Disclaimer: Do not own. Dig?

Note: If it tells you anything, which I doubt it does, I was making boeuf bourguignon when I came up with this idea (weird, right? Apparently most people ::cough:: get their ideas in the shower) and wrote it in an evening. I hope you enjoy it just as much as I'm enjoying my food. :)

Thanks: HedgehogQuill and Megfly, for staying up late to read this and making me feel super special. :)

—viennacantabile

seven kisses

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A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That's basic spelling that every woman ought to know.

—Mistinguett

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first

Graziella's first kiss tastes like cigarettes and sweat. It's awkward: lips fumbling and teeth knocking and the unnerving feel of someone else's mouth locked on hers and someone else's hands pressing into her body as she waits in the darkened movie theater for it to be over.

The thing is: for a thirteen year-old, Graziella talks big, sure, but it's the first time anyone has ever really kissed her. And as Action lets go of her waist and settles nonchalantly back into his seat, arm draping loosely around her shoulders, Graziella's reaction is not happiness, but a more incredulous that's it? It's not what it looks like onscreen, that's for sure. There are no fireworks, literal or figurative, to make the moment magical, no beautiful hour of perfection to remember forever. So when Clarice and Bernice clamor for details the next day, all Graziella can do is shrug.

"It was just a kiss," she says. "I don't see what all the fuss is about."

If she says it often enough, Graziella figures, maybe she'll believe it.

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perfect

Minnie's first kiss is chaste and sweet and over far too soon, and Clarice, hearing all about it the next day at lunch, squeals.

"Oh, Minnie, it sounds wonderful!" she exclaims happily, clapping her hands over her carton of milk.

Minnie blushes, because it's true, and keeps blushing for a week straight as she adapts to post-first kiss life. She can't help it, though; she keeps reliving that moment under the streetlight over and over in her mind—how Johnny leaned in, how their lips touched, how she'd never felt so happy in her life. So with scandalous thoughts like these occupying her mind, it isn't surprising that every time she catches Johnny's gaze in school, Minnie turns even redder.

"You'll forget all about your first kiss once ya move on to better things," Pauline smirks, but Minnie, her face a still deeper shade of scarlet as she tries not to understand the implications of Pauline's words, doesn't believe her. Minnie knows she's a little bit late, that all of the other girls have already had their first kisses and more, long ago, but to her this dizzying feeling is entirely new. Minnie isn't like the others, though; the difference with her, perhaps, is that she knows immediately that she will remember, because she does not want to kiss any other boy, ever, for the rest of her life. She likes Johnny, really likes him, and even though her father says that gang members are bad and that she shouldn't associate with juvenile delinquents, that doesn't stop her from thinking about him every second of every minute of every day. Minnie doesn't know anything about gang members or juvenile delinquents, but she does know that, no matter what anyone else says, Johnny is good. And that is all that matters, really.

"Hiya, Minnie," Johnny says bashfully when she passes him in the hall later that day. "How ya doin'?"

And Minnie beams. "Perfect."

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memory

Pauline doesn't even remember her first kiss. Whoever it was, however it was, it's buried underneath countless memories of countless other kisses (and more—much, much, more) by countless other boys. She does think, though, that it can't have been any good; after all, no first kiss ever is.

Sometimes she does wonder, though, what it was like, and who it was from. Pauline has been kissing boys so long that they are all one and the same to her; the only difference she still keeps tabs on is not one that you see outside of the bedroom. Pauline is not a girl who knows what it is like to wait anxiously for that first boy, that first kiss. She is the girl who dispenses those first kisses to boys like candy. She is the girl who gives, and usually doesn't receive. That is the way it has always been, and that is the way it is likely to be for the rest of her life. And Pauline, going to and from the arms of whatever boy is ready and willing to have her, is more than happy with that.

(Sometimes, though, when she thinks about it, she can just remember the press of fingertips against her spine and she wonders, dimly, who it was with, and what it was like.)

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happy

Anybodys has never been kissed in her life, and she is just fine that way. Why the hell would she want some idiot boy slobbering all over her, especially when she's more than capable of pounding him into a pulp with her bare hands? She's not some idiot needy girl who needs a boy to make her feel special. Anybodys feels pretty special all by herself, thank you very much. And if this sounds like a cheap rationalization to make up for the fact that she is not pretty like the other girls and never will be, well, it's not. Anybodys knows exactly who she is and she's damn proud of it.

But one night, when she is drunk on beer and gin and—more importantly—the simple giddiness of being alive in New York on a night like this, A-Rab steps closer than he's ever dared to before. She looks him up and down, breath catching in her throat, before he has the sense to take that last step forward and cover her mouth with his own. And instead of beating him into the ground, Anybodys doesn't even think twice before kissing him back, conscious that of all the pretty girls in the city tonight, he is with her. And tonight, she can say it, without the least bit of doubt: Anybodys is perfectly happy the way she is.

