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Reckless Hearts
Sean Olin


In this second book set in the steamy Wicked Games series, two best friends - and potential soulmates - are torn apart by a dangerous game of deceit and identity theft.What do you do if you find yourself fantasizing about kissing your best friend? Sensitive guitarist Jake has been asking himself that same question for a long time, and there’s no easy answer. Telling his dream girl – talented anime artist Elena – about his feelings might lead to the ultimate rejection, but not telling her just might kill him.Before Jake can make his move, though, a new mysterious guy enters the picture in an unexpected way. In Elena’s mind, Harlow is excitement-personified: a rebellious yet kindred spirit who she instantly connected with online. Jake’s gut is telling him that something about Harlow is off, and that Elena is in way over her head, but the more Jake pushes the issue, the more he pushes Elena right into Harlow’s arms-and into a tragedy that neither of them would ever see coming.























Copyright (#ulink_76c9530c-51d2-5ef5-b768-18ba1d03cab9)


First published in the USA by HarperCollins Publishers Inc. in 2015

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Reckless Hearts

Copyright В© 2015 HarperCollins Publishers

Jacket photo В© 2015 by Gallery Stock;

Jacket design В© Joel Tippie

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007569946

Ebook Edition В© 2015 ISBN: 9780007569953

Version: 2015-10-15


Contents

Cover (#u5c1806d3-80fe-589f-8eeb-23df286c69d0)

Title Page (#u955852c2-277f-542d-ad69-7ebcc1752f34)

Copyright (#u3189aa31-42fd-57b8-befd-ded3dea6a73d)

Chapter 1 (#ufeeabc3c-1c0a-5503-8ce6-ccf9d56ca83b)

Chapter 2 (#u8ad7f372-8642-5bb4-a539-421e5986fe29)

Chapter 3 (#u94ad3d69-8e63-5fc1-ae19-55272ef97755)

Chapter 4 (#ua1fe9ee3-911a-5ad5-9113-269bf6846396)

Chapter 5 (#uefd17f73-b22a-50e8-bc2d-ab477a3eabfb)

Chapter 6 (#u77693c79-8ab9-5053-a4f5-cf863af3ad70)

Chapter 7 (#u0b0ed41d-44d8-541d-9234-1593f11f90bc)

Chapter 8 (#ue9e9dc4a-0ce7-5bd4-ab0e-a8e20fecd19a)

Chapter 9 (#ua08fba1a-dd9c-53d7-a921-b0ca19e13824)

Chapter 10 (#u51a8530f-f2d5-50c0-9945-407eca7c0d88)

Chapter 11: Electra and the Emo Boy (#u76e7d1d0-4146-5431-898d-8f67dd3e844d)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21: Laundry Day (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 31: Supernova (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 48: Simply Joy (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Sean Olin (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




1 (#ulink_66a39e11-262c-5cc1-af00-2191f7445c34)


DP Movers—their slogan was “You point the way, Dream Point!”—had arrived this morning at eight thirty. For the past three hours, they’d been carting boxes of clothes and books and kitchen utensils, and mostly, the carved figurines and masks and exotic musical instruments Jake Gordon’s mother had collected from all over the world, into the flatbed of their truck and stacking them up in tight systematic rows. The moving truck, a pale cavernous brick of sea-foam aluminum, was almost full now. Almost ready to haul the history of Jake’s life across town to the north shore, where the fancy people in Dream Point lived in their elaborate mansions, bunkered between their security gates and their private beaches.

Watching the movers sweat in the crisp December air, Jake had a hard time getting his head around the fact that he would be one of those fancy people now. He didn’t feel like he’d changed at all, but his mother, Janey, had married Cameron Pendergrass, maybe the fanciest of them all. He owned the Mariana Hospitality Group, a chain of hotels all over the world, including three massive, full-service island resorts, one in the Bahamas, one in Antigua, and one on some island in the South China Sea. He was easily the richest person in Dream Point.

As the stringy tattooed guys who looked like they shouldn’t be anywhere near this strong carried the last of the boxes from the house, Jake sat in a wicker-backed kitchen chair, its legs sinking into the moist soil of the front yard. He stared out at Greenvale Street and tried to distract himself from thinking how completely his life would change by wondering what would happen to all the stuff they were leaving behind. The couch, the dining room table, the bed he’d slept in since he was six years old, even the chair he was sitting in now—they were ditching all of it. The white stucco bungalow that Jake had always known as home—new people would be living in it by New Year’s.

And Elena Rios, his best friend and partner in skeptical endurance of the cliquey, shallow life at Chris Columbus High, who knew all his secrets, or all but one—she’d no longer be living right next door. She’d promised to hang out with him and watch the movers work this morning, and he’d dragged two wicker-backed chairs out onto the lawn, but the one next to him was still empty.

He’d texted her three times already, giving her status updates on the movers’ progress, and all he’d heard back was one hard-to-interpret message saying, “THESE THINGS TAKE TIME ;D.” Tilted on the uneven soil of the lawn, the chair looked sad and lonely beside him.

“Hey, yo,” the crew captain called to him from the back of the truck, squinting under the dingy red Santa hat he’d draped over his head. “You wanna sign off on this, or what?” He wagged a tin clipboard at Jake as though he thought Jake should have been able to read his mind.

Jake wandered over to the truck. His mother had put him in charge. She had to be at Tiki Tiki Java, the coffeehouse she owned on Shore Drive, and Cameron, obviously, wasn’t interested in spending his precious time coordinating with moving companies—he had employees for that. School was out for Christmas break, so it wasn’t like Jake had anywhere better to be, anyway.

“Just the boxes, yeah?” the mover said. “That’s some nice stuff in there. You’re leaving all of it?”

“Yeah,” Jake said.

“The TV? That speaker system? Shit ain’t cheap.”

“Salvation Army is coming to take it away.”

“Oh?” The guy raised an eyebrow. He was trying too hard not to seem overly curious. “When’s that?”

“This afternoon,” Jake lied.

The guy ticked his cheek. He braced the clipboard on his forearm and held the pen rubber-banded to it out to Jake. “You gotta push hard to get through all three layers,” he said.

Jake signed the sheet and reminded the guy that his mother would be there to sign on the other side.

As the guy rounded up his three workers and closed the truck, Jake headed toward the house for one last look.

He checked his watch. It was almost noon. Still no sign of Elena.

She didn’t usually flake like this, at least not with him. He knew she was elusive. She liked it that way. Enjoy being with me while I’m here and don’t ask for more. That was her attitude. But Jake had always been the exception to this rule. He was the person she didn’t hide from.

As he wandered the rooms of the house one last time, it took every ounce of his being to restrain himself from frantically bombarding Elena with the kind of needy, selfish where-are-you texts that he knew she hated getting from other people—her sister, her father, the couple of boys she’d briefly, disastrously dated.

He’d known her all his life. There was a photo of the two of them in their diapers sitting in the dirt under the swing set in Seminole Park, reaching out to fumble at each other’s chubby hands. She’d been there for him when his parents’ marriage finally broke up and his father moved permanently to the Keys. He’d been there for her throughout the long saga of her mother’s death of ovarian cancer and the roller coaster of chemo and radiation therapy, of hope and despair and hope and despair that had consumed her life for a year and a half. He’d watched her grow from a sassy, string-bean tomboy to a dark-haired, dark-eyed, darkly intelligent young woman whose sense of the world was as off-kilter as his own.

He adored her.

The truth was, he loved her.

He’d known it forever. Since middle school, at least, when they’d both begun to wonder why the other kids in their class seemed to always, only want to talk about LeBron James and Miley Cirus, when he’d begun to sense that Elena was the only person he knew who thought deeply about the world. She was curious, so curious that after she’d seen Spirited Away, the surreal, slightly spooky Miyazaki movie, she’d explored where it had come from and uncovered a whole world of Japanese anime. She didn’t care if nobody else had heard of this stuff. It was interesting to her, and that was enough.

He loved that confidence he saw in her. He loved her compulsive joy, the goofy silliness she allowed herself to indulge in. And her fiery loyalty, the way she’d leap to the fight when she felt like he, or her sister, Nina, needed defending.

But it wasn’t just that. Lately, it was physical, too. Her olive skin. Her perfect toes. The way she wore her hair in that modified pixie cut, close and tight around the back, her curls swooping up over her forehead. The sweet curve of her hips and the faint strawberry mark that peeked out like a tattoo from the side of her bikini bottoms.

If she weren’t his best friend, he would have admitted it long ago. Even though he was just moving across town, he felt he had to tell her now. At least then she’d know that all those songs he’d written for “Sarah,” the “girlfriend” who “lived down the beach from his dad in the Keys,” had really been about her.

