Jules smacks her lips together, an expression of mild panic crossing her face. “Oh my God. Do you think they’re together now?”
“No. Definitely not. They’re friends. Not everyone finds him irresistible, Jules.”
Jules drops the lip gloss back into her bag and leans her head against the window with a sigh. “Says you. He’s so hot, I could die.”
Emma pauses at a red light and rubs her eyes, then reaches for the volume button on the radio. “I need to turn this down,” she says. “My head is pounding.”
“Are you getting sick?” I ask.
“Just tired. My tutoring session with Sean Murdock went too long last night.”
“No surprise there,” I mutter. If you’re searching for signs of intelligent life in the Bayview High junior class, Sean Murdock isn’t where you’ll find it. But his parents have money, and they’ll happily throw it at Emma for the chance that either her work ethic or her grades might rub off on Sean.
“I should hire you, Emma,” Jules says. “Chemistry is going to be a nightmare this semester unless I get some help. Or pull a Bronwyn Rojas and steal the tests.”
“Bronwyn made up that class,” I remind her, and Jules kicks my seat.
“Don’t defend her,” she says sulkily. “She’s ruining my love life.”
“If you’re serious about tutoring, I have a slot free this weekend,” Emma says.
“Chemistry on the weekend?” Jules sounds scandalized. “No thank you.”
“Okay, then.” My sister exhales a light sigh, like she shouldn’t have expected anything different. “Not serious.”
Emma’s only a year older than Jules and me, but most of the time she seems more Ashton Prentiss’s age than ours. Emma doesn’t act seventeen; she acts like she’s in her midtwenties and stressing her way through graduate school instead of senior AP classes. Even now, when her college applications are all in and she’s just waiting to hear back, she can’t relax.
We drive the rest of the way in silence, until my phone chimes when Emma pulls into the parking lot. I look down to a text. Bleachers?
I shouldn’t. But even as my brain reminds me that I’ve already gotten two late warnings this month, my fingers type OK. I put my phone in my pocket and have the passenger door halfway open before Emma’s even shifted into Park. She raises her eyebrows as I climb out.
“I have to go to the football field real quick,” I say, hiking my backpack over my shoulder and resting my hand on the car door.
“What for? You don’t want to be late again,” Emma says, narrowing her light brown eyes at me. They’re exactly like Dad’s, and—along with the reddish hair—the only trait she and I share. Emma is tall and thin, I’m short and curvy. Her hair is stick-straight and doesn’t quite reach her shoulders, mine is long and curly. She freckles in the sun, and I tan. We’re both February-pale now, though, and I can feel my cheeks redden as I look down at the ground.
“It’s, um, for homework,” I mumble.
Jules grins as she climbs out of the car. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”
I turn on my heel and beat a hasty retreat, but I can still feel the weight of Emma’s disapproval settling over my shoulders like a cloak. Emma has always been the serious one, but when we were younger it didn’t matter. We were so close that we used to have entire conversations without talking. Mom would joke that we must be telepaths, but it wasn’t that. We just knew one another so well that we could read every expression as clearly as a word.
We were close with Owen too, despite the age difference. Dad used to call us the Three Amigos, and every childhood photo shows us posed exactly the same way: Emma and me on either side of Owen, our arms around one another, grinning widely. We look inseparable, and I thought we were. It never occurred to me that Dad was the glue keeping us together.
The pulling apart was so subtle that I didn’t notice it right away. Emma withdrew first, burying herself in schoolwork. “It’s her way of grieving,” Mom said, so I let her be, even though my way of grieving would have been to do it together. I compensated by throwing myself into every social activity I could find—especially once boys started getting interested in me—while Owen retreated into the comforting fantasy world of video games. Before I’d realized it, those had become our lanes, and we stayed in them. Our card last Christmas featured the three of us standing beside the tree, arranged by height, hands clasped in front of us with stiff smiles. Dad would’ve been so disappointed by that picture.
And by me shortly after we took it, for what happened at Jules’s Christmas party. It’s one thing to treat your older sister like a polite stranger, and quite another thing to…do what I did. I used to feel a wistful kind of loneliness when I thought about Emma, but now I just feel guilt. And relief that she can’t read my feelings on my face anymore.
“Hey!” I’m so caught up in my thoughts that I would’ve walked right into a pole under the bleachers if a hand hadn’t reached out and stopped me. Then it pulls me forward so quickly that my phone slides out of my pocket and makes a faint bouncing noise on the grass.
“Shit,” I say, but Brandon Weber’s lips are pressed against mine before I can get anything else out. I shimmy my shoulders until my backpack joins my phone on the ground. Brandon tugs at the hem of my shirt, and since this is one hundred percent what I came for, I help him along by untucking it.
Brandon’s hands move up and across my bare skin, pushing aside the lace of my bra, and he groans against my mouth. “God, you’re so sexy.”
He is, too. Brandon quarterbacks the football team, and the Bayview Blade likes to call him “the next Cooper Clay” because he’s good enough that colleges are already starting to scout him. I don’t think that’s an accurate comparison, though. For one thing, Cooper has next-level talent, and for another, he’s a sweetheart. Brandon, on the other hand, is basically an asshole.
The boy can kiss, though. All the tension flows out of me as he pushes me against the pole behind us, replaced with a heady spark of anticipation. I wrap one arm around his neck, trying to pull him down to my height, while my other hand teases at the waistband of his jeans. Then my foot sends something skidding across the ground, and the sound of my text tone distracts me.
“My phone,” I say, pulling away. “We’re going to smash it if I don’t pick it up.”
“I’ll buy you a new one,” Brandon says, his tongue in my ear. Which I don’t like—why do guys think that’s hot?—so I shove at him until he lets go. His front pocket dings loudly, and I smirk at the bulge there as I retrieve my phone.