by Kieran Scott
Until he made some bad investments and lost everything. And not just for us. He’d lost a lot of my friends’ parents’ money, too. I’d never been clear on the details. All I knew was it meant we’d had to sell our house and cars and our shore house—and that we’d had to leave. I think that was part of the reason I hadn’t been able to face calling any of my friends. What my dad did . . . it made me feel like an idiot. I’d thought he was so perfect—the greatest dad on the crest—and then he’d talked everyone’s parents into some stupid risky investment and lost tons of their money. My dad, as it turned out, was a fake. A loser. And it made me feel like a loser too.
My mom was always telling me that my dad hadn’t done it on purpose. After all, if he’d known that stock was going to tank, he wouldn’t have put all our money into it as well as some of our friends’. She said he’d simply messed up. But he’d messed up so big-time that my life had been completely turned upside down.
So yeah, I was angry. But not so angry that I’d never get over it. At least, I would have. If he hadn’t bailed on us.
The tears that had blurred my vision started to sting. I placed my feet on the stone and took a breath. I had not come here to cry. I was not going to cry.
I heard a noise behind me. The unmistakable sound of a window sliding open. My feet hit the pedals.
“What the hell are you doing?”
My fight-or-flight reflex was overruled by curiosity. I had to see who was living in my house. I looked over my shoulder. The first thing I thought was, That’s my room. The second? Who are you and why are you not on television?
The guy who lived in my room was shirtless. He folded his bare, tan arms on the windowsill and gave me an arch look. His hair was wet, as if he’d just come in from a swim, and his eyes danced as he looked down at me. He had the most perfect shoulders I’d ever seen, and his biceps bulged as he settled in. An athlete. Definitely. A possibly naked male athlete of the highest hotness order. And he was living in my room.
“Are you lost?” he said.
He was amused. One of those guys who was so confident in himself and his position that even the appearance of a scraggly-looking girl trespassing on his property presented nothing more than an opportunity to tease.
I turned my bike around to face him, still straddling it, just in case I needed to make a quick getaway.
“You’re in my room,” I said.
He laughed, and I felt it inside my chest. My toes curled inside my beat-up Converse. “Oh, really?”
“Yep.”
He looked over his shoulder. “So, that’s your jockstrap on the floor.”
I grimaced. “Okay, I’ve known you for two seconds, and already that’s too much information.”
His smile widened. “How is this your room?”
“I used to live here,” I told him, swallowing a lump that suddenly popped up in my throat. “I moved a couple of years ago.”
Now he was intrigued. He shifted position and looked me up and down. “Prove it.”
“Okay. Go look inside the closet, above the door. I used to write down my box scores up there.”
“What sport?”
“Basketball.”
He narrowed his eyes but went. The second he was gone I noticed that my hands hurt. I released the grip on my handlebars and looked at my palms. Dozens of tiny red lines had been pressed into them from the rubber. I’d been holding on for dear life. He came back.
“You scored forty points in the state championship?”
“JV championship,” I clarified modestly.
“If I had stats like that, they’d be spray painted on the walls.”
“My dad,” I told him. “He was always lecturing on being a team player. Didn’t want me to get all me, me, me about it, so I had to hide it.”
Which, considering how things had turned out, was pretty ironic.
He disappeared. Suddenly a basketball was hurtling toward my head. I reached up and plucked it out of the air with both hands before it could break my nose.
“Thanks for the warning!” I shouted, my heart in my throat.
He pulled on a maroon and gold T-shirt. Orchard Hill soccer. Of course. “I gotta see these skills,” he said. “I’m coming down.”
My palms started to sweat all over the ball. Who was this guy? If he was on soccer, he obviously knew Hammond. Was he friends with Chloe and them as well? Who was I kidding? Of course he was. He lived on the crest. Suddenly my brain was flying three steps ahead. He was definitely going to tell them I was here. Then everyone would be talking about me. What would they tell him? What would he think? He was just coming out the front door—tall . . . very tall . . . taller than me, even—when my cell phone trilled.
