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“Sorry.” I opened the car door and hopped in, where he looked me over for a moment. “What?”

  “You looked nervous. Did something happen?” Matt asked, and I sighed. He took his whole big brother thing way too seriously.

  “No, nothing happened. School sucks,” I said, brushing him off. “Let’s go home.”

  “Seat belt,” Matt commanded, and I did as I was told.

  Matt had always been quiet and reserved, thinking everything over carefully before making a decision. He was a stark contrast to me in every way, except that we were both relatively short. I was small, with a decidedly pretty, feminine face. My brown hair was an untamed mess of curls that I kept up in loose buns.

  He kept his sandy blond hair trim and neat, and his eyes were the same shade of blue as our mother’s. Matt wasn’t overtly muscular, but he was sturdy and athletic from working out a lot. He had a sense of duty, like he had to make sure he was strong enough to defend us against anything.

  “How is school going?” Matt asked.

  “Great. Fantastic. Amazing.”

  “Are you even going to graduate this year?” Matt had long since stopped judging my school record. A large part of him didn’t even care if I graduated from high school.

  “Who knows?” I shrugged.

  Everywhere I went, kids never seemed to like me. Even before I said or did anything. I felt like I had something wrong with me and everyone knew it. I tried getting along with the other kids, but I’d only take getting pushed for so long before I pushed back. Principals and deans were quick to expel me, probably sensing the same things the kids did.

  I just didn’t belong.

  “Just to warn you, Maggie’s taking it seriously,” Matt said. “She’s set on you graduating this year, from this school.”

  “Delightful.” I sighed. Matt couldn’t care less about my schooling, but my aunt Maggie was a different story. And since she was my legal guardian, her opinion mattered more. “What’s her plan?”

  “Maggie’s thinking bedtimes,” Matt informed me with a smirk. As if sending me to bed early would somehow prevent me from getting in a fight.

  “I’m almost eighteen!” I groaned. “What is she thinking?”

  “You’ve got four more months until you’re eighteen,” Matt corrected me sharply, and his hand tightened on the steering wheel. He suffered from serious delusions that I was going to run away as soon as I turned eighteen, and nothing I could say would convince him otherwise.

  “Yeah, whatever.” I waved it off. “Did you tell her she’s insane?”

  “I figured she’d hear it enough from you.” Matt grinned at me.

  “So did you find a job?” I asked tentatively, and he shook his head.

  He’d just finished an internship over the summer, working with a great architecture firm. He’d said it didn’t bother him, moving to a town without much call for a promising young architect, but I couldn’t help feeling guilty about it.

  “This is a pretty town,” I said, looking out the window.

  We approached our new house, buried on an average suburban street among a slew of maples and elms. It actually seemed like a boring small town, but I’d promised I’d make the best of it. I really wanted to. I didn’t think I could handle disappointing Matt anymore.

  “So you’re really gonna try here?” Matt asked, looking over at me. We had pulled up in the driveway next to the butter-colored Victorian that Maggie had bought last month.

  “I already am,” I insisted with a smile. “I’ve been talking to this Finn kid.” Sure, I’d talked to him only once, and I wouldn’t even remotely count him as a friend, but I had to tell Matt something.

  “Look at you. Making your very first friend.” Matt shut off the car’s engine and looked at me with veiled amusement.

  “Yeah, well, how many friends do you have?” I countered. He just shook his head and got out of the car, and I quickly followed him. “That’s what I thought.”

  “I’ve had friends before. Gone to parties. Kissed a girl. The whole nine yards,” Matt said as he went through the side door into the house.

  “So you say.” I kicked off my shoes as soon as we walked into the kitchen, which was still in various stages of unpacking. As many times as we’d moved, everyone had gotten tired of the whole process, so we tended to live out of boxes. “I’ve only seen one of these alleged girls.”

  “Yeah, ’cause when I brought her home, you set her dress on fire! While she was wearing it!” Matt pulled off his sunglasses and looked at me severely.

  “Oh, come on. That was an accident and you know it.”

