Last Year's Mistake - Gina Ciocca Page 0,4

of moving to Norwood.”

“Shut up!” I stopped too, and gaped at him.

“I swear. Your uncle helped us find the house.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “It is what real estate agents do. What street are you moving to?”

“Meadowbrook?” He said it like he couldn’t quite remember, but I knew exactly which street he was talking about.

“That’s right around the corner from us! The house next to the big empty field, right? Kind of purplish?”

David grinned. “You mean purplish, scary-ish, and dilapidated-ish? That’s the one. But we’re gonna fix it up—it won’t be an eyesore for long.”

I tilted my head and gave him a quizzical look. “You really need to stop apologizing for things that aren’t your fault. Our place doesn’t exactly look like the White House either. None of the houses in our neighborhood do.”

It wasn’t that Norwood was known for being poor on the whole. But the deeper into it you got, the more obvious it became that someone had forgotten to post a NO BOTTOM-FEEDERS ALLOWED sign. Beautiful houses on generous plots of land eventually gave way to narrowing, woodsy roads; shrinking, unkempt properties; and houses that could fit inside the master suites of the ones you’d driven past five minutes ago.

That was the part we lived in.

“Anyhow, I’m going to Norwood High,” David said. “Are you? Or will you be at one of the private schools?”

“Ha! Private school.” Maybe if I really wanted to feel like a bottom-feeder. I shook my head. “Norwood Public High is good enough for me. If you want, I’ll introduce you to my friends.”

A genuine grin lit his face. “Cool.”

“Kelsey, hurry up!” Miranda called from inside the house.

I wrapped my fingers around the door handle, then paused. “I should warn you—I usually win.”

“Then I should warn you that you need to kiss your winning streak good-bye, because this is the end.”

“We’ll see about that.”

We headed into the house side by side. David was wrong, of course. It was only the beginning.

Three

Rhode Island

Senior Year

“Kelsey! Kelseeeeeeeey!”

Crap.

Miranda hurried through the outdoor lunch area as fast as she could on her skinny legs. Her enormous book bag slapped against her back as she ran, and honey-colored wisps that had escaped her forever-disheveled ponytail fluttered in the breeze. Her hair was the exact color mine used to be, before I kicked it up a notch with some platinum-blond highlights. Though I had never allowed mine to look like a tornado had taken up residence on my head.

Miranda came to a halt in front of our lunch table, wide eyed and breathless. “Did you see who’s here?”

Ryan tensed next to me. He hadn’t exactly appreciated my earlier reaction to the “who” in question. Candy coughed and focused on stabbing a cherry tomato.

“I saw him,” I said, taking a bite of my pretzel in an attempt at nonchalance. And failing, because I nearly choked on it. “Shouldn’t you be inside with the other freshmen? The picnic tables are only for seniors.”

Miranda ignored my attempt to get rid of her, plowing ahead with barely a pause for air. “Can you believe he’s living here in Rhode Island? In his grandfather’s house? Or that his grandfather died? I mean, that part I can believe because he was always drunk, but holy crud, Kelse, we were just talking about him in the car this morning!”

Ryan’s head snapped up. “Wait. That’s who you were talking about?” His leg began to bounce beneath the table, and he readjusted his cap for the umpteenth time.

Nice, Miranda. It had taken me the entire morning to lower Ryan’s level of suspicion from red to orange, and she’d sent it flying off the charts again.

“Anyone wanna tell me who we’re talking about?” Matt Crowley¸ Ryan’s baseball buddy, called out from the other end of the table.

“Kelsey knows the new kid.” Ryan jerked his head in my direction and then ripped a bite from his sandwich in a way that made me feel bad for it.

“Ooooh, Kelse. An old flame?” If the tone of Matt’s voice hadn’t made me want to punch him, the smirk on his face would’ve.

“No.” I crumpled my bag of pretzels. “An old friend. Ex-friend.”

“I know exactly who you’re talking about!” Violet Kensing squealed before I could reiterate that he was a friend I didn’t speak to anymore. “He’s in my homeroom! Oh my God, Kelsey, he is so hot! Can you introduce me?” She tossed her hair like she expected him to materialize at the mere mention of his existence. Candy rammed an elbow into