I considered not answering, but my mother would freak. I tucked the basketball between my hip and forearm and fumbled the phone from the pocket of my jeans.
“Hey,” I said.
“Ally, I really need you back here,” she said. “They want to know where to put your furniture, and we have to get something for dinner. Where are you?”
I looked at the hot boy who was standing in front of me expectantly with his perfect calves and ready smile and the lightest blue eyes I’d ever seen, the house that wasn’t my house looming behind him.
“I’m on my way,” I said.
His face fell.
I closed the phone and tossed him the ball. “I gotta go.”
“Wait,” he protested.
“What?”
Wow. Way to sound belligerent, Ally.
“If you used to live here, then you must know the crew,” he said, taking a few steps toward me, passing the ball back and forth from hand to hand.
The crew? Seriously? “Um, the crew?”
“Hammond, Chloe, Shannen, Faith, the Idiot Twins,” he said, rolling a hand around.
I laughed. The Idiot Twins. It was our nickname for Trevor and Todd Stein, local daredevils. Hadn’t heard that one in a while.
“Yeah, I don’t know who came up with that name, but it fits,” he said with a smile.
“I did,” I told him.
His eyebrows shot up. “Yeah?”
“There was this whole thing where Trevor and Todd rigged up a homemade bungee cord and tried to bungee jump off their jungle gym,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Let’s just say the results weren’t pretty.”
He laughed. “Is that why Trevor’s nose is like that?”
“Yep.”
“Nice.” He nodded, dribbling the ball. “I must mock them endlessly about that later.” He looked me in the eyes, and my knees went a tad weak. Just from eye contact. “So, you coined the Idiot Twins. Nice work.”
“Thank you,” I said, bowing my head slightly.
“There’s a party the night before school starts. At Connor Shale’s house.”
Connor Shale. The boy who’d shoved his tongue down my throat in Shannen’s tree house the summer between eighth and ninth grade while his parents played Mexican train dominoes with mine on the patio down below. I’d been too polite to shove him off me and had let the heinousness go on for at least two minutes until, thankfully, Hammond Ross had appeared at the top of the rope ladder and laughed until Connor finally stopped. Then I’d practically fallen the ten feet to the ground trying to get away. My first kiss. Not my finest moment. Even more unfortunate? I’d only kissed one other guy since.
“You should come,” Bedroom Boy said.
I experienced an unpleasant twisting in my lower gut. It was amazing how casual it was for him. Like he wasn’t inviting me into the very scene I had both dreaded and looked forward to with a mixture of excitement, apprehension, and abject fear for so long.
But it was kind of nice that he wanted me there. And wasn’t this a good sign, anyway? Clearly my friends hadn’t been slandering me all over the place for the past eighteen months. If they had, he never would have invited me to a party with them. Right?
“Um, yeah. Maybe,” I said. My phone trilled again. “I really gotta go.�
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“Oh, come on. Just one game?”
“Rain check,” I told him, turning and peddling away.
“I’m holding you to that!” he shouted.
It wasn’t until I was halfway down Harvest Lane that I realized I’d never even gotten his name.
jake
“Am I running some kind of geriatric summer camp here?” Coach shouted. “Let’s hustle!”
I didn’t hustle. I looked at Hammond and he rolled his eyes. I hate laps. If you’re going to make us run distance, at least let us out on the streets. What am I, some kind of lab rat scampering in circles for your block of cheese? Upperclassmen, at least, shouldn’t have to do this shit. It was so fucking hot out. And my brain was fried. And I still had three hours of practice ahead of me and back-to-school shopping with my mom tonight and all I could think about was the girl who used to live in my room.
The girl was hot. Not, like, model hot, but hot. I like a girl who dresses down. Who doesn’t need all those bows and doilies and jewelry and crap—’cause she knows she’s hot without it. And the ponytail? That sealed it. She even had those little curls behind her ear just, like, touching her neck. . . . Shit. So effing sexy. All night, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I mean, she used to sleep in my room. How could I not think about that?
“Dude, that’s ten,” Hammond said, smacking me in the chest with the back of his hand.