If only she’d come out to say good-bye, he could say the lines he’d been rehearsing all week.

He sent her one last text. “THEY’RE DONE. GOTTA GO IN 10.”

She responded immediately. “LOOK OUT THE WINDOW.”

And there she was in the chair he’d put out for her, casual, in tight jean shorts crisply folded up just above her knees, sporting her favorite Cowboy Bebop T-shirt. She made a goofy face, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue, briefly, then returned to hunching over the open laptop balanced on her thighs just in time to stop it from falling off.

The future—the future he’d imagined, anyway—flashed in front of Jake. Him moseying out of the house, hands in his pockets, playing it cool. Just as he reaches her, Elena looks up from the computer and something in her eyes says she knows what he’s about to say. That wry grin of hers, capable of communicating both her relish in experience and her ironic commentary on how silly life can be, breaks over her face. And before he can even say, “It’s always been you. I can’t hide it anymore,” she’s up on her tiptoes, her arms stretched out around his neck. A kiss that releases the years of longing between them into the world.

He could almost feel it electrifying his cells already.

The slow walk out of the house was the easy part, even if he could feel his hands nervously shaking in his pockets.

“Hey,” he said, from doorway.

“Hey is for horses,” she said with a wink. And there was that grin, but it didn’t convey the revelation of longing he’d imagined. “Sorry it took me so long.” She patted the six-year-old MacBook that, through the strategic placement of black electrical tape, she’d made look like a monster chomping down on the Apple logo. “Technology. I had to reboot this sucker like five times this morning.”

“Shaun White’s not what he used to be, huh?” Jake said. Shaun White was the name Elena had given the computer.

“Shaun White should have retired years ago.”

“Maybe I can ask Cameron to buy you an upgrade,” Jake said. He meant it, though the idea of actually asking Cameron for anything made him nervous. He’d never spent any time around super-rich people and he wasn’t sure he understood the codes they lived by.

Elena shot him a look that said, Yeah right. “I’d never let you put yourself in that situation.” She focused on the screen for a second and tapped the touch pad a few times. “I mean, he didn’t even come help you pack up.”

“He’s a busy guy.”

“I know. I’m just saying,” she said, protectively defending him.

Elena locked eyes with him for a second, and as her face softened and seemed to reach out to him, he knew she’d seen through to the part of him that was scared about all the change that moving into Cameron’s mansion on the beach would create in his life.

“Come look at what I made you,” she said.

Jake sat in the chair next to her, conscious of her body heat, not getting too close with his elbow or knee for fear of touching her—if he touched her, he’d melt.

“Come on, Jaybird,” she said. “You have to be able to see the screen.” And she threw her arm over his shoulder and mussed his hair, like a buddy, like she was about to give him a noogie. “You ready?”

She adjusted the volume and clicked play on her video-editing program.

First came the music. “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” from Toy Story. Then the delicate, slightly nervous script she always used in her animations.

For Jaybird, it said.

Jake immediately felt the emotions swell in his chest.

The animated characters that always represented the two of them in Elena’s animes—Electra, the tough girl with spiky hair of black flames, heavy kohl eyes, padded, studded leather armor, and jet-flight platform shoes; and Jaybird, tall and skinny with knob knees and a constant bewildered expression on his face—performed a choreographed dance to the music. A backbeat kicked in, and Electra grew larger and larger, her mouth opening until the darkness inside swallowed up the screen.

As Elena’s voice rap-talked over the Toy Story song, stylized freeze-frame images of the two of them floated in and out of the frame—highlights from their years of friendship: the day they raced their bikes all the way to the Seminole monument in the middle of town and then climbed triumphantly to the top and sat on the Native American warrior’s back; the time Jake’s mom took the two of them to Disney World and they spent the whole day pretending they weren’t having as much fun as they really were; the moment when Jake played his guitar in front of an audience for the first time and Elena was right there clapping from the front row. Image after image of the two of them sharing each other’s lives.

The song, or poem, or rap, or whatever Elena was calling the spoken word she’d layered over the images explained what was happening in them. She talked about the day her mom died and the long walk Jake had taken with her, not speaking at all, because what was there to do but be there, a presence by her side, ready when she needed him. She talked about the day he found out his parents were splitting up, how they’d snuck into the recycling center on the west side of town after dark and let out all their rage by shattering bottles against the wall, bottle after bottle after bottle after bottle, until they were giddy, until they’d almost forgotten how sucky the day had been.

“Most boys only want one thing,” she said at one point. “But Jaybird’s different. Jaybird sees the all of me.”

The anime ended with another scrawled fragment of text. Jaybird, don’t you ever change!

Jake was devastated. Not because he was sad but because he was so deeply touched by her work. He stared at the screen, frozen on the final image of the two of them holding hands, and he couldn’t help but wonder if she’d be saying all these things if she knew how much he wanted to be more than friends with her.

“It’s just a rough cut, but … what do you think?” she said, the look on her face betraying a real and desperate need to know he thought it was good.

“I love it,” Jake said, trying to twist his lips into an earnest smile so she’d think he was telling the truth.

Her elegant eyebrows were arched in expectation, her whole face open, waiting.

“Should I post it to AnAmerica? You wouldn’t mind?” AnAmerica was a web forum where Elena and other anime-obsessed kids from all over the country shared their animations with one another.

“Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, you should post it. It’s great.”

But part of him was disappointed, too. No way could he confess his love to her now. Because what if she rejected him? What if she said, Sorry, I love you, man, but I don’t love you like that? Better to be with her, even as friends, than to lose her friendship because he wanted more out of it than she did.

He rubbed his hands back and forth across his jeans, unsure what to do. “It’s time,” he said. He stood, dazed, and picked up his chair.

She flipped her lower lip down, trying to be cute as she made her sad face. When he didn’t respond, she said, “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. I’ve … I just have to lock up the house.” He knew himself. He felt itchy. He had to get away. To go somewhere alone and lick his wounds. “And then I’ve got to go. I’m already late meeting Mom. Can you grab that chair?”

Leaving her computer on the lawn, she swung her chair above her head and carried it inside.

When it was time for them to say good-bye, he awkwardly held open his long arms for a hug. She fell into his chest, squeezing him tight, which was nice, but he couldn’t bring himself to squeeze her back. He was afraid, if he did, that she’d see through him and learn his real feelings. Instead, he patted her chastely on the back.

“Don’t forget us little people,” she said.

“I won’t. I’ll see you soon,” he said. “I’ll call you every day. You’ll see.”




2 (#ulink_6f5debf7-19d9-5131-981e-dcb9cc1907a7)


Even though Jake had said nothing would change, by that afternoon, it felt to Elena as though everything already had.

She was trapped at home—her least favorite place to be. Her sister, Nina, had closed the curtains tight across the half-moon living room window, shutting the house in darkness, and she sprawled in her crater on the plush yellow leather couch in front of the TV, shoveling Cool Ranch Doritos into her mouth. She didn’t move once. She just lay there, watching episode after episode of Storage Wars, which she’d turned up so loud that Elena couldn’t hear herself think, much less focus on editing the animation she’d made for Jake. She’d tried hunkering down in the kitchen. She’d tried locking herself in her bedroom. She’d even tried the bathroom, sitting on the floor with her computer propped on the closed lid of the toilet.

When, finally, Elena tried asking her sister to turn it down, Nina stared, her mouth open just enough to show her disinterest, and said, “I’m pregnant, Elena,” as though that explained anything.

“And I’m trying to work,” Elena responded. “I want to get this anime up on the site tonight.”

Nina shrugged. “So do that, then,” she said. She glared at Elena, challenging her to push the topic. “But I have to keep my feet up, so …” She jutted her chin out like she was putting a period on her statement.

Elena knew how this went. Her sister hadn’t done much of anything but lie on the couch for the past month. She was overweight—by a lot—and being pregnant bloated her more. Her ankles had swelled when she’d hit her second trimester and her doctor had told her she needed to keep her feet elevated as much as possible. In the past month, Nina had done almost nothing but lie in her command center on the couch, her feet propped on one arm, her head lolling on the other. She wore the same pink Juicy Couture sweatsuit almost every day.

And what was Elena supposed to do? Argue with her? Tell her to get some exercise? Remind her that this was her house, too? She was pregnant! Being pregnant trumped everything.

“Fine,” Elena said. She gave in, plopped on the tiled floor in front of the white fake Christmas tree draped in so much silver tinsel that the red balls hanging from it were barely visible, and watched the show with her sister.

