing, they come back to the table and cover Other Me with a sheet. Panic hits me when they switch off the light and leave the room because I can’t see my body anymore. Nothing is anchoring me to this world, this life. I’m just suspended in darkness. I spin around, calling for them to come back. The doors swing in their wake, jutting into my shoulder twice until the swing loses momentum. I realize then that when I burst into the room, I didn’t throw open the doors at all. I went through them.

  Snow gathers around my eyes again, and I decide it must be tears since it’s impossible for it to be snowing inside. Although it’s also impossible that I’m standing in a morgue staring at two sets of my hot-pink nails. I close my eyes and try to remember how I got here, how I got to the river, how I stepped out of myself and broke every rule that was supposed to be unbreakable.

  My icy skin turns molten as the heat of last night returns to me. I can see faces: Madison and Ethan and Aimée. Someone else. It’s Saturday night and we’re in Aimée’s ginormous backyard standing in front of a roaring bonfire. My trio of junior girls is drinking vodka and Sprite with Jolly Ranchers—jolly vodies as Aimée calls them—that are turning our clear drinks fruity colors: cherry red, apple green, grape purple. The colors are so vivid it’s like I’m there, in that moment, HD instant-replay memory-style. I can smell the smoke and feel Ethan’s gentle arms as they wrap around me from behind.