“Thank God.”
We grabbed paper cups full of water and dropped down on the grass to watch the stragglers.
“Jonah! Pick it up!” I shouted at my brother. Just to be a dick. He was a freshman, and all freshmen and varsity virgins get hazed. He shot me an annoyed look but sprinted the last turn. Hammond laughed and crushed his cup before tossing it onto the ground.
“Look at that little fucker,” he said, nodding at David Drake, who had finished ahead of us and was now running stairs on the bleachers, for no apparent reason. “He doesn’t watch out, he’s gonna get a kick in the head.”
“Maybe he’s on something,” I suggested, not at all serious.
Last year David Drake had been the most pathetic player on J V. This year he’d added at least ten pounds of muscle and had shown some respectable skill on the field. It was obvious he’d been working his ass off all summer, which I respect. Not everyone cares that much. I know I don’t. But Drake didn’t live on the crest, and he still had the balls to play soccer, which around here was a Crestie sport. So that meant Hammond didn’t like him.
Which brought up a question. Where was the new-old girl living? As far as I knew, none of the Crestie families had moved this summer. I glanced sideways at Hammond. “What do you know about the girl who used to live in my house?” I asked.
Hammond’s head whipped up so fast I heard a crack. “What about her?”
“Who is she?” I asked. “Were you, like, friends with her?”
“Why? What do you know?”
I stared at him. Why was he so tense all of a sudden? “She came over yesterday,” I said. “Guess she wanted to see her old place or something.”
“Shut the fuck up. You saw Ally Ryan?” Hammond shifted position. He reminded me of a dog waiting for a treat. A pit bull –German shepherd mix. The kind of dog that would take the Milk-Bone out of your hand and then bite your fingers off just for fun.
“Yeah,” I said. Ally Ryan. Her name was Ally Ryan. AllyRyanAllyRyanAllyRyan. “Wait. Ally Ryan. I’ve heard that name before.”
“She comes up every once in a while,” Hammond said.
Right. Now I remembered. She was the girl in the picture in Shannen’s room. The one of a whole mess of Crestie girls taken at the country club pool in, like, sixth grade. I’d asked Shannen about her once, and she hadn’t wanted to talk about her. Interesting.
“Dude. How did she look?” Hammond asked.
I didn’t like his tone. He was practically licking his chops. “Fine. Good. Whatever. I don’t know what she looked like before.”
“Is she hot?” Hammond asked.
I lifted a shoulder. “She’s all right.”
Hammond eyed me for a long moment. I stared straight ahead at the field, where the coaches were lining up cones for drills. My face was burning. I hoped I was already red from running so Hammond wouldn’t realize why.
“Dude, you don’t want to go there,” Hammond said.
I sucked down the rest of my water. “Who said I was going anywhere?”
“Good. Because Ally Ryan is, like, enemy number one.”
“What? What does that even mean?” I asked.
“Short version? Two years ago her father screwed all our families out of a load of money and then left town,” Hammond said. “We were all friends before that. You know, Sunday dinners and all that shit.”
“She comes to Sunday dinners?” I asked. I dreaded the stupid Sunday dinner tradition. My mother had campaigned for over a year to get my family invited to them, and once we were in I still had no idea why. It was all so fake, the crest families gathering once a week for a homemade five-course meal like we were one, big, happy family. We didn’t even know these people existed two years ago, but now all of a sudden my mother’s happiness hinged on whether or not Mrs. Appleby approved of her banana crème pie or whether Mrs. Kirkpatrick broke her vegan rule for Mom’s roast. I had an okay time with my friends, but the formal setting always made everyone act like tools, like Faith flirting with the wait staff or Shannen trying to sneak alcohol between courses or the Idiot Twins, well, being themselves, only ten times louder. I was constantly counting the seconds until dessert was cleared and we could bail. But I had a feeling I could tolerate Sunday nights a lot better if Ally were there.
