“Ash, why won’t you talk to us, sweetheart?” Mom asked me with a smile. She leaned forward and touched a hand to my arm, smiling like all mothers do when they want to sweet talk you into doing something for them. “You know we’re all here for you. We’re not here to judge you. Just tell us everything that happened, Ash. You’re really worrying us.”

“It’s starting to get annoying, Ash!” That was from my rival Gary. Because when you’re throwing a calm, quiet intervention, you should bring your son’s childhood rival who spent most of his life figuring out ways of tripping you into the mus. “Could you just open up your fat mouth and answer us?”

First of all, I’m not fat, and Gary’s a jerk. Next, I’m not going to talk. They all have that same stupid idea in their heads that I’m going to open me mouth and speak even though I haven’t for a while now. It’s not going to happen because they’re throwing a weird Make Ash Talk party. I don’t care how much that freaking electric rat of mine electrocutes me…now I feel bad for calling Pikachu that, but I’ve been getting shock treatment all week and I’m angry, I’m cranky, I’m embarrassed, and you’re not getting a freaking word out of me. If you can’t figure out why, don’t feel bad, you’re not alone. Nobody here can figure it out either…’cuz I’m awesome at hiding secrets.

I’m fifteen! It’s not like I didn’t have it coming! I grew about two feet taller, making me almost Brock’s height -- which rocks, by the way. I actually had to start washing my face every day to keep acne off even though I don’t have to shave or anything yet, and I don’t have any chest hair even though I keep looking. Oh, and I figured out that girls are actually really, really nice to look at. Now I get why Brock went insane whenever a girl walked by…well, sort of. The biggest change that all the girls have noticed is that I don’t seem to want to hang out with them anymore, especially for swimming. They love bikinis almost as much as Brock! Every time I try to go with them I feel guilty because, well, they’re putting on bikinis n’ stuff in front of me and it’s hard not to look.

At least I’m nothing like Brock with girls, thank goodness. I don’t run up to every girl I see and declare my undying love. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing? He doesn’t think so, but everyone else does, so I’m saying yes. I’m perfectly normal around girls, unlike him. I’ll fight them, I battle them, I’ll yell at them, whatever they want as long as they act normal too. But some of them are weird. Some of them are looking at me a lot and give that weird smile and they touch my arm a lot and talk really nice to me. If that happens, I start freaking out and get really red. After that, I black out. Brock says I shout something about ‘I think I hear my girlfriend calling’ and run. I tend to wake up in trees, under tables, and other strange places. Brock says he feels bad for me but I like to think of it as a great defense mechanism.

This is a deadly advantage for Misty.

A very deadly advantage.

She likes to get me flustered. She’s really good at that. She says she learned it from her sisters, and she says that that’s how she would have won that bathing suit contest if it wasn’t for James and his inflatable boobs which still kinda give me nightmares. You know, she’s practically flat – and you’re not supposed to ask a girl about that, because she’ll hit you, I found out -- and almost always in loose shirts. I don’t know how she does it. It probably has something to do with those freaking shorts. Doesn’t she wear anything but shorts? It’s as bad as the stupid mini-skirts all the girls wear when you go to the malls!

Anyway, Misty gets me flustered, and then when I’m about to run away, she grabs me, just by the wrist or whatever but she’s got the biceps of an angry Ursaring. Then, she keeps me there until I bed for some kind of mercy, which lasts about two seconds because after it happens four or five times, there really isn’t a point in trying to retain pride...plus I usually have a near blackout thing. After that, I’m free. That’s really good for me at the end. I run fast whenever she lets go. It keeps me in shape. I don’t have a six pack though. I really want one. I could probably tattoo one on.

“Come on, Ash. Talk,” Dawn probed. I shook my head so hard my hair stung my eyes so I had to close them tight and it made it look like I was trying not to cry, which only got everyone excited. “Why not? Did you lose your voice, Ash? We’ve got medicine for that. It’s the good tasting kind too, not the junk my mom gives me. Brock can make anything taste good!” I shook my head just as hard as before, except I kept my eyes closed this time so I wouldn’t get hair in them. “Then what is it!”

“Ash, what’s wrong?” Brock asked. Mew, was there anyone my mom didn’t invite? I was half expecting Ritchie and Duplica to walk through the door. Or my dad. I wonder where the heck my dad is, anyway? I don’t think he’s dead. He has to be somewhere. “Are you mad at us? Did we do something to you?”

I shook my head with a smirk, thinking of what “we” meant. Because “we” meant Misty, and Misty wasn’t there. We weren’t really sure where she was at the moment. I don’t want to know. Well, I do want to know, but only if I’ve got a camera or something.

