“So how was he?” I asked, trying to pin back my dark hair before it went completely limp again.

Note to self: Never try to cut my own hair. It had finally grown back to shoulder length after I sent nuts on it a couple months ago and chopped it all off. It was all the fault of Sun-In, which had turned my hair orange, and I just couldn’t wait for it to grow out.

Other note to self: Never dye.

“Robbie F?” Bella scoffed, whipping her mini-hairbrush out of her huge shoulder bag, which was lying on my bed next to Bella, herself.

“Yeah, I mean, was he a good kisser or what?” I spread my strawberry “extra-smoochable” lip gloss. It feels like glue, which seems counterintuitive, right? But it’s nice and shiny. “You are the queen of kiss-and-tell. Don’t make me drag it out of you,” I added, grinning at her over my shoulder.

Bella swung her Diesel-jeaned legs off of the dorky old Pooh Bear pillow I keep on my bed. “Ugh, please don’t remind me. Lisi, he wears braces and we were at the movies and so his mouth was full of popcorn.” Bella shuddered.

“That’s why you broke up with him?” Bella dates a guy a minute practically.

She chose to ignore my question, though, instead leaping up and nudging me to the side. “Come on, NBK, scooch over and let me use the mirror for a sec!”

“Stop calling me that!” I nudged her back.

“Well you ARE, aren’t you? Meanwhile, some of us have actual intentions of making out in the near future and need to prepare.” Bella smirked at me as she began her manic hair-brushing routine.

NBK. I truly hate it when she calls me that. But she’s right. It’s true. Never Been Kissed. That’s me.

Bella and I are sixteen. We are getting our driver’s licenses this summer. We are juniors in high school. We are totally normal. I am totally normal. Except for one little detail. The NBK status.

All my friends have kissed people. Bella’s kissed like, well, I think seven or eight guys that I know of, but there were probably more. And my other best friend, Mo, kissed that boy at camp two summers in a row, and then kissed Ryan Peabody behind the bleachers which was such a cliché but at least she can say she’s kissed people. As for Johnny, my guy best friend (and the only one of us who already has his license), he kissed this freshman girl Sandra last year who ended up moving to Kentucky, and I love telling him that she had to leave the state after experiencing The Johnny. He gets uber-red whenever we tease him about girls—so of course we do it as much as possible.

As for me, I guess you could say I’m picky. That’s part of it. Then there is of course The Curse. In second grade, a boy named Danny confessed his love for me in front of the whole classroom during snack. He leaned in to kiss me—at least, I assume that’s what he was trying to do—but I was so mortified I choked on my banana and ran away coughing and screaming “Ew!” I didn’t intend to be mean or anything. But that incident has always haunted me, like maybe I jinxed myself by refusing the one guy who actually said “I love you.” Never mind that we were seven at the time. It could still be bad karma.

But even worse than The Curse is, well, The Crush.

And by crush I mean “total and complete life-altering obsession.” I am convinced that my silent, well-hidden crush on Brett Jacobson, one of the most popular seniors in my school, has permanently stunted my social development and prevented me from ever finding the right opportunity to get kissed. It’s not like I don’t want to. I definitely want to kiss someone.