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practice

Clarice's first kiss comes at the end of a date with Eddie Jones, the school quarterback. He's very good at what he does; practice, Clarice supposes, makes perfect, whether it's kissing or football. And she enjoys it, just like she's supposed to. It's only when his hands start wandering that she pulls back.

Eddie catches her waist, won't let go. And suddenly those blue eyes that Clarice found so appealingly soft just moments before are small and ratlike; his touch now produces shivers that are very unlike those from earlier. She delicately removes his hands from her body and makes her way up the stairs to her apartment door. "Good night."

"Come on," Eddie says in a tone that borders on disbelief. "It ain't even ten, an' you're sayin' good night?"

Clarice gives him a cutting stare. "I don't know what you were thinkin', but ya ain't scorin' with me, buddy."

And with that, she unlocks the door, slips in, and shuts it behind her, all in one swift motion. Clarice can hear him shouting outside as she waits for the elevator. He's still at it when she skips into the apartment and into her room, where Bernice doesn't even look up from filing her nails. "Thought he was gettin' lucky, didn't he?"

Clarice laughs. "Yep."

Bernice rolls her eyes and throws a pillow at her. "Prude. You're no fun," she yawns, stretching. "Oh, well. More for me."

Clarice giggles. "Go right ahead," she says, and as she undresses, Clarice glances at her twin. They are not physically identical, and she has to wonder if this is why they are so mentally dissimilar, too. The difference, she thinks, is that while Bernice is willing to be some guy's warm body to practice on, Clarice is not, because she wants more than that. And if she has to wait awhile before finding it—then, well, she grins, more for Bernice.

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fun

Bernice's first kiss is fun. One moment, she's sitting on the floor next to a blushing, deeply embarrassed Tommy Majors, being taunted by all the other seventh-graders at her and Clarice's birthday party, and the next, her lips are on his and she's pushing into him and forgetting that this is just a simple game of spin the bottle that she just happened to lose (or win?) when Clarice yanks her arm and Bernice falls back to sit cross-legged and dart coy glances at all the boys in the circle and think about a whole new world of men and dating and most importantly kissing that has just opened up in front of her. This is what it's like, she thinks excitedly, this is what it's like to become awoman.

So when Tommy Majors hangs back after the party is over to ask her, stuttering and stammering, if she wants to go to a movie on Friday, Bernice says yes, because kissing, she's figured out, is so much more than fun.

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last

Velma has had a lot of first kisses, but, chronologically speaking, at least, her very first kiss happens in kindergarten (though of course Robbie Lawrence doesn't count, at least not to her). All she remembers is a bright-eyed boy running around the playground and stopping directly in front of her.

"You're pretty," he says, and kisses her, just like that, his lips brushing quickly and carelessly against hers.

She blinks, surprised, as he darts away again, then turns back to her giggling friends, who don't let it go until Velma gets so sick of Robbie Lawrence and his dastardly first kiss-stealing ways that she gives him her dessert at lunch for a week in return for shutting her friends up in the most effective way possible. And by the end of that dessert-free week, Velma isn't a novelty anymore, because all of her friends have had their first kisses, too. Though this, she has to admit, has its unforeseen drawbacks.

"It was just a kiss," she says exasperatedly, as Marjorie and Laura and Helen swoon yet again at the sight of Robbie running by on his way to the swings, "I don't see what all the fuss is about."

Years later, when Robbie Lawrence kisses her again, but longer this time, slower, Velma doesn't mind him so much, and, perhaps, has a pretty good idea now of exactly what all the fuss is about. "You're pretty," he says, and Velma thinks it's sweet until she realizes that he doesn't remember kindergarten at all.

After that, Velma has a lot of first kisses with different boys, on different occasions. She remembers their names (Andrew, Matthew, James, all good, traditional names from good, traditional families), but their faces are hard to recall, and the circumstances even more so, beyond the usual All-American pretty boy in the backseat of his All-American car. To Velma they just seem like fuzzy, sketched-out watercolors of a distant time before her life burst into full color and light and motion on the streets of West Side.

Velma has had a lot of first kisses in her life, but what she will always remember is the one she considers the last first kiss: her, and Ice (a most untraditional name, from a most untraditional family), standing on the street at midnight, soaked in moonlight. Her first, because it opened her eyes to a possibility that still takes her breath away, of a world with just the two of them in it, and her last, because Velma doesn't plan on having any more. This is it. Her last. And, she thinks, the first of many.

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.end.

If you're interested, the account of Minnie's first kiss with Baby John can be found in HedgehogQuill's "Of First Dates and Milk Duds," and Velma's first kiss with Ice is in my first West Side Story fic, catch the moon. Also, every girl here is a canon character in the movie, and is characterized based on extensive research (um, watching the movie every day totally counts, what are you talking about?) by HedgehogQuill and me, and named using the Jet girls' names from the play (with the exception of Bernice, whom I named). PM if you have any questions about them. Anyway, hope you enjoyed! :)

—viennacantabile