  “So you say.” Matt opened the fridge.

  “Anything good in there?” I asked and hopped onto the kitchen island. “I’m famished.”

  “Probably nothing you’d like.” Matt started sifting through the contents of the fridge, but he was right.

  I was a notoriously picky eater. While I had never purposely sought out the life of a vegan, I seemed to hate most things that had either meat in them or man-made synthetics. It was odd and incredibly irritating for the people who tried to feed me.

  Maggie appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, flecks of paint stuck in her blond curls. Layers of multicolored paint covered her ratty overalls, proof of all the rooms she had redecorated over the years. She had her hands on her hips, so Matt shut the fridge door to give her his full attention.

  “I thought I told you to tell me when you got home,” Maggie said.

  “We’re home?” Matt offered.

  “I can see that.” Maggie rolled her eyes, and then turned her attention to me. “How was school?”

  “Good,” I said. “I’m trying harder.”

  “We’ve heard that before.” Maggie gave me a weary look.

  I hated it when she gave me that look. I hated knowing that I made her feel that way, that I had disappointed her that much. She did so much for me, and the only thing she asked of me was that I at least try at school. I had to make it work this time.

  “Well, yeah . . . but . . .” I looked to Matt for help. “I mean, I actually promised Matt this time. And I’m making a friend.”

  “She’s talking to some guy named Finn,” Matt said corroborating my story.

  “Like a guy guy?” Maggie smiled too broadly for my liking.

  The idea of Finn being a romantic prospect hadn’t crossed Matt’s mind before, and he suddenly tensed up, looking at me with a new scrutiny. Fortunately for him, that idea hadn’t crossed my mind either.

  “No, nothing like that.” I shook my head. “He’s just a guy, I guess. I don’t know. He seems nice enough.”

  “Nice?” Maggie gushed. “That’s a start! And much better than that anarchist with the tattoo on his face.”

  “We weren’t friends,” I corrected her. “I just stole his motorcycle. While he happened to be on it.”

  Nobody had ever really believed that story, but it was true, and it was how I figured out that I could get people to do things just by thinking it. I had been thinking that I really wanted his bike, and then I was looking at him and he was listening to me, even though I hadn’t said anything. Then I was driving his motorcycle.

  “So this really is gonna be a new start for us?” Maggie couldn’t hold back her excitement any longer. Her blue eyes started to well with happy tears. “Wendy, this is just so wonderful! We can really make a home here!”

  I wasn’t nearly as excited about it as she was, though I couldn’t help but hope she was right. It would be nice to feel like I was home somewhere.

  TWO

  “if you leave”

  Our new house also supplied us with a large vegetable garden, which thrilled Maggie endlessly. Matt and I were much less thrilled. While I loved the outdoors, I’d never been a big fan of manual labor.

  Autumn was settling in, and Maggie insisted that we had to clear the garden of its dying vegetation to prepare it for planting in the spring. She used words like “rototiller” and “mulch,” and I hoped Matt would deal
with them. When it came to work, I usually just handed Matt the necessary tools and kept him company.

  “So when are you hauling out the rototiller?” I asked, watching as Matt tore up dead vines. I’m not sure what they used to be, but they reminded me of grapevines. While Matt pulled things up, my job was to hold the wheelbarrow so he could throw them in.

  “We don’t have a rototiller.” He gave me a look as he tossed the dead plants into the wheelbarrow. “You know, you could be helping me with this. You don’t need to physically hold that at all times.”

  “I take my job very seriously, so I think it’d be better if I did,” I said, and he rolled his eyes.

  Matt continued grumbling, but I tuned him out. A warm fall breeze blew over us, and I closed my eyes, breathing it in. It smelled wonderfully sweet, like fresh-cut corn and grass and wet leaves. A nearby wind chime tinkled lightly, and it made me dread winter coming and taking this all away.

  I’d been lost in the moment, enjoying the perfection, but something snapped me out of it. It was hard to describe exactly what it was, but the hair on the back of my neck stood up. The air suddenly felt chillier, and I knew somebody was watching us.

