Meet Cute

by Jennifer L. Armentrout

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Siege Etiquette

  KATIE COTUGNO

  Print Shop

  NINA LACOUR

  Hourglass

  IBI ZOBOI

  Click

  KATHARINE MCGEE

  The Intern

  SARA SHEPARD

  Somewhere That’s Green

  MEREDITH RUSSO

  The Way We Love Here

  DHONIELLE CLAYTON

  Oomph

  EMERY LORD

  The Dictionary Of You And Me

  JENNIFER L. ARMENTROUT

  The Unlikely Likelihood Of Falling In Love

  JOCELYN DAVIES

  259 Million Miles

  KASS MORGAN

  Something Real

  JULIE MURPHY

  Say Everything

  HUNTLEY FITZPATRICK

  The Department Of Dead Love

  NICOLA YOON

  The Authors

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Meet Cute

  Copyright © 2018 by Alloy Entertainment, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Cover illustration by Nina Cosford

  Hand-lettering by Nina Cosford and Mallory Grigg

  Cover design by Mallory Grigg

  Cover illustration © 2018 by Alloy Entertainment

  Produced by Alloy Entertainment

  1325 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10019

  www.alloyentertainment.com

  Typography by Liz Dresner

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-328-75987-0

  eISBN 978-1-328-81084-7

  v1.1217

  Siege Etiquette

  — — — — — —

  KATIE COTUGNO

  YOU’RE GETTING ANOTHER beer in the kitchen and watching two badly dressed sophomores try not to be too obvious about the fact that they’re staring at you, when the cops show up outside Madison Campbell’s house.

  “Uh-oh,” Jay says when he spies them. You follow his gaze through the living room window where, sure enough, two cruisers are gliding to the curb with their lights flashing, silent as sharks. “Friends are here.” Right away he heads down the stairs to the basement, motioning for you to follow without actually waiting to see if you do. Boyfriend or not, you guess you can’t really blame him. After all, it’s not like you get in trouble anymore.

  “Everybody down,” Nicole calls from the hallway, flicking the kitchen lights off so you’re plunged into darkness, save the glow of the water dispenser on the front of the stainless-steel fridge. Nicole’s parents are both law professors an hour away from here at Cornell, and firm believers in the importance of exercising one’s constitutional rights: Never, never open up the door to the police unless they have a warrant, you’ve heard them say over a number of bagel breakfasts at Nicole’s kitchen table, same as other parents would remind you to make sure to be home by curfew. “Somebody get the rest of the lights!”

  “Are you serious?” a panicky-looking freshman asks as everyone dashes for cover—into bedrooms and under coffee tables, inside the immaculately organized pantry. “You’re not going to let them in?”

  “Do you want to go to jail?” Nicole snaps, which seems a little dramatic. “Turn off the music. They’ll be gone in a minute.”

  You’re not entirely sure about that, actually, but before you can register your concerns, the bell is ringing; the police are knocking hard and insistent on the front door, glowing flashlights visible through the frosted glass. The combination of noise and sound sets something off in you, a cold animal panic. Suddenly it feels very important to hide. You scurry up the short flight of stairs off the foyer and through the closest door, shutting it firmly behind you before turning around and realizing that a) it’s the bathroom, and b) Wolf Goshen is sitting on the edge of the tub in the dark.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Um,” you say. Fuck. “Hi.”

  “Sorry,” Wolf says, standing up and wiping his hands on his jeans. “I can get out of here, if you have to—I mean, everybody was just yelling to hide and stuff. I kind of panicked.”

  “No, I don’t need to—” You exhale, heart pounding with a savage ferocity wholly disproportionate to the seriousness of this situation. That happens to you sometimes, now. The cops are still ringing the doorbell. “I mean, that’s why I’m in here, too.”

  “Oh.” Wolf nods, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Okay.”