She got hit by a hypnosis attack. Since then, she’s been running around in black leather with a Nerf gun singing the theme songs to “Mission Impossible”, “James Bond”, and, of course, “The Pink Panther”. We sent Sabrina after her. I mean, it was funny when it started. It was hilarious when it started. Then she started kicking us and hitting us guys in the privates with Nerf foam darts. She somehow figured out how to make an operational bomb and wanted to blow up a carrot patch or something. That was when we decided we needed to wake her up…because it’s not funny anymore.

Sabrina said she’d do it, and I shouldn’t bother trying to help. She could start killing us if this continued. So, we decided she could handle it. I mean, do you want to go after a psychopath? No. She could kill me. That’s probably not an exaggeration either, considering I’ve seen her do a few ninja like things, many happening while she was carrying a togepi.

“Are you worried about Misty” Mom asked, rubbing the comforting hand up and down my arm.

I snorted and shook my head with a grin, because Misty’s not the type I’d worry about.

Then Pikachu said something in Pikachu speak and did this weird little dance that I somehow figured out meant she wanted to help. So I mimed writing, and she rushed off. She understood a lot quicker than I did her, so I was jealous of that. It was a second later that she came back with a writing pad and paper. Speedy. So I petted her and she made the happy “cha” noise.

“I’m not worried for Misty. If I’m worried, it’s for the people she’s going to attack. Stop guessing. If you don’t know it by now, you’ll never get it.” That was the first note. I have good handwriting. Not as good as May’s but it’s still nice. It’s better than Misty’s or Gary’s. Her handwriting is barely legible, let alone pretty, and his is big and loopy and takes up too much space on the page.

Misty burst through the door in her old clothes, shorts and a yellow shirt. She threw her arms around the closest person available. Me. Not because I was closest, really, but because she was trying to get me flustered and freaked out again, which isn’t very nice.

“Hey, Ash, guess what I learned today?” I eyed her nervously, and wished I could say something witty about her being stupid or mean, because she really set me up for some great ones, but I didn’t want to talk and she didn’t deserve that satisfaction. “I have the strength to break a grown man’s arm. Also, leather is tight, sweaty, and doesn’t breathe. Now I know why that went out of style. It must’ve been unbearable to have on all day.”

I didn’t know leather was ever in style. I don’t think it is. I think she lied.

“Ash isn’t talking,” Brock said, and I thought ‘Gee, Brock, thanks for being a traitor’.

“Say nothing if you’re gay.” She grinned playfully and leaned forward. I was quiet, glaring up at her while my fingers drummed on the table. I don’t care if people think I’m gay, really. Who does, nowadays? I’m more concerned about dressing up like a girl. But I know what she’s using it for, so she can make a crack about me and Gary, because that’s her favorite subject and she’s convinced we have a secret affair going. “Hey, I always knew it! So, who’s your lover? I’ve always been a fan of you and Gary.”

Told you.

“I didn’t say nothing. I was silent,” I wrote in my pretty handwriting.

“You’re clever today.” She paused and looked at Max. “You don’t care if I swear, right? Because I wanted to say something else to him, if you didn’t, but I kind of thought you would.” She turned back to me, not really giving him a chance to answer and crossed her arms over her chest, releasing me from her death grip. “Fine, stay silent if you’re madly in love with Gary,” she shot back. I was smart that day, and coughed loudly. She groaned, and I think that means I won.

“Why aren’t you talking, fatty, fatty two by four, too fat to fit through the kitchen door?” I glared, because I really want a six pack and I don’t have one. There’s really no way to make fun of someone for not having a six pack, so the next best thing is to skip it all and just go for fat, which I’m not. I just don’t have a six pack. “Wow, that usually gets you to talk. This must be something really bad. What’s up with you?”

“There’s nothing wrong,” I wrote, underlined, capitalized and bubble lettered. I threw in five exclamation points too, just for good measure. “Stop asking, I’m fine, really. I’m emotionally safe. In fact, I’m cheerful. Stop asking.”

“Oh!” she gasped delightedly. “I saw this on a TV show once! You’re finally a guy, right? I knew it! It’s about time, Mr. Pokémon Master! Puberty took its sweet time to get to you, but it’s taking its toll just like it did on the rest of us, huh?”

“What do you mean?” May asked, biting her lip. I though it was a kind of random time to be biting her lip, but I’ve never really got why people do that. Anyway, the others looked just as baffled as she did. If only it could have been that way forever. Misty just had to open her big mouth though. She loves hearing herself talk. Wouldn’t that be funny if that way really why she talked? Because she thought it sounded good?