  I looked around, trying to see who it was, and this weird fear ran over me. We had a privacy fence at the back of the yard, and a thick row of hedges blocking our house on either side. I scanned them, searching for any signs of crouching figures or spying eyes. I didn’t see anything, but the feeling didn’t go away.

  “If you’re gonna be out here, you should at least wear shoes,” Matt said, pulling me from my thoughts. He stood up, stretching his back, and looked at me. “Wendy?”

  “I’m fine,” I answered absently.

  I thought I saw movement around the side of the house, so I went over there. Matt called my name, but I ignored him. When I rounded the house, I stopped short. Finn Holmes stood on the sidewalk, but oddly enough, he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at something down the street, something out of my sight.

  As strange as it sounds, as soon as I saw him, the anxiety I’d felt started to subside. My first thought should’ve been that it was him causing my uneasiness, since he was the one who always stared at me in such a creepy fashion. But it wasn’t.

  Whatever I’d felt in the backyard, it wasn’t because of him. When he stared, he made me self-conscious. But this . . . this made my skin crawl.

  After a second, Finn turned to look back at me. His dark eyes rested on me a moment, his face expressionless as always. Then, without saying a word, he turned and walked off in the direction he’d been staring.

  “Wendy, what’s going on?” Matt asked, coming up behind me.

  “I thought I saw something.” I shook my head.

  “Yeah?” He looked at me hard, concern etched on his face. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine.” I forced a smile and turned to the backyard. “Come on. We’ve got a lot of work to do if I’m gonna make it to that dance.”

  “You’re still on that kick?” Matt grimaced.

  Telling Maggie about the dance may have been the worst idea I’ve ever had, and my life is made up almost entirely of bad ideas. I hadn’t wanted to go, but as soon as she’d heard about it, she decided it would be the most fantastic thing ever. I’d never gone to a dance before, but she was so excited about it, I let her have this small victory.

  With the dance at seven, she figured she had enough time to finish the coat of paint in the bathroom. Matt had started to voice his complaints, mostly about my interacting with the opposite sex, but Maggie shut him down. To keep him from getting in her way, she ordered him to finish the yardwork. He complied only because he knew that there was no stopping Maggie this time.

  Despite Matt’s attempts to slow us down, we finished the garden pretty quickly, and I went inside to get ready. Maggie sat on the bed and watched me as I rummaged through my closet, offering suggestions and comments on everything. This included an endless stream of questions about Finn. Matt would grunt or scoff every now and then at my answers, so I knew he was listening nearby.

  Once I had decided on a simple blue dress that Maggie insisted looked amazing on me, I let her do my hair. My hair refused to cooperate with anything I tried to do it, and while it wasn’t exactly obedient for Maggie, she outwitted it. She left some of it down, so the curls framed my face, and pulled the rest of it back.

  When Matt saw me, he looked really pissed off and a little awed, so I knew that I must look pretty awesome.

  Maggie gave me a ride to the dance, because we both weren’t convinced that Matt would let me out of the car. He kept insisting on a nine o’clock curfew, even though the dance went until ten. I thought I’d be back well before that, but Maggie told me to take all the time I wanted.

  My only experience with dances was what I had seen on TV, but reality wasn’t that far off. The theme appeared to be “Crepe Paper in the Gymnasium,” and they had mastered it perfectly.

  The school colors were white and navy blue, so white and navy blue streamers covered everything, along with matching balloons. For romantic lighting, they had strung everything with white Christmas lights.

  Refreshments covered a table on the side, and the band playing on the makeshift stage under the basketball hoop wasn’t that bad. Their set list appeared to include only songs from the films of John Hughes, and I arrived in the middle of a “Weird Science” cover.

  The biggest difference between real life and what films had taught me was that nobody actually danced. A group of girls stood directly in front of the stage swooning over the lead singer, but otherwise the floor was mostly empty.

