The International Kissing Club (11 page)

Later that night, the four girls met up again over at Izzy’s house for their regular Saturday night sleepover. Izzy had the biggest flat-screen TV for movie watching, and since Linc would probably be home, the chance that Tanner would be with him meant that Piper wanted to hang out there whenever possible.

Izzy and Mei had just congratulated Cassidy on getting the money from her dad. The phone call had been totally awkward, but she’d done it and he had come through. Plus, he’d sounded genuinely happy to hear from her, and had even mentioned that they should plan to get together as soon as she came back from her trip. Cassidy didn’t want to raise her hopes too high, because plans with her dad had the tendency
to fall through at the last minute, but it still felt good imagining it could happen.

Izzy’s door banged open and Piper made her entrance, weighed down with two large Victoria’s Secret bags in tow. “Good, you’re all here. Because I’ve brought goodies!”

The change in Piper since they’d all decided to go on these trips was nothing less than manic—she’d been so low since the Kiss the Pig fiasco that Cassidy had really begun to worry for her, but now she seemed to be back to the old perpetually bright and optimistic Piper. Although now that Cassidy looked closer, Piper’s eyes were a little red. Another round with her mother? Cassidy had known those blue shoes were a bad idea. She sent up a silent thank-you that her own mother was so laid back.

“Now, I know I said I wasn’t going to give you these until closer to the trip,” Piper trilled, “but I decided I couldn’t wait. A little something from me to y’all for those unexpected, special events.” She winked and handed out the little pink boxes like Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.

“You got us underwear?” Cassidy asked. “Um, no offense, Piper, but I like to buy my own panties.”

“It’s not underwear,” she declared. “It’s
lingerie
.” This in her best French accent.

Mei had already opened her box and was holding up what looked to Cassidy like black polka-dotted tissue paper with two straps, and a pair of matching string bikini panties. Mei’s gaping mouth said what they were all thinking.

“I thought you’d like black best, Mei—it’s more demure, like you. I got you a camisole, too, so it would be warmer, ‘cause I read online it gets pretty cold at night in Shenyang.”

Mei examined the garments, the thin straps more like angel hair pasta than spaghetti, obviously wondering how these and “warm” belonged in the same sentence. Also, did Piper not realize that nothing was “unexpected” in Mei’s hyperorganized life? And that any
special events would not involve underwear purchased by someone else? “Thanks, Piper. That was really … thoughtful of you.”

Cassidy was now wondering with one part morbid curiosity and another part total dread what she was going to find in her own gift box. Turned out, both feelings were rewarded by what she found underneath the tissue: three pairs of boy-short panties—a hot-pink-and-black-striped pair, a hot-pink cheetah pair, and a hot-pink pair covered in little red cherries. They were all cut so high in the back that her butt would be hanging out of them.

“They’re called Cheekies,” Piper said, “because they show your—”

“I got it,” Cassidy cut her off, looking inside the box again to see if Piper had left a gift receipt. If any “special events” happened on this trip, which they probably wouldn’t, Cassidy was more than certain none of these would be the underwear she would want to be wearing.

“What the hell is this?” Izzy cried. Dangling off the end of her finger was a tiny triangle of green lace and a filament of string connecting all three corners.

“It’s called a Brazilian thong, and there are five of them because I didn’t know how much access you would have to a washing machine in Costa Rica. Oh, and there’s a push-up bra, too, for a little extra boost of confidence.”

Mei’s eyebrows practically touched her hairline as she picked up the bra. “If Izzy has any more ‘confidence,’ she’ll tip over face-first.”

“Is that a bra, or a melon catcher?” Cassidy asked.

Izzy pretended to look offended. “Hey, we can’t all get by in a sports bra and tank top.” They all burst out laughing so hard that Cassidy thought she might have pulled a muscle.

“You think this is an appropriate undergarment to wear in the rain forest, Piper?” Izzy asked, eyeing the scraps of fabric.

“What? It’s Brazilian,” she replied. “I got myself a sexy black bustier with match—”

The door flew open, and Linc stood in the hall, Tanner just behind
him. “What the hell, Isabel,” her brother said. “We can’t hear our game over y’all’s noise.”

Linc had been in a pissy mood since he’d stupidly punched his locker and broke his hand after losing the first game of the season. Nice to know he was taking it out on his sister.

Izzy still had the thong in her hand. “Damn, Izzy, put those away. I don’t want to see that,” Linc said.

“Hey, Tanner,” Piper said, all flirtatious smile. “Do you prefer lace or thong panties?” She held up a pair of each that she’d grabbed from the girls’ gift boxes.