“Well, duh,” she scoffed. “Ash finally hit puberty and now his voi-oof!” I elbowed her in the ribs, hoping that it’d shut her up like it does on TV. It worked. Sort of. “That hurt…dammit,” she moaned, grabbing her stomach and doubling over like she was going to throw up. “Now you’ve got it coming.”


Oops. Never harm what you cannot kill, ‘cuz it gets mad and just tried to kill you.


“Okay, I’ve been working really hard to keep this a secret. Could you not screw this up for me? I’ve been winning!” I wrote, and it looked kind of stupid on paper, but I think it would have been better if I had said it out loud. That’s redundant, said it out loud. If you say it, you have to say it out loud, don’t you?

“Oh, really? I should help you! Did you ever help me?” she snapped and I could practically see her fingers itching to grab her mallet.

“Huh?” I wrote verbosely…I’m not really sure what that word means, but it sounds smart and I’m pretty sure it fits.

“Two years ago!” she continued to snap. There’s probably a synonym for that but I don’t know one. I don’t even know if I’m using synonym right. I hate words. “When I first learned what cramps were, you were so sympathetic to me!”  I winced. That was true. I wasn’t exactly Mr. Compassion. “You made fun of me! As I recall, you said ‘puberty’s sucks, right Misty?’ then ran off laughing! Why should I be nice to you?”

To be fair, she wasn’t nice that day. As in I thought she was going to kill me and she had already hit me and Brock with the stupid mallet eighty or so times so I had a reason, a really good reason, and I don’t think I should be blamed for that.

“I’m cute?” I scribbled. I wrote it, technically, not scribbled, but I thought I needed a new word so I wrote down scribbled instead.

“Cute my butt,” she snapped…again. Synonyms are hard. And, you know what? I know a whole lot of jokes I can make about Synonyms being hard and her butt being cute but I’m not going to make any of them because I’m nice.

But she’s not nice at all. She grabbed my arm and twisted it hard behind my back and said, “Oh, I’m pulling this stupid thing right out of its socket! I swear by all that is good I will hurt you so bad you’ll cry!”

“Ironic thing to swear by,” I thought, pretty rebelliously if I say so myself. She just had to take the right arm, didn’t she? The one I write with. That’s like tying Helen Keller’s hands together. That’s how they punished her for misbehaving. She yanked it harder and made me grunt in surprise and pain. I glared up at her, clearly asking ‘what the hell was that for?’, which doesn’t make any sense for me to ask anyway because I’m a pokeist, and I don’t believe in hell.

You know, looking back on this, I can’t help but wonder what my mom was doing, what the hell my mom was doing, actually. I mean, she’s worried over my once. Once. I’ve told her all my stories and adventures and I got kidnapped in a Mr. Mime costume and I’ve been assured loads of times that, guess what? She’s not worried. I swear, Misty could stab me with a kitchen knife and Mom would tell her to be careful not to get blood on the carpet.

“I know you were thinking something bad. You always are,” she sniffed. “Guys, Ash’s voice is changing. He doesn’t talk because he’s embarrassed.” I blushed and tried to twist away from my captor. She slammed me hard into the table (my mom didn’t seem to care and I was ever approaching the “don’t get blood on the carpet, dear” phase of my life”) and lazily sipped at a water glass on the table she had just slammed me into. I writhed, which is a pretty good word. “Down, boy. We’ve got a lot more time to waste embarrassing you.”

“That’s all?” Tracey asked.

“Why would he be embarrassed about that?” Gary snorted. “So you voice cracks once in a while. What’s the big deal? It’s not like I didn’t go through it. Max is going to go through it too. Why do you think we care so much?”

“His voice probably cracks really badly. Does it, Ash Why don’t you ask me to let you go? If you ask nicely, I’ll let you run like usual,” Misty snickered. I think she was trying to make up for kind of having her hopes crushed that everyone would assist in embarrassing me. Even better, no one cared. You know, sometimes I…never mind. She dug her nails into my arm a bit trying to get me to yelp. I didn’t. Because I’m a real man.

“Leggo,” I whispered too low to hear, and I thought it sounded very manly.

“Leggo is not a word, Ash,” she said. Maybe her hearing was better than previously imagined. I’m on a roll with words today! Yeah, I’ve got a dictionary and a thesaurus next to me, so what? Looking them up takes effort. “I don’t think anyone in the room can hear you. Wanna speak up?”

I didn’t, actually, so I just hissed in my low, manly voice, “Deaf.”

“Sorry, I can’t hear you. I must be going deaf or something.”  Which is one of the meanest things you can do while holding a person down painfully. You shouldn’t add insult to injury. I mean, she had me pinned against the table, I don’t see what else she wanted.