  You look at each other for a moment. You breathe. Wolf has been in your class since kindergarten, but you’ve never actually talked to him before. He only ever comes for half the year because of some arcane agricultural law that lets him be homeschooled for the fall semester so he can help his parents at their farm, thirty miles outside Ithaca, one of the last working family-owned operations in the entire state of New York. Every autumn you forget about him and every January he shows up at school again, blinking and dazed, like he’s spent the last six months wandering dumbly through a cornfield. You’ve never seen him at a party before in your life.

  “I came with my cousin,” he explains, like he can see you wondering, as if he thinks you’re going to ask to see his pass. You think he might be afraid of you. You’d probably be afraid of you, if you were Wolf. “You know Jared? He dates Madison now. So I came with him.”

  You nod, not particularly caring. God, this whole night sucks. You’re about to make an excuse and get the hell out of here, but before you can come up with something plausible the beam of a flashlight shines directly through the bathroom window, and like an instinct you’re grabbing Wolf’s arm and jerking roughly, pulling him back into the shadows beside the tub.

  “Sorry,” you say once the light has moved away again. “Close call.”

  “It’s okay.” Wolf sits back down on the edge of the bathtub.

  When you were little kids he was notorious for falling asleep at his desk every day during free read. His fingernails were always too long. You remember not wanting to get stuck next to him in line or at lunchtime or in the Starlab, a traveling planetarium that came to school every year, all of you crawling into a big inflatable tent in the middle of the gym to look up at the constellations. “Don’t be giving that boy a hard time, Hailey,” your mom scolded when you came home and complained about it. You were already popular back in elementary school, and she was worried it was going to turn you mean. “He’s got enough trouble without you piling on.” It occurs to you, all of a sudden, that you never actually asked her what that meant.

  The police are still banging on the front door, insistent: “Madison Campbell!” a man’s voice calls, authoritative. “I know your parents, Madison, and they’re gonna want you to open the door now.” Madison’s parents are in Harrisburg dealing with some kind of disciplinary clusterfuck at her brother’s boarding school. For a second you feel kind of bad for them.

  “This happen a lot?” Wolf asks.

  You sit down on the lid of the toilet seat. “Sometimes,” you allow. “They’ll be gone in a minute.” In fact you’re not at all as confident as you sound. You’ve waited out the police in this very house before, plus once at Amber Dooley’s and another time, memorably, while fooling around in a coat closet with Jay at Nicole’s: normally the partiers lay low, the police get bored or tired or hungry, and eventually they go away. But this feels different. The last week of summ
er, two juniors drank a twelve-pack of Budweiser and killed almost a whole fucking family at the intersection down by the Walmart, and now it’s like the whole town thinks everybody else is breathtakingly stupid enough to do what they did. It occurs to you, as you listen to the incessant banging on the front door of the house, that the McCormack County Sheriff’s Department might be looking to make a point.

  Well, you think, pulling your legs up on the toilet seat and wrapping your arms around your knees, let them make it, if that helps them.

  Wolf is glancing at you across the bathroom, seemingly unconcerned about the scrum of law enforcement out on the front lawn. It’s his first party, after all. You guess it’s not like he’s got anything to compare it to. “Should have brought snacks,” he says, sliding off the lip of the bathtub and making himself comfortable on the tile floor, crossing his legs at the ankles, and before you can respond either way he grins. “You remember how Mrs. Hollander used to give out Atomic FireBalls during tests?”

  That surprises you. Mrs. Hollander taught fourth grade. “Uh-huh.”

  “I was obsessed with those things,” Wolf says. “Every day I used to ask her if we could have them. Like, I used to get so excited for tests, just so I could cram a bunch of FireBalls into my mouth and chow down. And finally one day she kept me after the last bell, and I thought I was in trouble, but it turned out she’d been at the dollar store and gotten this giant tub of FireBalls just for me. She told me I was going to make myself sick, but of course I walked outside and ate like a hundred of them all at once. Burned all my taste buds off, and that wasn’t even the worst of it. Anyway, that was the end of me and FireBalls.” He shuts up abruptly then, shrugging his shoulders. “I’m rambling.”