Ugh. Cassidy wished Piper would stop trying so hard to make Tanner notice her every chance she got. It sucked watching your best friend waste her time on someone who obviously wasn’t interested. But at least Tanner was a decent guy—except for his Germaine problem, that is.

Unlike Linc, who commented, “Shouldn’t you be asking a pig?” The urge to break his other hand started to bring Cass to her feet.

Luckily, Mei saved her the trouble by saying, “If she’d asked you, she
would
have been asking a pig. That’s why she asked Tanner.”

Linc’s walnut-sized brain struggled for a response. When nothing came, he elbowed Tanner and asked, “Does Germaine even wear panties?”

Jeez, did putting a football in a guy’s hand turn him into a jerk, or was it that only jerks played football? It was an age-old riddle Cassidy had yet to solve.

Tanner just grinned. “Nice panties, Isabel.”

“Nice gun, Derringer,” Izzy quipped, but by then he’d already disappeared down the hall with Linc. “Damn it. Why can’t I be quicker on the uptake?” She made a disgusted face before throwing the thong back into the box.

Piper looked disappointed that Tanner hadn’t answered
her
question.

“Okay, then,” Mei cut in. “We have other things we need to get done tonight.”

“I hope so,” Cassidy said.

“Me, too,” Izzy agreed.

Mei took out her laptop. “We need to come up with avatars to go with our IKC pseudonyms—you know, something unique to each of us, but not too revealing.”

“Definitely not pictures of us in our new underwear, then,” Izzy snickered.

“
Lingerie
,” Piper corrected. She grabbed a camera off Izzy’s desk and flicked it on. She panned around the room, focusing on Mei’s laptop case resting against her calf. Piper crouched down to shoe level and snapped a couple of shots. Then she jumped to her feet in triumph. She turned the camera around to reveal the picture to the others. The laptop bag dominated the left side of the photo, the toes of Mei’s funky Doc Martens extended beyond the edge of the bag. Studious with a dash of edgy. It was so Mei.

“Oooh, I love it!” Piper cried in excitement.

She hopped up and dashed for the pile of junk she carted with her to every sleepover, pulling out her brand-new pair of blue shoes. She slipped them on and gazed around the room. “I don’t have a good bag.”

“Sure you do,” Izzy chimed in. She pointed to the vintage train case that Piper had inherited from her grandmother. It was white with pink trim and looked like a miniature suitcase. Piper stored her evergrowing stash of cosmetics in the chic little bag.

A few minutes later, they had the perfect shot of Piper’s Smurf-blue shoes kicking above the cosmetics case.

Cassidy’s shot was simpler: her aqua Vans against the sports duffel she usually carried to practice.

Izzy dug in her closet to find her new favorite shoes, her Simple Mary Jane sneakers made from hemp and recycled tires. She posed them on either side of the hiking backpack she’d bought for Costa Rica.

Once Mei had loaded all of the pictures onto the page, she looked up. “That’s done,” she said. “I can check it off my list.”

Good. One step closer to getting the hell out of Paris. Now that Cassidy knew for sure she could pay for the trip, all this other stuff: the Facebook page, the kissing—should there be any—it was all icing.

Especially the kissing. She glanced down at the cherry-print Cheekies—the kissing could be the cherry on top.

The Official Fan Page for the International Kissing Club

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IKC Page

Chapter 7
Izzy

If it hadn’t been for the word “emergency,” Izzy would have ignored the post on the IKC Facebook page. Piper, Mei, and Cassidy had been shooting messages back and forth nonstop since first devising the club. For a while she’d been as excited as they were, but that had all changed this past Monday when her parents had told her the news: there wasn’t enough money for her to go on the trip. When her idiot brother had broken his hand, he’d blown his shot at a scholarship from the University of Texas. Unless he had the healing powers of a superhero, he’d be out for the rest of the season and there was no way UT would give a scholarship to someone who’d spent the year on the bench. Plus, her mom was plotting to send Shane to New York for the qualifying round of some international piano competition that no one under the age of ninety-eight would be interested in. Because of all this, her parents were too broke to send Izzy to Costa Rica. Since then, she’d been dodging her friends at school and online.

Now she felt a faint glimmer of hope. Emergency meeting? Maybe she wasn’t the only one. If her parents could overspend, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that Piper’s had, too.

Ten minutes later, she pulled Brittney into the empty space in front of Piper’s house. Today, she didn’t dare curse at the car the way she sometimes did. Who knew how much longer she’d have a car to curse at?

She found her friends up in Piper’s room. Mei lay sprawled across Piper’s rumpled bed, flipping through a magazine. Cassidy perched on the back of an armchair, her feet on the seat, her elbows propped on her knees. Piper stood before the closet doors, along the top of which she’d hung a half-dozen hangers of clothes. Two suitcases lay open at her feet.