The International Kissing Club (7 page)

“Just so long as you can get three points for a superhottie?” Cassidy asked.

Piper grinned. “Why not? Unless you’re afraid there aren’t any three-pointers in Australia.”

“So it
is
a competition, then?” Izzy asked, eager to nail down the details.

“Not a competition. More like a club,” Piper said.

“A kissing club?” Mei injected incredulously.

“Not just any kissing club.” There was that bless-your-heart tone again. “The International Kissing Club, or IKC for short.” Piper paused dramatically, as if she expected a gasp of awe from the crowd.

“Aren’t you at all worried that this is the kind of thing Germaine would do?” Mei asked in a wincing tone. “Rating boys like they’re cattle? That’s so shallow. And you know it would piss us off if guys were talking about girls that way.”

“Okay, then.” Izzy nodded—after all, Mei did have a point. “Maybe it’s not about how hot the guy is.” Piper looked ready to protest. And since the last male she’d kissed had been porcine, Izzy couldn’t really blame her. If anyone deserved to kiss a hot guy, it was Piper. “Maybe we don’t rate the guy, maybe we rate the kiss. Just ‘cause a guy’s hot, doesn’t mean he knows how to kiss.”

“Good point,” Mei agreed. “John was sure cute enough, but there was zip lip chemistry between us.”

Cassidy rolled her eyes. “You’re just saying that because he thought Jimi Hendrix was one of the Beatles.”

“Jimi Hendrix!” Mei threw up her hands, as if that should have been explanation enough. “The Beatles!” She shuddered in mock disgust.

“The point is,” Piper said, picking up the argument, “hot guys do not always hot kissers make. If I want to expand my carnal knowledge base, shouldn’t I be aiming for really great kissers? If we’re seizing all of life’s experiences, then we want these to be transcendent, life-changing kisses.”

Izzy nodded. “Exactly!”

Piper’s eyes gleamed with excitement. “Okay. One point per kiss. Three points to lip scorchers.”

“Okay, well, my mother will still kill me,” Mei said dryly, but Izzy could tell she was intrigued.

“We’re taking charge of our sexuality,” Izzy countered. “She’ll be thrilled.”

“Yeah, right,” Cassidy said. “That’s what I’ll tell
my
mom when she’s attaching the chastity belt.”

“Which is why we’re not going to tell them,” Izzy pointed out.
“That’s why we’re creating new Facebook accounts and doing it anonymously. They’ll never know.”

Piper had had a lot of crazy schemes over the years, but this was one Izzy could get behind. Especially if it would help her get over River. Born-again virginity was so overrated.

Chapter 4
Mei

“So, did you get any sleep at all last night?” Mei asked Piper, as they waited outside the counselor’s office. The girl was bouncing around like she’d just drunk three double espressos from Starbucks.

“A little bit. Why, does it show?” Piper reached into her voluminous purse and dug around until she pulled out a compact.

Mei rolled her eyes. “You’re fine. I just meant that you look like you could orbit the earth under your own power.”

And it was true. Piper was always a little high-strung, but ever since Friday night she’d been jumpy enough to make her mother’s Chihuahua nervous.

“I just want to get this done, you know? I’m ready to leave for Paris tomorrow.”

“Well, maybe not tomorrow. You do have to pack, after all.”

“Right. I was thinking about that most of the night. We’re going to have to go shopping in Dallas before we leave.”

Well, wasn’t that just so Piper? Forget the million details that went into planning a trip like this. Forget that they hadn’t checked on vaccinations or visas. Forget even that they still hadn’t run the idea by their parents.
Let’s go shopping for a new pair of shoes.
Anything to get them out of Paris—and away from censorious eyes, even for a little while.

Of course, retail therapy was a time-tested means of overcoming depression, right? Piper’s dad must have thought so. It had always
been obvious to Mei that he funded Piper’s shopping expeditions out of guilt. He must have known his wife was a nightmare. But if Piper was as unhappy with her father’s negligence as Mei thought she must be, Piper was too much of a trouper to complain to them about it.

Thankfully, Mei was saved from having to respond about the shopping trip when Ms. Vogel opened her office door. “Girls, come on in,” she said with a bright, sympathetic smile.

“The others aren’t here yet,” Piper said. “Shouldn’t we wait for them?”

“We can get started. Unless it’s a problem you’re all having.” She lowered her voice. “Are the kids still bothering you about ‘the incident,’ Piper?”

Mei ground her teeth together. She knew the counselor was only trying to be helpful, but did Piper really need everyone—even the school staff—to remind her of her problems with Germaine the Stain? It was hard enough to talk Piper out of the house most mornings.

Especially since Jackson had taken the blame for the pig incident and Germaine had gotten away almost scot-free. It was just like last year, when Germaine and her minions stole Piper’s clothes out of her gym locker and strung them up the flagpole. They’d gotten away with that, too. It had been just another crushing blow in their campaign to destroy Piper—at least until someone had added beet juice to their self-tanner and the cheerleading squad had walked around bright pink for almost a week.

Germaine was still trying to find proof of who had done it, but Mei and Cassidy had plotted too well to leave any evidence behind.

Once they were seated in Vogel’s office, Piper launched right into her spiel. “You know how you were telling us about the international exchange program and how we need to stretch ourselves to reach our full potential? Well, we’ve decided that that’s exactly what we want to do.” She paused for dramatic effect, then blurted out, “We want to be foreign exchange students.” Then she ruined her one attempt at being serious by shrieking so loudly she nearly broke the sound barrier.

