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headsets, enjoying Latino movies and TV shows while the rest of us struggled.
    I was pretty good at Spanish but nevertheless had somehow gotten the idea in my head to ask Cruz if he would help me out with a conversation session a couple of evenings a week. I waited till everyone else had left the language lab and poked my head around the half-wall that separated the regular desks from the multimedia section.
    Cruz was engrossed in a movie. No idea what it was. My brain was in some kind of cloud when I knocked on the back of his chair like it was a door. He snapped out of his tunnel vision and yanked off his headphones.
    “Hey, Kari.”
    “Hey. Cómo está?” I ventured, proud of my effort.
    He smiled, waited a second, then corrected me. “You mean, ‘Cómo estás?’”
    “Oh,” I responded, crestfallen.
    “’Cause we’re close. I mean ... you know me, so, like, you gotta use the familiar part of the verb,” he explained, pushing his chair back and turning off the movie.
    “Right ...” I nodded. I actually thought I was going to impress him. Fat chance. I rolled my eyes, annoyed with myself. I decided to focus on my shoes while I gathered the courage to ask him. “So... I’m, like, totally into Spanish and, you know, I thought it might be fun to, like, study together? I mean, just talk, chat or whatever. Hang out and, like, shoot the breeze...in... Spanish. One evening. Sometime.”
    Oh . Em. Gee. I was barely able to string a couple of sentences together in English, let alone Spanish.
    I looked up at him. Only then did I realize that even though he had seemed to be watching the movie, he had a pencil in his hand and a sketch pad on the desk.
    He put the pencil down and responded, “Yeah, I’m down with that.”
    “ Awesome!” I beamed back at him.
    “I gotta get some shit done at home tonig ht, but sure – maybe tomorrow?”
    The pencil he’d been using was rolling slowly toward the edge of his desk. He didn’t notice its movement and it seemed like an eternity passed as it completed five or six revolutions before plummeting to the floor. Cruz saw the pencil out the corner of his eye as it fell. He made a lunge for it, but was just too late. As he jerked forward, the back of his chair pushed the sketch pad off the desk too. It fell open at a drawing, and he froze. Even upside-down I could tell that the image was a likeness of me. Not just me, but a ridiculously perfect version of my face. Like the doodles pinned up inside Cruz’s locker, the sketch was incredibly symmetrical. Disturbingly so.
    He scrambled to pick up the pad, but he knew that I’d seen it. And I knew that he knew that I’d seen it. Regaining his cool, he bent down and closed the pad. He placed it back on the desk and leaned back in his chair, somehow expectant.
    I remember feeling a wave of emotion wash over me. What was it? This was something I’d never felt before. Cruz’s eyes met mine for an instant and I held them. Heat coursed through my veins. Through my arteries. My stomach tightened but there was only one thought in my mind: kiss him. Kiss him like you’ve never kissed any guy before. Like the rest of the world doesn’t matter.
    So I did, and sure enough the rest of the world melted away. The kiss was as electric as the shivers that ran down my spine. I closed my eyes as he closed his. His lips were warm and soft. Time stopped completely. I was lost in the moment and the moment was lost in our kiss. No idea whether it was seconds or minutes, but eventually our lips parted and our eyes opened. But we were still entranced by the rush of magic we’d felt. Our faces were inches apart, mine slightly above his as he leaned back in his chair. My hair fell around my face, the ends brushing against his chest.
    A first kiss is always special, but this was beyond believable. It was as though my brain had been unanchored. I was floating. I looked down at my hand, still gripping Cruz’s forearm. Suddenly there was a noise – a