Not five minutes later, Nina nudged her on the shoulder with a socked foot and said, “Can you get me a Diet Pepsi? Pretty please?” She smiled with a coy helplessness that was as annoying as the question.

“Nina! I’m not your maid,” Elena said.

Nina rubbed her pregnant belly and readjusted the expression on her face to convey her helplessness with more conviction.

“Okay. But only if you turn it down.”

As Nina made a show of playing with the volume buttons on the remote, Elena hopped off the floor and wiped the tinsel off the butt of her jean shorts. She padded around the couch and up the single step into the kitchen area. She grabbed a can from the fridge and faked throwing it at Nina’s head before handing it to her.

“Should you really be drinking this while you’re pregnant?” Elena asked.

“What’s wrong with you today, anyway?” said Nina, defensively. “You’re all pissy. If you want to do your thing, go over to Jake’s house. You like it better there, anyway.”

“You really don’t know?”

Nina’s face was blank.

“Today was the day. The movers came this morning.”

“Oh!” said Nina. She reached out and squeezed Elena’s shoulder, a quick massage, just enough to convey that she understood how sad this must make her.

“So I can’t go over there.”

“Tell you what,” Nina said. “You take the controls. We’ll watch what you want today.”

Elena appreciated her sister’s gestures toward sympathy and understanding. She knew Nina cared, in her lazy way. But her attempt to comfort her felt more like a burden than a gift. They were just so different. Elena had unending supplies of energy. She liked making stuff, using her imagination to explore her reality and transform it into extravagant cartoons. She liked the sunshine. She liked jangly music played live on the guitar, especially when she was near the ocean and there was maybe a campfire nearby. Her sister just sort of let her life happen to her.

More than anything else, it made her depressed. She hated the thought of being condemned to this house, wasting her life away in front of the TV, shutting down her brain and passively letting the world close in on her.

Of course, she couldn’t tell her sister all this. Instead she said, “I don’t care what we watch. Whatever you want. It’s not like a different show will bring Jake back. Here—” She lobbed the controls back to her sister.

For the next three hours, they sat there, not moving, barely speaking, just staring at the obsessive freaks on the screen as they bid on box after box. Elena felt like a huge metal plate was being pressed down over her head, crushing her, pushing her into the floor. She felt both bored and trapped. She wondered how Nina could live like this all the time.

Then she wondered what was wrong with her that she was so ready to judge her sister—her pregnant sister! Life was just such a disappointment sometimes. Jake would understand how she felt. Jake would know how to make her feel better. But then, if Jake were around she probably wouldn’t be feeling this way. She wouldn’t even be here! She’d be outside somewhere with him, imagining, like they sometimes did, all the ways that, when Nina’s baby was born, the two of them would make sure it had good taste, teaching it about art and music and culture.

Eventually, the familiar sound of her father jangling the spring-loaded clip on which he kept his keys broke the monotony. Elena could hear him futzing with the door before realizing it was already unlocked, and then there he was standing in the room with them, a look of exhaustion and smoldering frustration weighing down his face. His white guayabera shirt was stained with sweat at the armpits and his pleated linen pants had inched under his gut.

He flipped his keys back and forth around his finger, slapping them repeatedly in the palm of his hand, taking in the situation at the house.

“Hola,” he said. “Good to see you’re all doing something constructive with your day.”

With three great strides, he moved to the window and dramatically pulled the curtains open, filling the room with streaming evening sunlight. Elena and Nina shot quick wincing glances at each other, blinking in the suddenly bright light and bracing themselves for what was about to come. He was in a mood. Everybody was in a mood today.

“What’s wrong with you?” Nina said bullishly.

He brushed his hand from the top of his bald head down over his bushy salt-and-pepper mustache, reigning in his thoughts. “What’s wrong with me is, one, I’ve been zipping back and forth from one Super Suds to the other, dealing with all kinds of mierda—Selina locked her keys in her car on the south side and I had to open up for her, then the basement flooded on the west side … uno, dos, tres, quatro. Every single one of my Laundromats had something go wrong today. And then while I’m dealing with all this, what do I get? I get a call from a Mr. Ricardo Colon. You know that name? You should. That’s Matty’s parole officer—”

At the mention of her boyfriend’s name, Nina shot up into a sitting position, ready to fight. “No, no, no, no,” she said, waving her finger at her father. “I’m not his keeper.”

“You see? Why don’t you tell me why this Colon guy called me, hey?”

“I don’t know,” said Nina, defensively.

“Sure you do. Matty missed his appointment. Matty hasn’t been to work. Matty this, Matty that. Matty’s blowing it again.” His voice rose a tick with each new item on his list. “Where is he? He heard me coming and snuck out the back door?”

“He’s not here,” said Nina.

“Oh? We must have run out of food, hey?” Elena’s father shot back.

And then they were both shouting, rapidly, in Spanish. Elena was caught between the two of them, ducking as their words zipped back and forth above her head. She’d so had enough of this. All they ever did was fight, and always about Matty.

God, get me out of here, she thought. But where would she go? She couldn’t flee to Jake. It’s not like she could ride her bike all the way across town and show up at Cameron Pendergrass’s estate, begging to be let in. He’d think, Who’s this crazy Cuban girl and why’s she on my lawn?

Her dad was stalking around the room now, circling Nina. And Nina was wagging her finger all over the place. Elena couldn’t take it anymore.

“Everybody! Shut up for a second!” she said. She leaped to her feet, putting herself physically between them. Turning to them one at a time, she said, “Dad. Matty hasn’t been here all day. I’ve been sitting right here. I would have seen him. And Nina. Dad’s right. You have to get Matty under control. What are you going to do when the baby is born and he disappears for days on end, or shows up drunk in the middle of the night shouting for you to come out and party with him? He’s the father of your child. Tell him to get it together. Jeez.”

She didn’t usually get involved in their fights like this, and the two of them stared at her in surprise for a beat. Then they turned right back to each other and commenced shouting again.

“You people are hopeless!” Elena said.

But neither of them even heard her. They didn’t notice when she slinked out of the room, either. They just kept on yelling. It was almost like they liked the drama.

She padded down the hall to her room, feeling with each step how wrong it was to head in this direction, farther into the house, when she should have been moving in the other direction, out into the crisp night air, toward Jake’s place next door, where they’d find a way to remind each other that laughing about their troubles always made things better. But she couldn’t do that. For the first time since Jake had driven away with his guitar and the duffel bag of clothes in the backseat of his beat-up old Jeep, which they affectionately called the Rumbler, Elena sadly understood how her life would be different without him living next door.

Locking the dead bolt she’d placed on her door, she sparked up her computer, put on her headphones, and checked out the new animations her virtual friends had posted on AnAmerica, hoping they’d be distracting enough to drown out the drama on the other side of the door.




3 (#ulink_a29980db-0d76-51f9-9bc8-7deb27709b42)


Jake had never seen a house quite like this one. It was like something out of a magazine. It had been featured in a magazine, actually. Luxury, it was called. Jake had never heard of it, but the name said everything he needed to know. It was hidden from the street by a solid white gate and the first time Jake had seen the surreally lush lawn he’d wondered how many thousands of dollars Cameron spent every month on landscaping. There were no trees, just this vast flat green space perched above the beach and the house sitting there like a sculpture.

From the outside it looked like a set of blindingly white boxes, each one set off-center from the ones above and below it, like children’s blocks that had been placed precariously on top of one another. Inside, it was a cavernous, flowing open space with different platformed levels connected by brushed concrete stairs that seemed to float free in the air.

The interior was so tasteful that there weren’t any Christmas decorations, not even a wreath. Jake felt like he was in an art gallery, not someplace people lived. But people did live here. He lived here now. It would take some getting used to.

That first night, as he sat at the hand-carved, blond-wood dining table—positioned in just the right off-angle location in the big oblong main room that was, all by itself, larger than his old house across town—he had the strange feeling that he and his mother and Cameron were guests at a five-star restaurant that only served one party a night.

They were served by a waiter with artfully mussed hair and a carefully untucked linen shirt, which he wore over crisp jeans and white no-brand sneakers. He looked casual but brought their duck confit and shaved fennel salad to the table with regimented efficiency. Jake wished Elena were here to see it—he could imagine the arched eyebrow she’d throw his way, the way she’d poke him under the table and slowly twist her silver custard spoon in the air, studying it like a mystifying artifact from an alien civilization until she finally got Jake to chuckle over the pomposity that was surrounding him.