I managed to grab the pen and paper and scribble a surprisingly readable sentence with my left hand. She leaned over my shoulder to read it, and it sounded like a badly written script from a cops show. “If you let me up, I’ll talk. I promise and you’ve got it in writing, even if you can’t read it. It’s not my fault I can only write with my left hand right now.”

“You can read that?” Brock asked.

Please, of course she can. She reads her own handwriting, and that’s way worse than me writing with my left hand. We can’t even send letters anymore. It’s impossible to tell if she’s writing or sending a coded message. She sent e-mails instead. At least then I could respond without asking her what she just wrote. Gary could read it too, I bet, if he care enough to try.

“Yeah, I’m pretty good with handwriting.” It was a decent lie, but I snorted. She yanked my arm again. “Fine, Ash, you’ve got a deal. But you better say it loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. A deal is a deal.” She released me.

I stood and fixed myself for a while, eyeing her hair band. I figured if I took that blue beauty out of her hair she’d get pretty mad. Maybe she’d leave me alone, though. She did hate to have her hair down. Something about it getting in her face. So, I snatched it. “Thank you!” I shouted, glad my voice didn’t crack too badly on the words. If I was ever going to try for a sentence, however, I’d be screwed.

“Ash!” she shouted. “I just ran around for three days in the hot sun in a leather suit! You do not want to make me angry right now!” Looking back, sticking my tongue out and racing out the door was probably not the most effective course of action. In fact, it was probably the worst thing I could’ve done in that situation, short of slamming my head on the doorframe as I went, which I did. Oh well, accidents happen, right? As long as I learned from my mistakes, and survived them, what’s the harm?

I did manage to make it to the Viridian Forest before I was tackled and sent rolling around in the leaves and grass. Usually the win/lose rate for me is 1/999. I’m usually the one who ends up with her nails digging into my back while she uses pain to make me eat dirt and lots of other objects I don’t want to eat.

Before you ask, this time wasn’t any different. Except, I managed to keep my face up. Instead of the painful, gross clay in my mouth, I was in pain, awkward and slightly pleased with my position. If nothing else, it was a delight to see Misty blush when she snatched back the band and swept it into her hair, still sitting on my chest with her knees pushing my elbows into the warm grass.

She looked very uncomfortable, but cleared her throat and shifted on top of me. I swallowed, that was uncomfortable. Why did she have to sit on top of me? She already knew I had hit puberty, and that really wasn’t helping my case. Where was Pikachu when I needed her, huh? She had to try and make me uncomfortable by not being here, leaving us alone…both of us had hit puberty already. Who leaves pubescent children alone, really?

“Well, talk Ash. We had a deal,” she snapped, and I learned I hate my thesaurus because it doesn’t have any good words for this. “I let you up, now you’ve got to say something, now say something interesting!” If she hadn’t had me pinned the way she did, I probably could’ve jumper cabled her off. Just poked her sides until she bounced off of me. But no, she just sat there all proud of herself.

She was pretty, kinda. Just a little, though. Not very pretty. She needed a haircut, I guess. When it was down it had fallen a little past her shoulders. Now that it was back up it just fell down. It couldn’t stay spiked up like it used to, because it was kind of greasy now and she had to wash it a lot and all the stuff she did to it made it sort of flat in her ponytail. She hated that, even though it did look nice. Her hair was covered with leaves too. Her face and clothes, like mine, we streaked with mud and who knew what else. I didn’t. I really didn’t want to know. But the thing was, she just looked like Misty.

It’s just that, well, Misty never looked pretty before.

“Sorry I took your hair tie.” I blushed. My voice cracked in that sentence. Actually, it cracked twice. She burst into a giggling fit, and I got all hot tempered. “What? Do you think that puberty is funny! This is something every boy goes through, Misty. You shouldn’t be laughing at me. That’s just mean.” My voice dropped low this time, the tone it would supposedly be when all the leaping stopped. Well, the cracking didn’t stop that fast, but Misty’s giggling did. Her eyes widened, but I was still mad so I continued, “What are you so surprised about?”

“Your voice went low.” She blinked. “It was really…” She swallowed and blushed, forcing herself to recover.

“It was really what?” I asked, trying to sit up a bit. It didn’t work. She was very good at keeping me pinned.

“You sounded like a guy for once in your life.” She giggled at me. The surprised, dazed look vanished from her face. “Maybe when this is all over you won’t be able to dress up like Ashley anymore!”

“I always sound like a guy!” I snapped. My voice cracked high this time and, of course, I ended up sounding a lot like Ashley. She grinned knowingly. “Okay, that doesn’t count. My voice is changing, Misty. It’s bad enough without you making fun of me.”