  “It’s okay,” you say. You kind of liked listening to him, actually. Nobody has talked to you about something as stupid as Atomic FireBalls in months. “I don’t mind.”

  Just then your phone buzzes with a text from Nicole: Where are you??? she wants to know, the question followed by a long row of screaming emojis.

  Upstairs bathroom, you text back.

  Wtf are you doing up there? We’re all in the basement. Come down now.

  You look at the screen for a moment, then back at Wolf. You don’t know if you’ve ever actually bothered to look at him before, like in your head he was a walking, sentient wheat stalk. That’s not the impression you get now at all. His clothes are clean, if a little bit trashy: light-wash jeans and a faded T-shirt with the Ghostbusters logo on it, plus a pair of knockoff Timberland boots. His eyes are bright and intelligent and sharp. He could do okay, you think, in a place like New York City or California, where the past doesn’t cling like the smell of dirty laundry. Unfortunately for him, this is a suburb of a suburb of Syracuse. People have long memories here.

  You turn your phone over so the screen is facing down, tucking it underneath you on the toilet seat. “How’s your senior year going so far?” you ask him, then immediately feel like an idiot, remembering that he hasn’t even set foot in school yet this year. “I mean, such as it is.”

  Wolf’s mouth twists at that, not quite a smile. “Can’t complain, I guess.” He tilts his head to the side, looking up at you. “How’s yours?”

  “Good,” you chirp like a reflex, which is of course a giant lie, and not even a good one, and you’re thinking that of course Wolf knows that, until the moment that it suddenly occurs to you that he might not. After all, who can say what the hell news makes its way out to the Goshen Family Farm during harvest season? It might as well be medieval times over there. The idea of him not knowing makes him oddly compelling to you, like here is the one person in all of New York State to whom you’re exactly the same as you used to be. You want to keep up the facade. “I’m applying to schools, mostly. Are you—?” you start, then break off, but there’s nowhere to go but forward. “Applying to schools?”

  Wolf smirks at that. “No, Hailey,” he says quietly. “I am not applying to schools.”

  Something about the way he says your name makes your stomach do a strange flip. You’ve never heard him say it before. You look down at your hands in your lap, at your manicure. You and Nicole went to the nail place this afternoon. She’s been your best friend since ninth grade, which doesn’t mean she probably doesn’t talk about you when you get up and leave the room, just like everyone else does. It’s entirely possible she’s talking about you right now.

  Wolf reaches up and picks a fat candle off the side of the bathtub, probably pumpkin or cinnamon bun or something equally disgusting, and roots around in his pocket until he comes up with a book of matches. “There,” he says, lighting it and setting it back on the side of the tub.

  “Is that a good idea?” you ask, motioning to the window.

  “They can’t see it,” Wolf says, and for some reason you believe him. He looks oddly handsome in the flicker of the candlelight, all sharp cheekbones and serious expression. Nicole will die if you tell her that. You might not tell Nicole anything about this at all.

  “This is a really ugly bathroom,” you observe instead of thinking about it, looking around at the faux-Mexican tile and brightly painted sink, the sunken bathtub that looks like its sole purpose was orgies in the 1970s. Above the toilet is a framed stock photo of a baby wearing a shower cap and holding a rubber duck. “I never really stopped to notice it before.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Wolf says, peering around. “I could sit in here all day, personally. Have a bubble bath. Read a romance novel.”

  You laugh at that, surprisingly. You didn’t expect Wolf Goshen to be funny, like maybe he’s from someplace where laughter is verboten, and then you realize what a stupid thing that is to think. “Use a bath bomb,” you add.

  Wolf shakes his head. “What’s a bath bomb?” he asks.