Cameron didn’t seem to notice the waiter was even there. He held court, telling stories about the various adventures he’d had over the years, most of them involving the yacht he owned and small islands in the Caribbean. He was a small guy with big hair, a smaller guy than he seemed like he should be, given how much space he took up. He was the kind of man who never buttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, even when he wore a suit. Throughout the meal, he’d been leaning all over his seat and sprawling into the empty chair next to him, stretching his arms and legs out like he was inviting everyone to take their shoes off and chill.

“So, we looked out from the top of the cliff and Wickman points toward the bay and says, �Hey, check it out. Someone’s boat is floating away,’” Cameron was saying now. “And I look, and holy fuck. It’s my boat!”

Jake could tell his mom was in awe of him, that this new life she’d pulled Jake into was a kind of fantasy to her, a life of stylish leisure that she’d always dreamed of. The way she gazed at him, her chin on her hand, barely blinking her big blue eyes—it was like she was disappearing into his aura. Cameron hardly noticed how starstruck she was. He seemed to assume that women would respond to him this way.

“It was drifting sideways, a good hundred yards out already. The bay was so deep that the anchor hadn’t reached the bottom. So we had no choice, we had to dive. Operation Save the Boat. My first foray into extreme sports.”

Pouring with one hand while gesticulating and illustrating his story with the other, he almost unnoticeably kept Jake’s mom’s wineglass full of pinot gris.

Jake quietly took it all in, trying to make sense of his new reality. His mom’s romance with Cameron Pendergrass had been a whirlwind of frantic change. She’d met him only four months ago, when he’d hired Tiki Tiki Java to cater a reception at StarFish, the glitzy hotel he owned in Dream Point. Jake had barely met the guy before they’d suddenly gotten engaged and then, two weeks later, married, in a secret ceremony that not even Jake had been invited to on that yacht somewhere off the coast of St. John. He was happy for his mom, of course. She’d been lonely for a long, long time. But he was baffled by how to relate to Cameron. The guy intimidated him.

“You want a pour?” Cameron asked Jake, pointing the half-empty wine bottle at Jake’s glass.

Jake glanced at his mother, who subtly shook her head no. “No thank you, sir,” he said.

“It’s Cameron to you, Jake. We’re family now.”

A voice from the other side of the room called out, “I’ll have a glass. Since you’re offering.”

Everyone turned to see a guy Jake’s age leaning against the wall near the front door to the house like he’d been there for a while, watching them. He was tall, though not as tall as Jake, and fit under his formfitting rich-navy-blue T-shirt in a metrosexual way. He had stylishly cut blond hair and was wearing sunglasses that must have cost as much as Jake’s car.

The way Jake’s mom lightly touched Cameron’s hand, as though to brace him and calm his nerves, made Jake think that the guy wasn’t welcome. He wondered who he was and how he’d gotten here.

“Glad you could make it,” Cameron said. “You’re only, oh”—he made a show of checking his Omega watch—“two hours late.”

When the guy smirked it was like he was flashing a switchblade. “Well, you know, anything for you, Cameron,” he said. “How ’bout that wine?”

He sauntered toward the table like he owned the place and the waiter appeared out of nowhere to silently set a fourth place setting at the table.

As Cameron grudgingly poured a dollop of wine into the glass that had appeared with the new place setting, Jake caught his mother’s eye and mouthed, Who’s that?

She cleared her throat. “Jake, this is Nathaniel. Cameron’s son. He’s in town from the Roderick School in Atlanta. Nathaniel, this is my son, Jake.”

With a flourish, Nathaniel reached out his hand to shake. “How are you,” he said, and then after a pause he added, “brother.”

His grip was a vise, like he’d been told by someone—Jake couldn’t imagine it would have been laid-back Cameron—that a firm handshake was the key to success in the world and he’d turned this wisdom into a competitive dare.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, glancing at his father. “I had, you know, other things to do.”

Cameron patted him on the back, shot him a sharp glance, and said, “You’ll do better next time.”

Jake’s mom chimed in. She’d always been good at playing the gracious hostess. “We’re just glad you could make it at all,” she said. “It means a lot to your father. And I can say, for me, I’ve been dying to meet you since he first mentioned you.”

“Oh,” Nathaniel said drolly, “he mentioned me?”

“Of course he did. He loves you, Nathaniel.” She gave Cameron’s hand one last pat and then withdrew her own hand back into her lap.

Nathaniel grinned at this, showing off his sharp white teeth, and seeming, briefly, touched by what he’d heard. “Aww. Shucks,” he said.

The tension between Cameron and Nathaniel was overpowering. Jake could sense it in the way Cameron subtly adjusted his posture to make more room between himself and his son. He could feel it in the sharp end to Nathaniel’s charm, the way he was displaying his refusal to defer to his father.

He again wished Elena could be here to see this. He tried to imagine her making one of her silly faces at him, secretly letting him know she was noticing the same weirdness he was and reminding him simply by sticking out her tongue that he shouldn’t take it too seriously.

“Now—” Nathaniel took a swig of wine, downing the small amount his father had allowed him in one swallow. “That cliff. It was a hundred-foot sheer drop. The water was so clear that you could see the floor. I have this right, Cameron? Should I tell them how it ends? They survived. They saved the boat. That’s Cameron for you. He’ll do anything to save that boat.” He raised his empty glass and said, “But cheers to that, hey?”

Cameron met his challenge and graciously, indulgently, touched glasses with him. “Cheers to that,” he said.

Jake got the sense that Cameron could squash Nathaniel any time he wanted and it was just his good heart that stopped him from doing so. He wondered what had brought the two of them to this point, and how long their antagonism had persisted. Nathaniel’s behavior didn’t seem like the usual teenaged rebellion.

It felt uncomfortable just being in the room with them. There was a story here, a lifetime of resentments and secrets that Jake might never know. If Elena were here, she’d be taking mental notes so they could go over it all together later, dreaming up explanations filled with dangerous intrigue. But she wasn’t here. And even though she was just a couple miles across town, she seemed farther away than she ever had. It struck him that this was the first time in forever that he’d have spent an evening away from her.




4 (#ulink_2b004646-479f-5ff3-bfc9-163092d158d6)


Even with her headphones on and the volume turned up as high as it would go, Elena could hear her father and sister going at it on the other side of her locked bed-room door.

Sitting at the drafting table she used as a desk, she tried to ignore them, to fill her headspace up with the new clips her friends on AnAmerica had uploaded. There was a spoof of Hello Kitty by EvilTwin82 in which the cute pillowy cat was mutilated into a cartoonish sea of blood. There was an amusing journey through the daily life of an ant by NaNo_NoLa. An abstract dance of colored lights choreographed to a Yo-Yo Ma song by CelloMello. Another installment in the ongoing saga of “The 98-Pound Weakling” by ImNotNervous. But none of them held her attention the way she needed. None of them could compete with the never-ending soap opera of her family.

They were arguing over the remote now. Her dad was saying something about the Heat, how there was a crucial game against the Pacers tonight and no way was he going to let Nina stop him from watching it, even if she was pregnant. Elena didn’t even want to know.

She watched a clip of a crime-fighting dog and cat who solved their cases, usually involving evil squirrels, by accident as they chased each other around the neighborhood. She liked this one. FranSolo was the name of the girl who’d created it. Elena wrote a comment on her page. “I always knew those squirrels were up to no good!”

Having run out of clips to watch, she got down to work uploading her new animation—the one she’d made for Jake—to the site.

Electra, her online tag, was a kind of celebrity on AnAmerica, and she knew a lot of love would be coming her way soon. With nothing better to do with herself, she sat back and stared at the screen, waiting for the outpouring of likes and comments to rack up under her new clip.

And here they came. One, two, three, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five likes. It felt good to see them every time, though she didn’t know why—it’s not like they really meant anything. The comments started rolling in.

“Toy Story is the best movie ever!”

“So sorry to hear Jaybird is moving away!”

“Very cool, Electra!”

As usual, everyone was so nice to her here. So why did she still feel so empty inside? Stupid question. She knew why.

The sound of the basketball game blasted from the TV in the other room. And her father’s voice: “So go somewhere else, Nina. It’s not like you forgot how to walk when you got pregnant.”

She whipped out her phone and shot a text to Jake. “YOUR VIDEO IS LIVE.” Then she immediately sent him another one. “I MISS YOU!”

His response came within seconds. “I MISS YOU TOO! RICH PEOPLE ARE WEIRD!”

For the first time all evening she felt in some small way connected to the world.