“It’ll be so much fun and such a great experience. I’ve always wanted to go to France. Can’t you just see me walking along the banks of the Seine in my brand-new beret? It’ll be azure of course, and I’ll—”

“We’ve all given this a lot of serious thought,” Mei cut in, taking pity on the counselor, who was currently attempting to massage her aching eardrum.

“That’s great, girls. I’m glad to see you so enthusiastic about an
academic
program.” Piper seemed to miss Vogel’s subtle emphasis on the word “academic,” but Mei certainly didn’t.

“We talked about it all weekend—”

Mei needed to cut Piper off before she could do more damage. If Vogel heard even a hint of anything related to pigs or kissing, she’d eighty-six the whole plan. This had to seem like genuine, scholastic enrichment. “The exchange program offers unique and varied opportunities that we can’t get here in Paris, Texas.”

Jeez. She hated to be the cliché of the typical Asian egghead, but really, someone had to be the organized one, and, God love her, Piper just didn’t have it in her. “We’ve put together a proposal that we think adequately demonstrates our goals.”

Piper’s eyes widened. “We did?” she whispered loudly enough to be heard in the next county.

“Of course we did. Don’t you remember, we spent hours on it?”

“I remember Westley’s sword fights and too many Pixy Stix, but—”

Mei stepped on Piper’s foot, hiding it with her backpack as she reached into the bag and pulled out her leather portfolio, with the twelve-page report she’d printed out the night before.

Vogel accepted the portfolio with raised eyebrows. “Great. Why don’t you give me a few days to look this over and we’ll see about setting up something for next semester?”

“We can’t wait until next semester,” Piper cried in horror. “We have to go now!”

“I’m afraid that’s just not possible. The program—”

“Well, actually, it is possible.” Mei reached across the desk. “If you’ll look at the timeline on page three of my report, there are a few programs that don’t start until October first. You’ll see that as long as we submit the paperwork by Friday, we can be a part of this semester’s program. Plane tickets are available to our destinations and there are still openings at all of the schools. Cassidy will need to have her passport expedited and the program in Costa Rica is filling up quickly, so we need to act now.”

“Costa Rica?” Vogel asked faintly. “I thought y’all wanted to go to France.”

“Oh no,” said Piper. “We’re going to four different continents.” She slanted Mei a mischievous look. “How can we ‘broaden our horizons’ if we’re all in the same place?”

Of course, what Piper really meant was now that she’d committed herself to the International Kissing Club, she wanted all the French guys for herself. Well, really all the European guys. Mei wasn’t even sure Piper would leave her any guys in Asia to kiss—the continents were connected, after all.

Not that that was a big deal. She really wasn’t in this for the kissing, anyway.

Mei slid the last dish into the cabinet, then leaned against the kitchen counter and stared toward the living room. She couldn’t put it off any longer.

Her mom and dad both still had a little wine in their glasses. Good. Mei had the feeling her mom was going to need a drink when she heard what Mei had planned.

All day she’d thought about the right way to ask them, and she’d come to the decision that it was best just to spit it out. The more she practiced the speech, the less likely her parents were to believe that she hadn’t been plotting this for years.

She didn’t want to hurt them, didn’t want them to think she was unhappy with her life or that this was anything more than just an amazing opportunity.

But the fact of the matter was, she’d been curious for years now. Curious about China. And curious about the parents who had abandoned her because she wasn’t a boy.

She exhaled a long breath and went to join her mom and dad. A gritty guitar solo from Eric Clapton played in the background while her mom graded papers and her dad worked on his laptop.

“Do you have a lot of homework tonight, sweetheart?” her mom asked as Mei took the seat across from them.

“Not really; I finished it already.”

“That’s my Doodlebug,” her dad said without looking up from his screen.

Mei let the nickname go—it so wasn’t the time to fight that battle—then took a deep breath. Clasping her hands between her knees so she wouldn’t be tempted to chew on her nails, she blurted out, “Mom, Dad, I need to talk to you.”

Her mom looked up at once, concern accenting the tiny lines by her mouth and eyes. “Is there something wrong? Something at school?”

“No, nothing’s wrong, but it is about school, sort of.” They were watching her expectantly, so she went for it. “I would like to apply to do an academic program abroad this semester … in China.”

A very long pause followed, then her parents exchanged a glance that was easy to decipher—and that didn’t bode well for her.

“What brought this on?” her dad asked. Her mom reached for her wineglass, but seemed to otherwise remain composed.

What brought this on? Well, I’ve been haunted by the question of my birth parents for the past ten years.

Yeah. That would go over great. Though she couldn’t ever remember them saying anything aloud, Mei knew that deep down both of her parents had feared that this day would come. This was going to
require a delicate approach to avoid worrying them. “Well, the thing is …”

Her mom tipped back the glass and drained it.

Okay, forget delicate. She’d have to lie.

“Mr. Webb had us work on practice essays for the SAT, and the prompt was whether a person’s identity is something they are born with or is something people create themselves. And when I started to compose my answer, I realized I don’t really have an answer, because I don’t know who I am.”

How could she know when the only information she had about her origins was the name of the orphanage where she’d been dumped?

“Sweetheart, of course you know who you are: you’re our daughter and we love you very much,” her mom replied.

Her dad just chuckled. “Doodlebug, no one knows who they are when they’re sixteen.”