Superior was getting to graduate with my class. Jules’s parents had been generous enough to let me crash at their house, but I had to fake every ounce of enthusiasm. And faking it was exhausting.
“Oh!” Jules said. “Were you going to bed already? It’s not even nine yet.”
“No, I’m good. I’m up.” I picked off the strands of hair that were stuck to my sweaty face.
Jules hung my cap and gown from the top of the closet door. We’d been friends since kindergarten. I could tell her anything. Well, almost anything.
She flipped her hair to one side and wriggled out of her jeans. “I’ve got to start buying pants a size bigger. I swear these are giving me a rash.”
“Thanks for sharing,” I said. My phone vibrated on the bedside table. It was a text from an unknown number. It was the seventh time that day. The first time it happened, I thought, This is it! Calder probably got a new phone, right? That would make sense. Now that he had his freedom, he wouldn’t want his sister Maris to know how to reach him. But when I clicked on it, there was no message—only a link to a website, just some hacker sending me a virus. Now it was just plain annoying.
“Figure-flattering,” Jules said, trying on her graduation gown. “We’re going to look like saggy blueberries. Remember that Willy Wonka girl after she goes through the juicer? I wonder what they’d look like belted?”
“Stupid,” I said, sliding my phone open and closed, open and closed.
“Geez, Lily, what’s got your undies in a bunch?” She laughed. Everyone was always laughing these days. Or maybe they always had been. Had I ever laughed so easily? Nothing seemed funny anymore. I gathered my strength and forced a smile.
Jules rolled her eyes and muttered, “Nice try,” while she scrounged through my closet.
“Sorry. Just tired,” I said. “Are you looking for something in particular?”
Jules bypassed a paisley blouse, a chenille poncho, and a 1970s denim jumpsuit (my latest thrift-store purchase). She tossed a belt and a tuxedo cummerbund onto the bed and wrapped a skinny necktie around her waist.
“You’ve been grumpy for weeks, Lil, and you always say it’s nothing. It’s something, all right. It’s that guy again, isn’t it?” She checked herself out in the full-length mirror. “Want me to get the frozen yogurt?”
That guy. Dark curly hair, hypnotic green eyes, voice like liquid, each word pouring into the next like water tumbling over rocks when he got excited. Calder White. The most amazingly beautiful boy who’d ever tried to kill my father.
It wasn’t funny. Not at all. But I couldn’t help smiling when I thought of how far we’d come. I’d told Jules plenty about him: how we’d worked together at the Blue Moon Café and how he’d taught me to use the cappuccino maker and steam milk to a perfect foam; how he’d rescued me from a near drowning and later given me a personal tour of the shipwrecks and natural wonders of the Apostle Islands. Of course, I’d never mentioned the most amazing part: that the tours had been underwater, with his perfect lips pressed to mine.
Jules walked gingerly across the floor to the bed. A semester’s worth of white loose-leaf paper littered the guestroom floor. Now that my last final was behind me, I planned to toss it all, but I was enjoying the look of the room, kinda snow-covered.
A stack of books leaned like the Tower of Pisa in the corner of the room. Trig, physics, humanities, French, three dog-eared novels, and a copy of Hamlet. A tattered anthology of Victorian poetry teetered at the top, flopped open to Tennyson’s “Mariana.” That poem was what I’d fallen asleep to the night before: a poor girl asking when her true love would return. It probably should have made me feel worse, but it was the one thing that made me feel closer to Calder, remembering the sound of his voice as we recited Tennyson on Manitou Island, the cool air evaporating the water off my skin.…
Jules plunked herself down on the bed and put her hand on my shoulder. “He still hasn’t called?”
I shrugged.
“Do you think maybe you should move on? It’s not like this was a long-term romance or anything, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“I mean, it’s not like you’re in love with the guy, right?”
Love. I wasn’t sure what I felt for Calder White. When I first met him, he made me nervous, partly because of his unnaturally good