“He thinks you’re hot, you know,” my friend tells me.

He’s the boy with the Brillo pad hair and the biceps locked in a permanent flex. He’s a chauvinist to his sister and a burnout in school, but it’s summer and sweaty and something dangerous is burning my lips.

Tabasco sauce. That’s what it feels like. Tabasco sauce is all over my lips, and my mind registers the burn but my body doesn’t care. My body likes it.

My friend says something else, but I don’t care to hear her. My skin is hot in that drowsy way and something hazy is blurring my vision. I smell deodorant, sickly sweet, artificial. My toenails aren’t painted. I think it looks kind of sexy.

My friend wants to know what I’m going to do. She wants a scandal, something to gossip about, and I don’t blame her. I blame the new push-up bra exploding from my chest, like a double kite flying in the haze. It’s a dangerous contraption, that bra, like a robot in a sci-fi movie who vows to destroy Earth. I’m a dangerous, Tabasco sauce-covered girl and I like it.