Two Boys Kissing

As morning comes, Harry and Craig are still kissing, exhausted. Harry can still smell the egg thrown at him the night before. Craig fantasizes about sitting down with Harry. They prepared for the kiss, but still were not ready for the difficulty. “We think of ourselves as creatures marked by a particular intelligence. But one of our finest features is the inability of our expectation to truly simulate the experience we are expecting” (121). People around the world are tuned into the livestream, and local news crews show up to film their efforts. 

Peter wakes up and checks the internet for the news. Finding nothing exciting, he returns to the livestream of the Big Kiss. He looks through the comments and though he sees a lot of support for the boys, he also finds hateful comments. Even though they aren’t directed at him, he struggles not to take them personally.

Three local news crews want to ask questions about the kiss, but Harry and Craig can’t answer, and Tariq is too shy to speak on their behalf. The crowd still grows, there are more hostile people. The chorus highlight how different it was for them, getting to choose how and when to be on camera, versus the novel’s present, where teens have cameras in their pockets and have little say in when or how they end up on camera.