The regular old boy-meets-girl tale with a little bit of a smoky twist.

    Kissing Madison Parker is like taking a long drag on a cigarette.
    You know you shouldn’t, you know it’ll only hurt you, you know what you know and everyone knows what they all know. But you can’t help it. You just can’t. It’s called the Madison Effect, as if kissing Madison Parker were a particularly dangerous science that everyone fails in primary school.
    Not that I would know. I’ve never been a link on her chain of heartstrings she carries around like a trophy. But everyone’s heard the stories the same way passersby watch a car crash. I know. I know what I know.
    But knowing doesn’t prepare me for the day I walk into school and find Madison Parker herself leaning up against my locker, dark red lipstick curving her mouth into just one part of a smile.
    “Hey, Madison,” I greet warily, approaching her in the same way a puppy that knows he’s about to be kicked approaches a serial killer. Serial heartbreaker, more like, but you get my point. Madison Parker is a menace and I can’t afford to drop my guard around the girl.
    “Hey,” she says back. That’s it. Just hey. No why, hello there, innocent little boy figure, wanna make out with a vampire this fine British morning? A monosyllable is all I get.
    Disappointment settles on my tongue, but I push it aside and nod at the metal door she’s currently blocking with her tiny mass. “You’re kind of in the way. No offense,” I add a beat too late.
    “Am I?” The lipstick twitches up on the other side, too.
    I sigh. “Yeah. Sorry.”
    She just shrugs and twists a single finger in her long chestnut hair. Stares at me.
    All this staring is making my insides feel panicky.
    “Um. So, um, do you maybe want to move over? I hear the neighboring locker is totally free and probably lonely,” I suggest. “Bonus for not having my stuff in it.”
    “Nathan, do you think I’m pretty?” Madison Parker asks me.
A girl asking a boy if he thinks she’s pretty is not like smoking for your first time. It’s like murder all over again, an innocent looking bullet with a perfect cherry coating aimed right at your heart and the trigger to make it hit the lights on your common sense are the words
    “Yeah. Of course,” I say too soon. The finger curling her hair stops for a moment, then keeps going like I hadn’t just committed verbal suicide. Awesome. And there goes my dignity.
    “Then why are you scared of talking to me? Is it because I’m pretty?”
    Yes, I think. “I’m not scared of you, Madison,” I say.
    “But you don’t talk to me.”
    “Right. Because you don’t talk to me.” Unless she’s standing in front of my passage to learning. Smiling cigarettes that want to be told they’re pretty kind of take precedence over class in these situations.
    But she’s not smiling now. Her hand drops down to her side and her lips drop down into a little pout that happens to be a direct cause of the Madison Effect. “Maybe I was waiting for you to talk first,” she points out.
    “That is a valid argument that I have neither the time nor the willpower to debate.”
    “So I win?”
    I sigh. “Yeah. Sorry.”
    Madison Parker always wins.
    “I’m not asking you to be vain,” she says, moving on from her victory without even savoring the sensation of it. “I just wanted to know. I know people here don’t think very much of me.”
    Ah, so she’s caught on to her reputation. “Well, you are. And that’s what I think, so can I just get past you for a second--”
    “So I’m pretty. What else?”
    “What else?” I look her over, my heart thump thump thumping in my chest so loud I’m certain she can hear it. Why is she asking me all these questions? When did I, loner and weirdo and all-around nerd extraordinaire, suddenly become interesting? When did my opinion suddenly become so important to Madison Parker, of all people?
    But she’s looking at me with those big hazel eyes and twisting that single strand of chestnut hair around her long, slender finger. The black nail polish on that finger is chipped around the edges and, for some reason, that makes me weak at the knees. Oh, she’s just as good as they say.
    “You’re pretty. You’re funny. Um, you’re one of very few people who can actually hold up their end of an intelligent conversation. You...make awkward people nervous when you stand in front of their lockers and do that to your hair.” I look pointedly at her finger, then back up to her eyes.
    She’s still staring at me. Why the hell is she still staring at me?
    “How can you see all those things,” she asks casually, like this is in any way a normal conversation to have, “but have no idea that you’re like that, too?”
    Now I’m the one staring. The first thought that comes into my mind is the Madison Effect is real. Unfortunately, the second is the one that comes out of my mouth. “You think I’m pretty, Madison?” I respond warily.
    She laughs, her dark cherry lips widening into a grin. “Don’t be stupid,” she tells me.
    I sigh. “Yeah. Sorry.”
    “And stop saying you’re sorry. You don’t have to always be sorry, Nathan.” She shakes her head and steps to the side. “There’s your freaking locker. Now will you stop whining?”
    I do stop whining, actually. But I don’t open my locker, either.
    The Madison Effect is real. I know because it’s happened to me.
    Instead of messing with my locker and finding my books and sprinting to class while I think up an excuse as to why I’m late for Maths, I take Madison Parker’s hand away from her hair and I kiss her. She doesn’t react for a long moment, a moment that last for just long enough to freak me out perfectly, and then she closes her big brown eyes and closes her fingers around mine.
    The Madison Effect is real. I know because it’s happened to me. The Madison Effect kept me busy all through the screaming bell and the running freshman and the hollering teacher telling us to get to class and keep a five foot distance between our faces while we’re at it because the Madison Effect is not appropriate for school settings. But I’m kind of okay with that.
    Kissing Madison Parker is also a lot better than cigarettes.