“You made fun of me,” she countered, and that’s when I realized that this all pretty much boiled down to her grudge. Perhaps you find that blown out of proportion, but this is the same girl who stalked me across the countryside for a bike.

“You were in pain,” I said pointedly. “I thought laughter might help you feel better. Laughing when someone’s embarrassed never makes you feel better about yourself. It makes you want to crawl in a hole and die.”

“Ash, that’s a nice thought, but it’s really a bad thing to do. That’s the biggest difference between girls and guys! How they want to be treated when they’re in pain! Guys usually shrug it off and laugh about it once they finish screaming. Girls usually want you to feel bad for us because we feel crappy. We’re psychotic, Ash. Last week Daisy and I burned a bunch of feminine supply products, four boxes and pads and seven boxes of tampons, because of the motto on the back!” She paused and narrowed her eyes. “Happy period, my ass. Still, doesn’t change the fact that you guys are completely useless when you’re sick.”

“Sorry, Misty. I didn’t know,” I defended, and it was a good defense because it wasn’t a lie. “I meant well!” She muttered something along the lines of “well, you should’ve, fatty” and turned her head away from me. “Er, Misty, just wondering, could I get up now?”

“No,” she said brightly. She leaned back but kept me pinned, giving me more room to breathe. “But I’ll get off your chest a bit. Aren’t I the sweetest, kindest girl you’ve ever met, Ash?”

“No,” I snorted.

“Hey!”

“Well, it’s true. I’m still embarrassed and now I’m bruised. Look at me! I just know that my cheek is turning that gross yellow green color.” Of course, I really couldn’t. It didn’t matter because I wasn’t actually hurt. If I was, I couldn’t feel it. Having a girl sitting on my chest was distracting me from any pain I might’ve felt before. See, hormones do have their advantages sometimes. Hoorah for hormones! Then she shifted and I felt kind of tingly which made me hate those damned hormones again. That made me realize hormones were the reason I was an emotional train wreck and hated them even more. Basically, hormones suck. Why do we even have them? I don’t want kids yet, so I really shouldn’t need these for a while.

“You can’t see your cheek!”

“Can too.” I smirked.

“Well, what do you want me to do about it then?” Her eyes were narrowed, but she still looked fun, not angry. “Do you need me to run home and get your mommy to kiss it better for you? I can do that for the big baby.”

“No, you don’t have to do that! That’s why I have you around!” I was actually trying to make a reference to her being a mother hen sometimes, but that wasn’t the way it came out and it ended up sounding like I wanted to kiss her while she was pretending to be my mom or something, which is actually really weird and perverted.

“Ash!” she gasped, blushing. “You’re such a pervert!”

“What’s the matter? Are you scared to kiss me?” I said, kind of glad to have my ego fixed up a bit. Now I’m going to say everything that happened next was completely and totally my idea. I knew what she would do, oh yeah, sure I did. I wasn’t just being a smart ass, it was all part of an elaborate plan to escape. Do you believe me? I wouldn’t. Misty lies more than me, but I think I’m still a good liar even if I don’t get much practice.

“I’m not scared!” she shouted, holding up her fists defensively. That was my signal (all part of my plan) to quickly scramble out from under her and pin her to the ground instead. “Hey! Ash! You get off of me right now, Ketchum! I’m going to call Officer Jenny and charge you with rape and watch you get the death sentence!”

“You shouldn’t use that term loosely,” I said. Okay, it wasn’t exactly those words but it was something like that and this sounds way more manly. Artistic license, y’know? My voice surprised me again. It decided that it liked being low, not that I was complaining. My mom always did say I had a deep voice like my father’s. I never thought it’d actually be deeper than Brock’s. Well, maybe not deeper, but at least as deep. I dunno. I think it’s deeper than Gary’s. I think it is. I think that makes me better than him, and I should get a prize.

“I’m not using it loosely!” she shouted.

“I haven’t raped you!”

“Rape is any unwanted touch,” she retorted, “and you’re kind of pinning me, right?

“Yes, but don’t you want me to touch you?” I said in what I think was a pretty wickedly kind of voice. What was even more shocking (hey, I finally said that without it being a pun!) was how Misty reacted to it. She just blushed really, really badly. It wasn’t the little kid fits she used to have. This was the bridge of her nose to the very tips of her ears completely and totally scarlet blush. She was breathing fast, her eyes were wide. This time she actually did look scared. She couldn’t have thought I’d actually rape her? She licked dry lips and looked at anything but me, mostly a gray rock a few feet away. She was probably wondering if she could manage to reach it from her spot and beat me to death. I hope that espionage phase wouldn’t pay off.