5 (#ulink_d2e0cbcd-0894-53b2-bbbd-d046c67375c4)


Jake had trained himself to know when a new song was coming on. He could feel the rhythm in the fingers on his strumming hand. He’d unconsciously start miming out the chords and catching strings of lyrics in his mind. He’d learned to take note of these phenomena, to mark them and memorize them and hold them tight until he could begin doodling around them and teasing them into a musical form. Or better, to drop what he was doing immediately and follow the music wherever it was leading.

And tonight, after that uncomfortable dinner, he’d caught sight of the night view of the ocean from his new bedroom window for the first time—all that endless black water beyond the gray moonlit dunes—and known a sweet and slightly sad new melody was beginning to form in him.

Sitting on an unpacked box, surrounded by stacks of other unpacked boxes, he strummed at his favorite guitar, a worn old Gibson his father had given him way back when he was twelve, and tested various chord progressions. He had two phrases in his head—everything a boy could want, everything but you and don’t let the sea wash me away. He knew they went together but he hadn’t figured out exactly how.

He gazed out the window again and studied the way the blackness of the sky met the even darker blackness of the water. A new line came to him. I carved your name in the sand with a stick. Maybe it could be the first line. He tested the line out, fingerpicking in a slow minor key beneath it.

To inspire himself, he’d propped his computer on one of the stacks of boxes and pulled up Elena’s AnAmerica page. Her talent, and the energy she put into developing it, always inspired him. He had a notion that this song could be a response to the beautiful video she’d made for him, though he still wasn’t sure if he’d admit this to her. For now, it might be better to continue pretending he was pining for “Sarah,” the free-spirited Key West beach bunny he’d invented to explain to her where all his love songs were coming from.

A new fragment came to him as he stared at her page: don’t hate me for loving you. He knew this one would find its way into the song. It was the most honest line so far. It described what was going on inside him exactly.

Don’t hate me for loving you

Oh-o’delay

Don’t let the sea wash me away

Maybe that could be the chorus. It was a start.

He sang the lines again and again, changing his intonation and phrasing in little ways, running through the possible variations in search of the perfect version.

When he looked up from his guitar again, he was startled to see Nathaniel sitting on the sleek Scandanavian dresser across the room, slouching against the wall, smirking at him. His feet dangled off the edge and he tapped the drawers rhythmically with the heel of his polished black shoe. He seemed nervous, like there was a bundle of energy trapped inside him, bucking against his skin, trying to get out.

“Not bad,” he said. “Where’d you learn to pick like that?”

Jake clutched his guitar as though he could hide the music he’d been making. He didn’t like being distracted when he was composing. But like everything else about this foreign house, the bedroom didn’t feel like it belonged to him enough for him to tell Nathaniel to leave.

“I … My dad’s a musician,” he said. “He taught me.”

“Oh yeah?” said Nathaniel. “Have I heard of him?”

In his right hand, Nathaniel held an ornately decorated silver flask that had been inlaid with an image of a stalking tiger, delicately carved in ivory. He raised it to his lips and poured a nip of whatever it contained into his mouth as he waited for Jake to respond.

“He used to be in a band. Hope Springs. Kind of folky-bluesy stuff. They had a song called �Dandelions.’ You might have heard that one.”

“That song was huge. That guy’s your dad?”

“It wasn’t that huge. Nobody got rich off it. It went to number eighty-six.”

Jake glanced at his guitar, wishing he could get back to work.

“Still …” Nathaniel warbled a few lines of the chorus to Jake’s dad’s minor claim to fame. Then, tipping the flask toward Jake, he said, “Want some forty-year-old, oak-cask rum?”

Jake shook his head no, but then realizing that since Nathaniel showed no signs of leaving, he wouldn’t be getting any more work done on the song, he changed his mind. He felt like he should probably get to know his new stepbrother, anyway. “Know what, sure,” he said.

Popping down from the dresser, Nathaniel handed Jake the flask. The ivory inlay was impossibly intricate. It depicted some sort of Chinese landscape complete with mountaintop and weeping trees and a wise old man with a cane climbing a lonely path.

“How do you like the room?” Nathaniel asked, wandering around and poking his nose in the various boxes Jake had opened but not unpacked.

“It’s okay, I gu—”

Cutting him off, Nathaniel went on. “It used to be mine. That dresser? Mine. That bed? Mine. That bookshelf? Mine. I guess what’s mine is yours now, though, brother. Enjoy it.”

This was news to Jake. “They gave me your room?” he said, wincing at the burn as the rum hit his throat.

He felt a tug of guilt over having taken Nathaniel’s room, though Nathaniel didn’t seem all that upset about it. He just kept on poking around in the boxes, lifting things out to study them and then putting them back.

“Fuck it. That’s what happens when you don’t come home for two years.”

Every new detail Jake learned about this guy led to a hundred more questions. “Two years. Wow. That’s a long time. You didn’t come home once?”

Nathaniel threw him a look as if to say, Isn’t it obvious? “You’ll see,” he said. “Once you know Cameron like I do, you won’t be asking questions like that.” He peered at the screen of Jake’s computer. “Who’s this?”

Jake blushed. He felt exposed, like just having Elena’s profile open like this was a betrayal of the secrets of his heart. Instead of answering, he said, “Did something happen between the two of you?”

“You’re hilarious,” Nathaniel said. He took the flask back and downed a large shot of rum. “He’s my father. Is that not enough?” He went back to studying Elena’s profile. “Electra. And that makes you Jaybird.”

Jake could tell that he shouldn’t push the topic too hard, but he had to ask. “Why aren’t there any photos of you anywhere? I mean, I didn’t even know you existed. That’s sort of weird.”

“Ask Cameron, not me.” Nathaniel pulled up a box and sat in front of Jake. “Let’s talk about Electra. She’s obviously much more interesting to you than the ongoing saga of Nathaniel and Cameron. That song you’re writing for her is pretty sweet. But eventually you’re going to have to come clean with her.”

Just the thought of telling Elena how he felt made Jake’s heart swell until it almost cracked in half. Immediately defensive, he said, “She’s my friend, that’s all.”

“She’s your friend whose pants you want to get into. Unless you’re lying to yourself, too.” Taking another nip from his flask, Nathaniel stared at Jake like he was trying to break him. “I don’t think that’s true, though. �Don’t hate me for loving you’? You know exactly how you feel.”

Jake didn’t know what to say. Nathaniel was right, of course, but he didn’t seem to understand how sensitive and complicated the situation was.

“I know how it goes, man. I’ve been there,” Nathaniel said.

“Have you?” Jake said shyly.

Nathaniel smirked knowingly. “Here’s the thing.” He handed Jake the flask again. “Drink up.” As Jake forced himself to swallow down a little bit more of the rum, Nathaniel laid it out for him. “You can go on following her around forever, making puppy-dog eyes, knotting yourself up inside, dying a little bit every time she mentions some other guy, but you’ll never get what you want that way. You’ve gotta make your move. That’s the only play.”

Maybe it was the rum or maybe it was the fact that they were in this intimate space that had once been Nathaniel’s and was now Jake’s, or maybe it was just that Nathaniel seemed so much more self-confident and successful at life than Jake, but Jake felt like he could trust him, like he had something to learn from his new stepbrother. “If I never make a move, she can never reject me,” he said, admitting his deepest fear.

“So let her reject you. Then get on with your life,” Nathaniel said. “There’s a lot of fish in the sea.”

Jake knew he was right, but that didn’t make the truth hurt any less. He nervously picked out the few bars he’d written of his new song.

“There you go,” Nathaniel said. “Sing your heart song. And stick with me. I won’t steer you wrong, brother.”




6 (#ulink_11d33309-b22e-5b2d-ab87-5bcd490f0b8e)


By the next day, Elena’s new Jake-less reality had begun to sink in. She sat on the tile floor in the living room, cradled in a misshapen pink-and-yellow polka-dot chair pillow that just barely fit in the space next to the tree, tooling around on her computer to distract herself from her sister’s television program and, hopefully, escape the funk she’d fallen into since Jake had moved away.

The show today was Hoarders—even worse than Storage Wars.

As Elena bounced back and forth among BuzzFeed and Twitter and her own AnAmerica page, which was still racking up likes and comments now, three days after she’d posted her latest animation, she couldn’t help but track the gist of what was happening on the show. A woman in her forties who rescued cats to com-fort herself from all the ways she couldn’t rescue herself is confronted by her worried parents after they discover that the house she lives in is so overrun that she’s now sleeping in her garage.

The thought that Elena was supposed to find this entertaining disgusted her, but she wasn’t about to say anything to her sister. Nina loved it. She sucked on a giant candy cane and periodically popped it out of her mouth to click her tongue at the outrages the show paraded across the screen, shaking her head, bugging her eyes at Elena.