  “It’s like a fizzy soap thing,” you try to explain. “You put it in the tub and it kind of explodes and bubble bath and sometimes glitter comes out.”

  Wolf considers it. “That sounds like a gigantic mess,” he says.

  “Sometimes,” you agree.

  You look at each other for a moment. Neither one of you says anything. You remember, suddenly, a morning in the spring of third grade when he came into school with a hole in the collar of his T-shirt and a bruise the size of a new potato on his cheek. You remember how afraid it made you—not for Wolf but of him, like maybe black eyes were catching somehow. The memory makes you feel about two inches tall.

  The police are still shouting Madison’s name, doorbell chiming. It reminds you, stupidly, of the Siege of Bastogne, which was part of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. Lately when you can’t sleep, which is often, you’ve been reading all the old history books from the shelves in your dad’s office, poring over maps and committing battle plans to memory. You still have circles under your eyes the color of overripe eggplants, but you think chances are good you’ll pass the AP U.S. History test at the end of the year.

  Wolf tilts his head toward the window, listening. “Doesn’t really sound like they’re giving up, huh?”

  You smile, though it isn’t actually funny. The Siege of Bastogne lasted for seven days. “Nope,” you agree. For an instant you wonder what might happen if you strolled out onto Madison’s lawn right now, waved to the police in the porch light. Hey, guys. It’s me, your good buddy Hailey. Let’s all call this off and go home.

  Your butt is starting to fall asleep on the toilet seat, so you slide to the floor and stick your legs out in front of you, your knees a few inches from Wolf’s. He’s got his hands folded in his lap, like he’s praying; he’s got long fingers and round, knobby knuckles, the nails bitten way far down. You imagine them tending an animal or fixing some kind of complicated machinery, which immediately makes you feel like an idiot. God, you must be further gone than you thought.

  Your phone chimes again then, insistent: Are you ok??????? Nicole demands. You can picture them all down in the basement, draped over armchairs and sitting cross-legged on the carpet, st
ifling giggles in the arms of their hoodies. You used to wonder if Nicole might have a crush on Jay, back when you used to care about things like that. You think she might resent you a little, especially lately, although you know she would never admit it. You think you might resent you, if you were her.

  You switch the phone over to silent and tuck it back under your butt, but when you look up again, Wolf is watching you. “What are you doing up here?” he asks suddenly, in a voice like the thought has just occurred to him that possibly this might be a trick.

  “What?” You don’t understand the question. “Same thing as you’re doing,” you say.

  “Yeah, but, like, why are you up here with me and not downstairs?” His face has changed, gotten sharper somehow. “I mean, what are you after?”

  “What?” you say again, stalling for time. You can’t tell him the truth, which is that you’re up here with him in this bathroom because you cannot bear to be down in the basement with people who know you; because you cannot bear to be anywhere at all. Telling him will break the spell, which is the whole point of being up here to begin with. “I’m not after anything.”

  He shakes his head. “People like you are always after something.”

  “Seriously?” Your spine straightens up against the bathroom door. “People like me?”

  Wolf shakes his head. “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t, actually.” Suddenly you’re spoiling for a fight—craving it, even. Lately everyone is so fucking nice to you; there’s a certain dark pleasure in this sudden nastiness. It feels good. It feels normal. “And you don’t know anything about me.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Wolf insists, as if you’ve called him stupid, which you have not. “If you’re up here with me instead of with them, there’s a reason why.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” you snap, drawing yourself up against the door and thrusting your shoulders back, your anger like a fire burning deep inside your chest. In one of your dad’s books about the Civil War you read that the only real advantage the North had was industry: that the round-the-clock shoveling of coal into giant roaring furnaces was the only reason the Union didn’t fall. You think of that sometimes now, when the alarm goes off in the morning and you feel like you can’t get out from under the covers: You imagine that you are a munitions factory. You imagine that you are a train. “What’s wrong with my friends, exactly?”