as he lifts his tie from around my neck, drawing it out in a long ribbon.
The silk strokes my neck for what feels like minutes, and I force my gaze away when he finally pockets the tie.
My attention lands on the lone motorcycle across the parking lot. “Next time Carly gets creative with my car, I’m borrowing your ride.”
“No, you’re not.” He straightens, shoving a hand through his messy-is-sexy hair. “Jax Jamieson would destroy me for letting his baby girl near it.”
There it is. The reason I can’t avoid Tyler completely, even I want nothing more than to cut him out of my life.
Oakwood’s rebel prince doesn’t live in a brick mansion with a closet full of V-necks and two Ivy-League-educated parents.
He lives in our pool house, thirty feet from my bedroom.
2
“Sorry I’m late. Car trouble.” I trip into the café, and Pen looks up from her table. “I did bring you presents, though. Check your e-reader.”
My friend grabs her tablet from her bag. “Ooh! How many books did you get me?”
“Ten? Twelve?” I laugh. “You’re going away. You’ll need some new material.”
“You’re the best,” she informs me when I finish telling her about the mix of fiction and nonfiction I picked out.
We go to the counter, and I order a peppermint tea.
“How was rehearsal?” Pen asks while we wait.
I fill my friend in on what happened with Carly, and her eyes widen.
“The bitches tried to stop me driving away from the crime scene,” I finish.
“Sabotaging your ride is a new low. She’s escalating.”
I roll my eyes. “Carly can’t stand people taking things she wants.”
“It’s more than that. You’re a traitor to an income bracket,” Pen says, mock chastising. “Writing essays about how her dad and a bunch of others’ are destroying the middle class through their greedy empires and campaigning with the administration to spend our community involvement hours with actual disadvantaged people instead of working with fancy ad agencies on shiny posters for environmental groups.”
Her smile fades. “For real, though. Why is this High School Musical fantasy so important to you? In a year, we’ll both be at Columbia, and this will all be behind us.”
My tea is set in front of me, and I reach for it. “She doesn’t get to decide who has a voice, on stage or anywhere else.”
Pen follows me back to our table. “So, how’d you get here if they fucked up your ride?”
“Tyler fixed it.” I glance at her empty mug. “Do you want another Americano to get through calc?”
Hands grip my arms, and in a second, I’m looking straight into my friend’s dark, dancing eyes. “No, I do not want another Americano. I want to know in what world Tyler Adams was elbow deep in your business.”
Penelope’s smart. Like, next level. She’s the head of debate team and the newspaper, she’s taking all AP courses, and she doesn’t miss a beat.
Her dad moved here from Shanghai and met her mom at UCLA before they came to Texas. Mr. Wang knows my stepmom because Haley’s in software too.
“When was the last time you and Mr. Pool House talked about something other than who ate the last Cheerios?” she presses.
“Four months.”
“Which is weird given you’ve been living together for the better part of a semester and you were friends before that.”
Yes, we were friends. Or whatever you call it when you hang with someone incessantly, argue over bands until three in the morning, and take over diner booths across an entire city on an epic quest to find the best cheese fries.
When I met Tyler, he was part of a community outreach program at my dad’s label in Philly for kids from troubled backgrounds.
He was talented and gorgeous, but none of that was what attracted me to him.
There was a deeper pull.
I knew Tyler had seen some shit the way you can tell when another person’s been through it. Still, anytime I asked about his family, he shut me down.
When my dad finished the album, we moved back to Dallas, but Tyler and I stayed friends.
“Remember when he moved here from Philly to work with your dad and everyone at school lost their designer shit over him?” Pen muses. “Oakwood should’ve eaten him alive, but they didn’t.”
And that’s what I hate the most. The boy I trusted, my partner in crime during one of the most tumultuous periods of my life, traded my friendship for theirs.
“The whole thing was messed up from the start,” I admit. “Tyler showed up at our house. My