“Ay-yi-yi-yi!” she said.

Elena smiled in recognition and checked her AnAmerica page. A new comment popped up. Some guy going by the handle Harlow. “You’re the best artist on this site,” he said.

A grin broke across her face. She didn’t get compliments like this all the time, and it felt good to be singled out. She wondered who this Harlow guy was.

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said.

“Love the way you reference those seventies posters of big-eyed children.”

She was surprised to see that he had caught the reference. She hadn’t realized that anyone but her even knew those posters existed. Commenting back, she said, “Big-eyed kids. Good catch. So sad and yet so sweet. Thanks for the shout-out.”

“These people!” said Nina, gawking at the TV. “How do they live with themselves?”

Elena didn’t know where to begin answering this question. She looked at the nest of cast-off clothing Nina had strewn around herself, the glass-topped coffee table Nina had crammed with food like a buffet table from hell: takeout tacos, three more candy canes, Diet Pepsi, Cheez-Its, and the pineapple she’d been craving nonstop lately. Elena could see the seeds of a Hoarders episode taking root right here in her own house.

She wanted to say, Nina, look at yourself before you start judging other people. Think about what you’re doing to your unborn child. But this was just too mean. She knew that her sister was in real discomfort today. She’d thrown up all morning. Her ankles were so swollen that she couldn’t even fit socks over them. Feeling bad for her, Elena had made a promise to herself to be cheerful and kind and to baby Nina today in the way she knew nobody else would. Trying to play along with her sister’s mood, she said, “It’s good that she’s getting help. The producers are going to give her a whole new house. I just worry about what will happen to all those cats.”

“The cats!” Nina said. “It’s just too much!”

“Mmm,” Elena said as she scanned an article about Scarlett Johansson on Flavorwire. She tabbed back to AnAmerica to see if Harlow had responded to her comment yet. He had.

“They remind me of the graffiti I saw last time I was in Paris. Big-eyed kids are making a comeback there.”

“I’ll take your word for it. I’ve never been to Paris,” she wrote.

“We can change that,” he responded.

This made her smirk. “Oh yeah? How are we going to do that?”

“We’ll take my private jet.”

She smirked again. This Harlow guy was fun. But he couldn’t possibly have a private jet, right?

Before she could respond he shot her another message. “JK.” Then another one. “Who’s the emo boy?”

“Jaybird?”

“Yeah.”

“A friend.”

“Boyfriend?” he asked.

Elena knew he was fishing. Before answering, she pulled up his user profile in a separate screen and scanned it for signs that he might be a creep. There wasn’t a lot there. His profile picture was an aerodynamic cartoon motorcycle with giant jet boosters flaring out the back. Under likes, he’d listed “Cowboy Bebop, Studio Ghibli, getting lost in foreign cities where I don’t know the language,” and, mysteriously, “trouble.” She decided to risk it. She hadn’t flirted with anyone in a long time.

“No. Just a friend,” she wrote.

His response came immediately. “So let’s go to Paris.”

“We’ve already covered this,” she said.

“Right. How ’bout this. I’ll bring Paris to you.”

She couldn’t help but smile at this.

Her sister poked her with a toe. “Elena, you’re missing the best part,” she said. “What’s so funny, anyway?”

“Nothing, just … internet stuff.”

Elena glanced at the television. The shrink and the camera crew were wandering through the cat lady’s house, poking at the six-foot-high stacks of empty litter containers, saying how nauseating the place smelled. “This is the good part?” she asked her sister.

Grinning, Nina shoveled a handful of Cheez-Its into her mouth. “Uh-huh,” she said, dribbling crumbs onto her sweatshirt.

Elena shrank a little bit inside. This family. These people. How had she ever come to be related to them?

When she jumped back to the chat screen, she saw that Harlow had left a new message. “Still there?”

She typed quickly. “Yeah. Sorry. My sister’s annoying me.”

“Why?”

Where to start? She wasn’t sure she wanted to subject this stranger to the craziness of her family struggles just yet, but she knew better than to let the conversation go much further on the public comments board. She suggested they take the conversation into private mode.

“So? Your sister?” he asked, when they’d switched over.

Elena could feel herself chickening out. She didn’t know this guy well enough to go into the gory details of Nina’s troubles. Instead, she said, “Do you ever want to just run as far away as you can get from everything?”

“Every minute of every day,” he said.

“How do you deal with it?”

“I get on my motorcycle and just go, go, go. One day I’ll go and never come back.”

“I want to do that,” Elena said.

“What’s stopping you?”

“I don’t have a motorcycle.”

“I can solve that,” he said, adding a winking emoticon.

“Just like you can fly me to Paris on your private jet.”

“LOL. I really do have a motorcycle.”

She took a closer look at his profile. His location was listed as South Florida, which gave Elena a little thrill. There was no harm in idly dreaming that this witty guy who admired her art and knew how to flirt online might be perfect for her. No harm in imagining that he’d been hiding right under her nose all this time.

Then in a new message, she said, “So your profile says you like trouble.”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“As Marlon Brando said, �Whadda ya got?’”

This actually made her laugh out loud. She was brought back to earth when she glanced at Nina and saw her struggling to sit up on the couch and hobble on her swollen feet toward the bathroom.

See, this, this was why she couldn’t run away. Her sister, her father, everyone needed her to be the sane and capable one around here. She didn’t want to turn the TV on one day and see them on an episode of Hoarders or Intervention, or what was the other one? Cops.

“Gotta go. Nice chatting,” she typed, quickly shutting the computer.

Then, hopping up, she scrambled after her sister. “Nina, wait,” she called. “Let me help you.”




7 (#ulink_df3df597-d237-5f01-8525-cbb530aad7fc)


“Sounding good, brother.”

Nathaniel was back, leaning against the sliding door that opened out from the cavernous living area onto the massive porch where Jake had been practicing his new song. He’d just taken a midafternoon shower and was wrapped in one of the impossibly plush, massively large towels with which the house was stocked.

Annoyed by the intrusion, Jake looked up from his guitar and stopped playing. “Thanks,” he said, propping his bare foot on the rail of the porch and slouching back in the chair he’d dragged over.

He had a gig tonight at Tiki Tiki Java, his standing Thursday-night show, but this one was different because he’d made up his mind to play the new song for Elena. It was finished now. His most honest song ever. There was no way she’d be able to hear it and not know it was about her.

“You got a title yet?” Nathaniel asked.

“I think I’m going to call it �Driftwood.’”

Jake strummed a couple chords, hoping Nathaniel would get the hint and go away. He didn’t want to be rude. He picked out a timid melody. The guy wouldn’t leave. He was just about to get up and go somewhere else himself when he heard the telltale buzz of a bee zipping around his head.

He froze, momentarily terrified.

Having lived with his allergy for so long, he didn’t even have to think about how to react. He just listened and tried not to move a muscle.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Nathaniel cocking his head and studying him with a look on his face that said he found what was happening cruelly amusing.

“You okay?” Nathaniel said.

The buzz tracked closer to Jake’s head and he dug his chin into his neck, trying to avoid but not incite it.

“I’m allergic to bees,” he explained.

Nathaniel chuckled. “It’s always something, right?” he said. “No worries. I’ve got you covered.” For a moment, he tracked the bee, following it with his nose. Then he clapped his hands together and the buzzing stopped and the bee fell to the porch railing, dead.

Jake exhaled. “Thanks,” he said. But he couldn’t help feeling like there was something aggressive, some sort of power play, in the way Nathaniel had nonchalantly taken care of the bee for him.

“Not a problem.” Nate flicked his finger and sent the bee out into the dunes. He leaned against the railing and folded one leg over the other. “Electra gonna be there tonight?” he asked. “What am I saying? Of course she is. Look at you.”

Jake had put on his best pair of jeans. He’d rummaged through his T-shirt drawer until he’d found the iron-on Speed Racer shirt she’d gotten him for Christmas last year. A special outfit, yes, but how would Nathaniel have known?

“What do you mean by that?” he asked Nathaniel. “Do I look anxious or something?”

Nathaniel made that face of his, the one that might mean he was judging you or might mean he was just being smugly friendly. “Do you look anxious?” he said. “You look like you’re halfway to a heart attack. You gonna make your move?”

“I’ll see how it goes,” Jake said vaguely, trying not to give anything away. He gazed out at the ocean and let the breeze smother his face.