I tried to remember when the last time was that I had finally managed to pin her down. It probably wasn’t since we were ten. I decided that since my new, suave deep voice seemed to get her flustered, maybe I could use this to my advantage. You know what I mean, have some fun before it cracked again.

“Boy, is your face red.” I grinned. I leaned forward, putting more weight on her hands to keep her from sitting up. This also got me really, really close to her ear, and I decided to act like all those guys I’ve seen when my mom and Misty and May and Dawn and every other girl I’ve met sits down to watch one of those really stupid romantic movies. “How come you’re blushing so bad, Mist?”

“Shove off, Ash,” she muttered, not looking up at me. “You finally won, are you happy now? I’m still better at this than you. You’re usually that one that gets pinned. You’re weak, I’m strong, that’s the way it works. Next time I’ll win, just like usual. Let me up and let it go!” She stuck her tongue out at me.

“You really like to climb on top of me, don’t you?” I whispered with a chuckle, and that’s an innuendo which I think I pulled off really well. She shivered. She actually shivered! Thank goodness she wasn’t looking up, or I would’ve completely lost it. I was red, fighting back giggles, but the expression on her face was priceless. It wasn’t very nice, but it was her turn to feel awkward and uncomfortable. Hey, when it comes to revenge either one of us would do anything, no matter how compromising it looked. And, wow, did this ever look bad.

“Ha ha, Ash.” She wasn’t laughing. She just sort of deadpanned the ‘ha ha’. “ You made your first sexual innuendo. Aren’t you just so clever? Never mind that I’ve been making them since before I met you. Would you please get off of me now?”

“Why won’t you look at me, Misty?” I asked. “Do I offend you? Am I really that ugly that you can’t look at me? Or maybe it’s something else. What is it Misty? Tell me why.”

“Because!”

“Because why?” I pressed.

“Just because!” she growled. “Shut up and get off before I call for Officer Jenny! They can hear everything you know! All it takes is for me to raise my voice a little louder and they’ll all come running! I’ve got a voice that carries!”

I dropped my voice down as low as it could go. It felt weird, like it shouldn’t go that far down, but could. It made my cheeks heat too, mostly because it was kind of embarrassing to talk like that, and partly because it was starting to get really embarrassing to be this close to Misty. “Is it because you find this voice sexy?” I laughed in  my weird deep voice. It was weird, but comfortable, sorta. I didn’t mind it, but it’d be too much work to talk like that all the time. It sounded very cool. Her breath stopped. “You do?”

“No! Ash Ketchum and sexy!” She snorted loudly. “Ash Ketchum and sexy don’t even belong in the same…” She looked up at me, taking breaths so slow and deep they were pushing me up and down. “…sentence.” She gasped and licked her lips again. It was almost as if she was starstruck. I usually only see her look like that when she talks about France or chocolate. She closed and opened her eyes, the look disappearing instantly. “So, get off of me, Ash. You’re too fat.

“You know you want me.” I laughed again. She looked very uncomfortable as she tried to wriggle out from under me. It was a strange mixture of surprise and delight when she couldn’t. Maybe I was stronger than I thought…or fatter. I don’t think I’m fat. Just because I don’t have a six pack…I’m kind of circling back to that, aren’t I?

“As if! You make my stomach turn,” she said, pulling a face like she smelled something bad. I smelled good. I’d gotten out of the shower four hours ago. I smelled like manly body wash…and grass stains and mud, but that was besides the point. “With you this close to me it’s a miracle I’m able to keep my lunch down. Hey, did I even eat lunch in the past few days?”

“Don’t try to change the subject. How do you know that nauseous feeling you get isn’t just those butterfree in your stomach feeling you get right before some handsome boy kisses you?” I grinned. “After all, we both know you’ve never been kissed before.”

“What?” she gasped.

“Oh, you have been kissed before?” I said, and I believed she had, but it was more fun to pretend to mock her and get her really mad and get all her engines running and that stuff.

“Yes!”

“I don’t believe you.” I do like lying.

“Well I have! How pathetic do you think I am?” She glared. I don’t know a good word to replace that one either. I’ve used it a lot. “I’ve kissed lots of guys before! You haven’t kissed a lot of girl though, have you? You only managed to steal a kiss from some legendary turned human!”

“That’s good,” I sighed with pretend relief. “You’d be so ticked if I stole your first kiss. You’d probably give me a concussion or something the second I let you up. You might even cry. That’s way worse than a concussion!”

“What are you talking about?” Misty gasped, her voice cracking with nervousness and embarrassment. At least, what I’m guessing was nervousness and embarrassment. “Are you insane?”

