Cold Kiss

slouch down to get my French notebook out of my backpack while Mr. Rokozny calls roll. Madame Hobart is quizzing us on the imperfect tense today, and I fell asleep watching a rerun of some reality show before I even thought about studying.
    I raise my hand silently when Mr. Rokozny calls my name, and it’s only when he pauses after Cleo Darnell’s name to say, “Gabriel DeMarnes?” that I look up.
    Twenty-two pairs of eyes are trained on the kid in the very back of the room. Even Rokozny is squinting at him from above the morning’s roll. This far into October, it’s weird to find a new kid in homeroom.
    “That’s me,” the boy says, and Audrey Diehl sits up a little straighter, head tilted in appreciation.
    He’s tall—I can tell even though he’s hunched over his desk, because his long legs stick out into the faded linoleum of the aisle. His hair is the color of clean sand, and even short it’s sort of messy. He’s all angles, planes, a geometry proof of a boy in a wrinkled yellow button-down and faded jeans, and when I drag my gaze away from the long, slender fingers splayed loose over his thigh, I blink in surprise.
    Because even with everyone in the room checking him out, he’s staring right at me.
    Gabriel DeMarnes is everywhere that day, like a bad smell. Gabriel DeMarnes and his odd gray-blue eyes, which are focused on me way too often.
    He takes the empty seat beside me in trig, dropping the battered textbook Ms. Nardini gives him on the desk with a thud . He has a notebook and a single pencil, but he doesn’t touch either one of them, Whenever he’s not pretending to listen to Ms. Nardini ramble on about ratio identity, he’s looking at me out of the corner of his eye.
    It makes me itchy in all the wrong ways, heart beating too fast and too hard, like a rabbit, and a dangerous electric tension humming under my skin. He’s making me nervous, which is making me angry, because he’s just a boy, a stupid new boy who doesn’t know anyone and is probably fascinated by something equally stupid, like my beat-up purple Chucks or the fading black heart Danny drew in Sharpie on the back of my left hand two days ago.
    But the sixth time I manage to turn my head and actually catch him staring, it’s obvious that he’s not looking at any of that. He’s looking at me, and somehow he’s seeing past what I’ve got on, past my hair and the trio of silver hoops in my right ear.
    Except it’s more than that. Even though I haven’t said a word to him, he looks like he’s listening to me. His head is tilted to one side, and he’s concentrating, squinting a little bit, like he’s trying to catch something he can’t quite hear, and the loose end of that coiled electricity snaps rough over my nerves.
    “What?” I hiss, and the globe at the front of the room falls off its stand with a crash.
    I swallow hard and fix my eyes on my desk as Ms. Nardini gasps in surprise. “Okay, well, that was weird,” she says with a nervous laugh. She’s pretty much fresh out of college, where she was a sorority girl if the rumors are true, and she always follows her lesson plan like she’s got a gun to her head.
    She’s still examining the globe for cracks when I sneak a glance at Gabriel.
    He’s smiling.
    By the time he walks into history during seventh period, I’m seething. That makes three classes we have together, not counting homeroom. Three hours of him watching me, head tilted, hair flopping over his forehead and hiding his cool eyes when I glance at him.
    I prop my head in my hand, doing my best to keep the furious simmer of energy inside me under control. So far the only other casualty has been a lightbulb in Madame Hobart’s French classroom, but it’s getting harder to ignore that hum. My free hand twitches into a fist on my lap, nails digging into my palm, and the sting slices through the urge to let that current roll up out of me and explode.
    If Mr. Dorsey gives homework, I have no idea what it is. I’m the first one out of the room when the bell rings.
    Darcia’s waiting when I walk into World Lit, chewing on a hank of her dark hair, her feet propped on her seat and one arm wrapped around her knees.
    “Did you finish the reading?”
    “I skimmed,” I say, and drop into my chair. If Gabriel walks into this class, I’m going to have to throw myself on Darcia to make sure she’s not hit by the shrapnel.
    She doesn’t say anything until I’ve dug my notebook out of my backpack. When I