  People sat scattered all over the bleachers, and, attempting to fit in, I sat in the first row. I kicked off my shoes immediately, because for the most part I hate shoes. With nothing else to do, I resorted to people-watching. As the night wore on, I found myself feeling increasingly lonely and bored.

  Kids actually started dancing as the gymnasium filled up, and the band moved on to some kind of Tears for Fears medley. I decided that I’d been here long enough, and I was planning my escape when Finn pushed through the doors.

  Wearing a slim-fitting black dress shirt and dark jeans, he looked good. He had the sleeves rolled up and an extra button undone on his shirt, and I wondered why I never realized how attractive he was before.

  His eyes met mine, and he walked over to me, surprising me with his direct approach. As often as he seemed to be watching me, he’d never initiated contact before. Not even today, when he’d walked past my house.

  “I didn’t peg you for the dancing kind,” Finn commented when he reached me.

  “I was thinking the same thing about you,” I said, and he shrugged.

  Finn sat down on the bleachers next to me, and I sat up a bit straighter. He glanced over at me but didn’t say anything. Already he looked annoyed, and he’d just gotten here. An awkward silence settled over us, and I hurried to fill it.

  “You arrived awfully late. Couldn’t decide what to wear?” I teased.

  “I had stuff with work,” Finn explained vaguely.

  “Oh? Do you work somewhere near my house?”

  “Something like that.” Finn sighed, clearly eager to change the subject. “Have you been dancing?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Dancing is for suckers.”

  “Is that why you came to a dance?” Finn looked down at my bare feet. “You didn’t wear the right shoes for dancing. You didn’t even wear the right shoes for walking.”

  “I don’t like shoes,” I told him defensively. My hem landed above my knees, but I tried to pull it down, as if I could get it to cover my bare-feet embarrassment.

  Finn gave me a look I couldn’t read at all, then went back to staring at the people dancing in front of us. By now the floor was almost entirely covered. Kids still dotted the bleachers, but they were mostly the headgear kids and the ones with dandruff.

  “So this is what you’re doing? Watching other people dance?” Finn asked.

>   “I guess.” I shrugged.

  Finn leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and I moved so I was sitting up straighter. My dress was strapless, and I rubbed at my bare arms, feeling naked and uncomfortable.

  “You cold?” Finn glanced over at me, and I shook my head. “I think it’s cold in here.”

  “It’s a little chilly,” I admitted. “But nothing I can’t handle.”

  Finn would barely look at me, which was a complete 180 from his constant creepy staring. Somehow, I found this worse. I don’t know why he had even come to the dance if he hated it so much, and I was about to ask him that when he turned to look at me.

  “You wanna dance?” he asked flatly.

  “Are you asking me to dance with you?”

  “Yeah.” Finn shrugged.

  “Yeah?” I shrugged sarcastically. “You really know how to sweet-talk a girl.”

  His mouth crept up in a hint of a smile, and that officially won me over. I hated myself for it.

  “Fair enough.” Finn stood up and extended his hand to me. “Would you, Wendy Everly, care to dance with me?”

  “Sure.” I placed my hand in his, trying to ignore how warm his skin felt and the rapid beating of my own heart, and got to my feet.

  Naturally, the band had just started playing “If You Leave” by OMD, making me feel like I had walked into a perfect movie moment. Finn led me to the dance floor and placed his hand on the small of my back. I put one hand on his shoulder while he took my other hand in his.

  I was so close to him I could feel the delicious heat radiating from his body. His eyes were the darkest eyes I had ever seen, and they were looking at only me. For one unspoiled minute, everything in life felt perfect in a way that it never had before. Like there should be a spotlight on us, the only two people in the world.

  Then something changed in Finn’s expression, something I couldn’t read, but it definitely got darker.

  “You’re not a very good dancer,” Finn commented in that emotionless way of his.

  “Thanks?” I said unsurely. We were mostly just swaying in a small circle, and I wasn’t sure how I could screw that up, plus we seemed to be dancing the exact same way as everyone else. Maybe he was joking, so I tried to sound playful when I said, “You’re not that great yourself.”