“Hey, Misty. Maybe you’re going through puberty too.” I chuckled. I’ve never been really all that great with words. In fact, I’m really crappy with words and I swore right then to prove I have a bad vocabulary. So I just leaned forward and well…I kissed her. She managed to gasp right before our lips connected. Then she was shaking. She was shaking really badly. I was shaking too. It was as if it was negative seventeen degrees and we were both in our underwear. Similes are hard. Mine sound stupid. At least you can look up synonyms. I pulled back quick and rolled off of her, panting. My heart screamed in pain in my chest. It was beating too hard. My stomach twisted in that way they called butterfree. Sure, butterfree…

…on freaking steroids.

“Ash?” She was breathless. That was a very nice voice on her. How could she possibly find my voice sexy when just a gasped could do this to me? I was shivering and she wasn’t even that close. I wasn’t looking at her, and if I knew her like I thought I did, she wasn’t looking at me either. It was way too embarrassing for either of us to handle. “Ash, did you just-?”

“Yeah,” I cut her off quickly. “Don’t say kiss. I can say it, but you can’t. Let’s just talk about it while avoiding the K word or else something very bad will happen. I know what it is, and if I say it, it’ll happen. Just don’t say kiss.”

“Talk about it? Why in hell should we talk about it!” I’m pretty sure Misty’s pokeist too, so as for her saying hell I don’t really know. “We need to keep our eyes off of each other and avoid each other for a week or six or twenty and pretend that this never, ever happened! It didn’t happen” She continued in a softer voice, “Don’t look, just walk. We definitely do not need to do this, now or ever.”

Eh, I never listen to her. Well, I listen, I just don’t care about what she’s saying if she’s saying something I don’t like. If she says don’t look at her, I’m going to look at her. She still doesn’t seem to get that. I looked at her and I’m pretty sure I felt what most would call their head spinning. She was looking with her face tilted a bit away from me. I could barely see her lips, should’ve taken a magnifying glass to see them at this angle. I saw them though, and I crawled closer to her.

“But I want to talk about it. That just totally changed our lives!” Which was probably an exaggeration, but that’s what you do when you hit puberty. Exaggerate. Everything is supposed to be bigger and better than what it actually is. That’s so you can disappoint yourself when you hit your forties and realize life’s actually pretty pointless.

“That did not just change our lives!” She gasped. She seemed to be doing a lot of that. Her hands snapped to her lap and wrung there nervously. “It was an accident, a horrible, horrible accident that wasn’t important to either of us. Not life changing at all.”

“Changed mine,” I said simply.

“You’re so witty today, aren’t you?” She smirked. She had to move those lips of hers, didn’t she? It made my mouth go dry. “How many smart things have you said? Maybe you’ve been hanging out with Gary too much. He’s starting to wear off on you.” She turned her head and froze, our faces very close. “When the hell did you get over here? What happened to no looking at each other?”

“Hey, Mist.” I smiled. Her eyes flicked down to my lips. Her face blushed and she looked back at my eyes, staring at them hard, not like she was trying to see my soul or anything, but like she was trying to stop them from moving anymore. “With that look on your face I can only imagine what you’re thinking about,” I said triumphantly. My voice was cracking high again. She smiled at that. Oh, that twist of her lips was torturous. “Hey, Misty? I was wondering about something. And I really want to ask but I’m afraid that…”

“Go on,” she encouraged.

“Would you hate me if I kissed you again? Because I really, really want to kiss you again.” I swallowed a nervous lump in my throat. I wanted to tackle her into the ground and kiss her so badly, really badly. If she said that word, I didn’t know what I would do. It would probably be something I’d get in a lot of trouble for.

“Kiss me?” she asked. Maybe she would’ve said no. Maybe she would’ve said yes. There’s really no way to know because I answered it for her. I leaned forward as fast as she could and kissed her again.

I’m not really sure what I did at first. I just pushed on her lips really hard, not really knowing how the kissing stuff worked. Then she gently pushed back, her hand slowly coming to rest on my knee. We pulled away. “What do we do after that?” I asked. “You’re the expert here. What did you do?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. It was almost as if she was afraid to wreck the quiet. “I mean, I know what’s at the end of a relationship--” we flushed “--but I’ve never kissed more than what we just did. I’ve asked people about it, but no one will tell me. Some people laugh. My sisters just get red and run away. Or laugh. Or some combination of the two.”

“So…should we just go with it?”I swallowed.