“Dude. Confidence,” Nathaniel said. He was tapping his thumb against his pec in a weird way that seemed both casual and rehearsed. “You’ve got a few things to learn about girls, don’t you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” The last thing Jake wanted right now was unsolicited advice from Nathaniel. Every interaction they’d had since that first night in Jake’s room had felt tinged with undercurrents of competitive malice. Jake didn’t take it personally. It seemed more of a function of Nathaniel’s personality than anything specifically directed at Jake, but he’d begun to suspect that the two of them would never be the friends that Nathaniel seemed to want them to be.

“I’m just saying, you’re a nice guy,” Nathaniel said, pulling a chair up next to Jake’s. “Nice guys don’t win.”

“I’m not trying to win.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong.” Nathaniel pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights out of the waist of his towel and flipped it open. “You do want to win. You want to win Electra’s undying devotion.” He tapped out a lighter and a cigarette. “You want her to lie in bed aching for you. You want to see her and be able to tell that she’s drowning inside her desire for you. If that’s not winning, I don’t know what is. And I’m telling you, it’s never gonna happen as long as you keep trying to be a nice guy.”

Jake just stared at him. He felt trapped and suffocated by this conversation and he couldn’t figure out how he’d fallen into it. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he finally said.

Nathaniel shrouded his cigarette from the wind and lit it.

“Listen,” he said, leaning in conspiratorially. “Cameron’s an asshole. We’ve already established that. But a shrewd kind of asshole. He knows what he’s doing. And, brother, that dude gets more pussy than anybody I’ve ever met.”

Jake wasn’t sure how to take Nathaniel’s attitude toward Cameron. First that Nathaniel would talk this way about his own father. Then that he might be telling the truth. It couldn’t be true. Jake’s mother would never marry a guy like that.

Nathaniel leered at him. “The one helpful thing he’s ever taught me—girls want the bad boy. They want the guy who doesn’t care about them. They want to pine and fret over whether you love them. That’s just the facts, Jack. Make her think she’s got to beg and grovel for your devotion and she’ll give you whatever you want.”

Jake retreated into picking at his guitar. He was repelled by the thought that Nathaniel would want him to aspire to this sort of behavior. Jake had seen guys like this who, as Nathaniel had said, got whatever they wanted. There was a guy nicknamed Rollo, a thick-necked wrestler who’d graduated from Chris Columbus a couple years ago and who’d been a total bastard toward women who always seemed to be falling all over him. Elena used to rant about him all the time. His name—Rollo—had become a secret code between them, a word they used to refer to guys like that in general.

“Elena’s not like that,” he told Nathaniel. “She’s enlightened.”

“That’s what you think,” Nathaniel said. “They’re all enlightened. Until they’re not.”

Jake wanted to punch him. He felt his muscles clenching.

“Now I’ve hit a nerve. Sorry, brother. Just trying to help.”

But Nathaniel didn’t seem all that sorry. He leaned over the rail and flicked the end of his cigarette out into the dunes. Then he flashed that look of his again and patted Jake on the shoulder.

“Let me know how it goes.”

He adjusted his towel and wandered back into the house, and when Jake began practicing his song again he found that he couldn’t concentrate. All he could think about was Elena swooning and fawning over an asshole like Rollo. Something like that would never happen, he told himself, but now that Nathaniel had placed the idea in his head, he couldn’t get it out.




8 (#ulink_59e2b822-5537-5e34-9131-38c11e89681c)


When she arrived at Tiki Tiki Java, Elena was so excited to see Jake that she threw herself off her bike, leaving it to spin its wheels on the patch of lawn out front as she raced through the bamboo-covered outside seating area that had been strung with white Christmas lights into the main room of the café. Jake’s mom had really done the place up for the season. Spray-on snow frosted the windows and intricate snowflakes had been stenciled onto the glass. A massive Christmas tree sat in one corner of the room, festooned with ornaments fitting for a café that took pride in its tropical location: plastic pineapples and bananas, a surfing Santa, reindeer in sunglasses.

Elena hardly saw the mothers with strollers and old fogeys reading their newspapers and the few hipper, looser, younger people who’d begun to show up for Jake’s gig—her eyes were focused on Jake, seated, as she knew he would be, at the small round table next to the platform where he would perform. It had been only three days since they’d seen each other, but it felt like a lifetime.

He gazed up at her with his shy smile and she was pleased to see that he looked just like himself, so tall that he seemed folded into his seat, his light brown hair mussed and a little too long, like an overgrown little boy. He’d worn the faded Speed Racer shirt she’d bought him last year for Christmas and on the table in front of him was a pink smoothie, which she knew must be for her, since he’d never let that kind of sugary, milky drink gum up his throat before he had to sing.

“Hey-o!” she said, sliding into the seat across from him. “Jake. Jaybird. Where’ve you been my whole life?”

He blinked at her with his wide, pale eyes. “Your smoothie, madam.”

Taking a sip, she thought through the various tastes as they hit her tongue and said, “Umm. Raspberry and … banana. A hint of, is that vanilla yogurt? Where’s the kale? I’m disappointed. To me it’s not a smoothie unless there’s kale.” This was a game they’d played a hundred times, imitating and mocking the pretentious foodies who’d taken over the strip of restaurants along Magnolia.

“Kale’s so last year,” Jake said, picking up on her riff. “I asked for brussels sprouts, but they were all out.”

They both laughed at this.

“You better get your mom to take care of that,” she said.

She tapped at the table with both hands, grinning at Jake, unable to contain the energy inside herself. She could see by the inquisitive angle of his gaze that he was trying to get a bead on why she was so excited.

“Everything okay, Elena?”

She held up a finger, like, wait a second. She felt like a hundred firecrackers were going off at the same time inside of her, each one a new thing she wanted to tell him, all of them erupting on top of each other, drowning each other out. To calm herself down, she guzzled her smoothie through the straw until she’d given herself a brain freeze. Then she threw herself dramatically, head and shoulders and one slapping open hand, onto the table.

“So,” she said. And she grinned at him.

“It’s good to see you, too,” he said, matching her grin for grin.

Sitting up, leaning back, both hands splayed flat on the table, she just kept grinning.

“What, Elena? Tell me!” he said, carving a little doodle of expectation in the air with his head.

“It’s nothing. It’s stupid,” she said.

Jake’s eyebrows raised slightly, then returned to neutral.

“I’ve been talking to some guy on AnAmerica. Chatting. Like internet-wise. And … I don’t know. It’s silly. It’s just flirting. Forget it.”

“You’ve been chatting with a guy online? Don’t you do that every day with your AnAmerica friends?”

“Yeah, but this is different.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know. It just is. He seems smarter than most of those people. And he really liked the animation I made for you. He said it reminded him of the art he saw in Paris. He just … surprised me, I guess.”

Jake hunched down in his chair, as much as was possible with his long legs. He had that look on his face that he got when was listening closely, taking everything in and absorbing it in that sensitive way of his. “Paris, huh?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“And you’ve fallen in love with him because—”

“Love? Who said anything about love? I’ve fallen into witty banter with him. I’ve fallen into Wow, you know about art and you can talk to me about my animations in a really sophisticated way and you think I’m talented and you’re so much cooler than the boneheads and dweebs who usually like me with him. I’ve fallen into I’m bored and my sister’s being a pain and my best friend is busy with his new family across town with him.”

Jake flinched a little, and Elena sort of regretted making that comment about him being too busy for her. But what had he said on moving day? That he’d call her all the time or something? Well, her cell hadn’t exactly been ringing off the hook or buzzing with texts from him since then. She didn’t want to admit it, but it kind of stung.

“Do you know anything else about him? Like what his name is, even?” he asked, his voice sharp.

“His name is Harlow.”

“Harlow what?”

Elena stared at Jake, unable to answer. What was up with him today? This was exactly not how she’d thought this conversation would go.

“You’ve talked to him, how many times?”

“Like … two.” Why did she feel so defensive? “Does it matter?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Jake. He shook his head and winced, thinking it through. “I’d be careful, Elena … Guys on the internet. Anybody on the internet, really. You can never know who they really are. Who knows what he might be up to. Stealing your information. Infiltrating your computer. Toying with you just to, I don’t know, fulfill some dark little fantasy of his. He might not even be a guy. Or he might be eighty years old. Or seven. You see what I’m saying? Just … be careful.”

“Okay, Dad. I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, hoping her tone would point out to him how weirdly overprotective he was being.

He looked so wounded somehow. It was bizarre. “I’d just hate to see you get hurt,” he said.

“Have you ever seen me let myself get hurt? Look! I’m wearing Doc Martens!”