“Came. Past tense, dude,” Hammond said. “Look, everyone hates the Ryans. Her dad is the reason Shannen’s father is on a permanent bender. He’s the reason I have no college money and Liam had to take out freaking student loans. Trevor and Todd lost their house because of him.”
“That’s why they live at their grandparents’?” I asked.
“Yep.”
Huh. I’d wondered why the Idiot Twins and their parents lived in the Enclave. It was this exclusive condo neighborhood on the crest where most of the places were owned by Crestie grandparents who only visited on the holidays. The Steins lived there year round, and every once in a while their grandparents would come back and squeeze in. They seemed to like it, though. Nana and Pop were like superheroes to those dudes.
“Wait. But Shannen always says her dad’s been sloshed her whole life.”
“Maybe, but he got really bad when Charlie split, and then he went off the reservation after Ally’s dad lost all their savings,” Hammond said, his jaw clenched. “Stopped going to work, lost his job. . . . That’s why he’s ‘consulting’ now,” he said, rolling his eyes and adding air quotes. We both knew Mr. Moore hardly ever left their house. If he was an advertising consultant, he wasn’t doing very well at it.
“Whoa.” I was surprised Shannen hadn’t told me that part. She was basically my best friend and usually told me everything. But then, maybe this was why she hadn’t wanted to talk about Ally the one time I’d asked.
“No shit,” Hammond said. “Chloe’s dad’s the only one who didn’t get screwed when the Ryans skipped town. Guess he was the only one smart enough not to invest with the guy.” He ripped up some blades of grass and threw them at his feet. “Trust me. We’re all better off if Ally Ryan stays far, far away.”
“Wow. Crazy,” I said.
Probably not the best idea to invite her to Shale’s party, then. I wasn’t even sure why I’d done it. Usually I didn’t invite anyone anywhere. Especially when it wasn’t my party to begin with. I just go with the flow. Don’t rock the boat. But I don’t know. I think I’d just wanted to make sure I’d see her again. Of course if I’d thought about it for two seconds, I would have realized I’d be seeing her in school. Every day. But whatever. Maybe she wouldn’t show up. I mean, if she was at all aware of how everyone felt abo
ut her, she’d be stupid not to stay home. Either way, not my problem.
Coach blew his whistle. “Let’s go! Break time’s over!”
“The girls are going to shit when they hear you talked to Ally Ryan,” Hammond said as he stood up. “You coming?”
“Yeah.” I got up and tossed my cup in the garbage can, then stooped to pick up Hammond’s and tossed that, too. I wanted to know more, but I wasn’t about to press for details. If I had learned one thing since moving to this town, it was that the people on the crest had their own way of doing things. They had their theme parties and their group vacations. They had their cheesy little traditions and their pack mentality, as my dad called it. And they also had their opinions. And hardly any of them made sense. At least, not to me.
“Hey, guys,” David Drake said as he jogged to catch up with us. He bounced back and forth from foot to foot, juggling his soccer ball. He had this self-satisfied look on his face. The kid was showing off his energy level. Maybe later I should take him aside and give him a few pointers about not coming off like a pathetic, needy loser.
“Fuck off, Drake,” Hammond said, slapping his ball away. It rolled across the field and onto the track on the far side, where the cheerleaders were throwing each other around.
David chuckled. “Yeah, right. Good one.”
This guy had no idea of the size of the hole he was digging for himself. I looked at Hammond and we laughed. David did, too. Like he was in on the joke. Dig, dig, dig.
“Line it up!” Coach called out.
We did. I made sure I was between Hammond and David so that Ham couldn’t shove the kid over in the middle of a calf stretch.
“That dude is so getting hazed this weekend,” Hammond said, almost loudly enough for David to hear.
I bent over to stretch out. Ally Ryan’s face flashed in my mind, and I squashed it. I wasn’t about to hook up with some chick all my friends hated. Even if them hating her made no sense. It wasn’t worth the drama. I was just going to have to start fantasizing about someone else. Luckily I’d heard some marys from Blessed Heart Academy were going to show up at Shale’s. Blessed Heart girls were hot. I needed distraction from Ally Ryan.