She nodded weakly and we tried again. We pressed and then…then our lips started moving. It was strange, I guess, but really nice. It was tingly, y’know? We pulled each other closer and pushed even harder. Suddenly, my body did something I didn’t know it was capable of thinking of, because I never would have thought of it before. It’s weird, and I don’t really know if it’s normal but…I dunno, My tongue went it her mouth and back out really fast. Misty made this strange, strangled, almost moaning kind of noise and we pulled back again, her beat red.

“What was that?”

“I don’t know!” she said, ducking her head away.

“What do you mean you don’t know? You made the sound didn’t you? You were the one who had to do that weird noise. Why did you do that? Don’t you know? There’s got to be some reason! You’ve always got a reason for shooting your big mouth off!”

“Why did you shove your tongue in my mouth?” She challenged back, thinking she had won. No, I had an answer for everything today.

“Because I thought I was supposed to! My body just did it, I didn’t ask it to! I was just going with it, like I said we were going to do! So hurry up and make up an answer as to why you…you did whatever you did!”

“I dunno. I guess you must have done something right, Ash. I’m all shivery. I’ve got goose bumps all over and that sound I made.” She bit her lip self-consciously, and I know girls bite their lips because of that. “It didn’t exactly sound unhappy.”

We cooled down for a minute, then I began to giggle.”You moaned!  I can’t believe I made you moan!”

“I know!” she yelped. “I can’t believe I did that! It felt so…so good though, Ash! It was different but really, really nice.” She was almost moaning again, closing her eyes and apparently remembering the sensation. “Mew, this is really scary. I don’t even know why we’re doing this. Aren’t you scared?”

“No. Why should I be? Why are you scared?” I asked. “Is it because you, uh…you liked it?”

“Yeah,” she gulped. “And because I really want to do it again. It…it’s not just that, I need to. It’s like it’s addictive. I mean…” She made a frustrated sound and tackled me. Her covered her lips with mine and shoved her tongues down my throat in a tingly, electrifying way. I made a noise a lot like hers, and that felt weirder than talking deep. “See what I mean?”

“No more interruptions.”

I moved up and she moved down and we started doing the really fun lip moving tongue thing again. I was too afraid to do anything but keep my hands on her knees, completely still. Her hands found their way under my shirt, timidly gripping and releasing the flesh she found. It took a minute to realize she was trying not to hurt me. I grabbed her hands and made them dig into my skin as a hint, you know, because it was sort of like I had an itch and she wasn’t really scratching it. That’s when she bit me. It was soft at first, on my bottom lip. Then she made her way down to my neck, kissing, and bit down hard. I gasped. That was probably the weirdest feeling of all. Some weird pain and pleasure swirl together in a way that made my eyes shoot open.

It probably wasn’t very smart to say, but I couldn’t help but snap, “Damn, are you a vampire or something?”

“I should stop,” she said, pulling back and reddening.

“No, I was just kidding. That felt good,” I argued, sitting up and sending her tumbling off of me. “Can we try that again? Just kiss and bite and all that kind of stuff. It’s fun. Really fun.”

“No! Ash, we’re going to leave marks!” She flushed. “Everyone’s going to know what we were doing! They’ll see the bruises!”

“I’ll say I fell,” I begged, my voice had settled into its original tone. “Please, Misty?” I laid down next to her and kissed her neck lightly, sort of going down the line until I had to pull at her shirt a bit. Her breath caught when I gave a playful nip on her collarbone.

“No,” she said, not really sounding like she meant it. “We can’t do this, Ash. Everyone will see? How are you going to explain obvious bite marks? They look a lot different than falling down bruises. ‘Oh, I was just playing with Ash and I bit him.’ Nothing weird there! Nobody will ever question that logic!” she shouted, sitting up.

“You have cover up, don’t you?”

“Cover up?”

“Yeah, cover up. Just use a whole bunch of makeup and wear turtlenecks or something. I’m going away to a chilly region. I can wear a scarf. No one’ll ever know.” I sat up and tugged her ear with her teeth. “Let’s play, Misty.”

She giggled, punching my shoulder. “You’re getting good at those words. You should stop listening to Brock so much.”

“Can I try something?” I asked. “It won’t leave a mark, I swear.” She sighed and nodded. I brought her close and kissed her, making sure she was occupied while one hand sneaked under her shirt. I unsnapped her bra easily, giggling when Misty fell away from me, screaming my name in surprise.

“Are you insane?” she snapped, fumbling to fix her bra and get the clasps behind her back. “You’re such a guy! Why’d you go and do that?”

I shrugged. “You’ve got my old hat. Can’t I have a souvenir?”

Yeah, yeah. She hit me in the head with a mallet. But it was worth it, especially since I’ve got a reminder of her in the bottom of my backpack, which just so happens to be pink with yellow flowers on it.

The blackmail is incredible.