She yanked her foot up above the tabletop to show off her pink combat boots, hoping that doing so would lighten the mood. But Jake had withdrawn into one of his quiet places. Elena could never tell what he was thinking when he did that. She could see the emotions rippling on his surface, but she had no way of knowing what those emotions were. Though she knew there was no reason to, she felt bad, like she’d somehow done something wrong.

Jake’s fans were beginning to show up. Kids from school, mostly—Becky Anderson, with her timid way of walking, like she didn’t want anyone to see her and her signature waist-length braid; Arnold Chan, the computer whiz who’d gotten in so much trouble a couple of years ago when he’d been running tech for the graduation ceremony where Jules Turnbull’s homemade sex tape had been inadvertently played; and a handful of others. Jake nodded and threw curt two-fingered waves at them.

Hoping to make peace, Elena asked, “How’s life in the fast lane? Has Cameron taken you out on the yacht yet?”

“No,” he said glumly. “And even if he had … he’s sort of aggressively proud of how rich he is, you know?”

Maybe this was why Jake was in such a mood today. Maybe he was having a hard time getting used to the idea of this new guy strolling into his life and in some way trying to replace his dad. Elena frowned sympathetically, but she wasn’t sure Jake saw. She’d lost him to the hidden thoughts in his head.

She surveyed the room with its potted palm trees and tiki lamps and rasta flags. There was Seth Rothman. And Sally French. Hank Lewis. Cassie Crews. When Hannah Jones entered, Elena watched her fuss over where to sit. This happened every time Hannah showed up at one of Jake’s gigs. Trying to look nonchalant with a finger tapping at her lip, Hannah paced from one part of the room to another, vying for a prime position near the stage, where she could sink her head into the cradle of her arms and gaze longingly at Jake while he played.

“Look,” Elena said, trying again to coax him out of his mood. “Hannah’s here to ogle you again.”

This got him to at least look at her, but it didn’t lighten his mood. “I’ve got a girlfriend,” he snapped. “Sarah. Remember?”

“Still, it’s nice to be wanted, isn’t it?”

“Not by Hannah. Remember Lilah Bell?”

“Yeah.” Everyone remembered Lilah Bell and the crazy obsessive way she’d stalked Jules Turnbull. It was the most exciting thing to have ever happened at Chris Columbus High. A warning story people told themselves when they felt themselves slipping toward making bad, bad decisions. “But—”

Jake cut her off before she could finish her sentence. “You want that to happen to me?”

He was just impossible today. “Jake,” she said. “Why so defensive? This is me you’re talking to.”

She locked eyes with him and danced her head around, trying to coax a grin out of him. When it finally came, halfheartedly, she could tell Jake was just appeasing her. She sighed and rolled her head back to look at the imitation bamboo ceiling.

“When you want to talk,” she said, “I’ll be here.”

“Will you? I hope so. You might be too busy.” Before she could ask what that was supposed to mean, he tapped the table once with his fingertips and walked to the stage to tune up his guitar.

As he wandered away, she realized that this must be a reference to her online chats with Harlow. Was that it? Was Jake jealous? But why? It wasn’t like some guy she’d met online could ever come between them.




9 (#ulink_144f8b4e-da78-534f-90e2-19f61ce0944a)


Beneath his carefully cultivated casual stage persona, a destructive energy surged in Jake’s blood. He felt out of control in a way that he usually never did. He wanted to take the water bottle next to him and whip it across the room. He wanted to pick up his stool and shake it above his head, roaring at the audience, scaring them with his rage. He wanted to smash his guitar over Elena’s head. Or his own head, because really, he wasn’t mad at her, he was mad at himself. Nathaniel was right. He was a coward. And with this Harlow guy in the picture now, he’d lost his chance yet again. Jake was the kind of guy who swallowed his emotions, endured and suffered and lost and lost again.

As he sang the first song in his set, a ballad called “I’m Here” that he’d written years ago, Jake ignored the crowd and stared moodily at his fingers. They wouldn’t notice. He often looked inward as he played his music, disappearing into the feelings he conjured out of his instrument.

He played “Nothing Doing.”

He played “Wake Me When You’re Home.”

All these old songs he knew so well he wouldn’t have to think. Thinking was too much for him right now. It was like white light, blinding and obliterating him.

Every time he felt the urge to look up, he felt Elena’s presence at the side of the stage and knew he’d gravitate to her, staring, his feeling of hurt and rejection bleeding out of him. He imagined her projecting this Harlow character into the romantic scenarios his songs described. It was too much for him. He could just imagine what an idiot he’d look like if he played the new song he’d written for her.

He launched into “Misunderstood,” which pretty much summed up his feelings right now.

When this one came to an end, he knew he couldn’t ignore the crowd much longer and he finally looked up and, leaning into the mic, said, “Thanks for coming out tonight, folks.”

Forty or fifty faces gazed back at him. His fans. It was ironic—he should have been happy to see so many expectant, appreciative people here to see him, but somehow they and their devotion didn’t count. All that counted was Elena, and she’d gone and found some random stranger on the internet to swoon over. Jake tried to block her out of his vision, but he couldn’t. She’d dressed in her best spunky clothes—her pink Docs, those skintight black tights that made it so hard for Jake not to stare at her luscious legs, those layers of tank tops in differing colors and degrees of looseness that seemed always to be on the verge of falling off her body. It wasn’t fair. He knew she’d gone to this effort for him. And she was so unfathomably beautiful, sitting there, watching him play.

The next song on his playlist was “Driftwood.” He doodled on his fret board, procrastinating, knowing that revealing his love now, in an achy, moony emo song, would be just about the worst move he could make. She’d laugh at him. She’d think he was joking. Worse, she’d think he was endorsing her new quasi-relationship.

Jake was glad not to see Nathaniel’s smirking face in the crowd. He didn’t want to admit it, but Nate had been right. The good guy always lost. You had to be an asshole to win at love.

He brought his hand crashing against the strings, a loud power chord like he almost never played. Maybe if he took Nathaniel’s advice, she’d see that he was worthy of her attention. She’d see he was capable of surprising her too; that he wasn’t the asexual platonic BFF she saw him as.

“I’m going to mix it up a little now,” he said. “This one goes out to Elena.”

He threw her a defensive glance and she beamed back at him, that pure joyful smile she sometimes allowed herself brightening her face, framed adorably in her wave of black ringlets. Every time Jake saw her smile like this he was stung by its beauty, its tenderness. Nobody, not even his dad, believed in him the way Elena did. And that was the problem, wasn’t it? Protecting his friendship with Elena meant he was perpetually frustrated by the distance between what they had together and what he wanted.

“Wednesday’s Girl.” That’s what he would play. It was one of the first songs his dad had ever taught him. A mean little Bob Dylan–inspired thing his father had written about the woman who’d broken his heart before he met Jake’s mom.

He strummed quickly at his guitar, generating a vigorous rumble of sound, and then he sang:

On Monday, when the world was new

She marveled at a bird that flew

Through her doorway, into her room

And spread its wings

To show her all its precious things

Oh, I warned her it was too good to be true.

I said, he’s not pretty, he’s just new

Glancing up, he could see from the crimson color of her face that she was hurt by this. It gave him a little thrill to think that she might experience a touch of the rejection he was feeling. He strummed on. He strummed harder. He broke a string, he strummed so hard.

On Tuesday, he was in her bed

Cooing softly, spinning thread

He bit her ear until she bled

And still she wanted to believe

In him and all his precious things.

Hearing an abrupt thump from the corner of the room where Elena was sitting, Jake looked up. She’d stood up. She was slamming shut the flap on her messenger bag. She was stalking out of the café.

“Hey … Elena, wait,” he called after her.

But with a flip of the bird behind her back, she was already gone.

Jake felt like an idiot. The urge to chase after her and apologize was so strong that he almost fell off his stool. But he kept on strumming. He was trapped on the stage, and anyway, he had a responsibility to his fans.




10 (#ulink_7eb60881-3e8c-53c3-ad72-10132c347924)


Later that evening, Elena and Nina walked slowly around the block, looking at the Christmas decorations, the sleds on roofs and cactuses and palms wrapped in blinking lights and plastic snowmen lodged on perpetually green lawns. They paced themselves so Nina wouldn’t get overheated. Elena felt like she had ants under her skin. She couldn’t keep still.

“You gonna tell me what’s wrong?” Nina asked her.

“Is it that obvious?”

“Of course it is. You’re a Rios, girl. We’re hot-blooded.”

“Well, okay, fine,” Elena said. She launched into a long, overheated harangue about everything that had happened tonight. The smoothie, the horrible, tense conversation in which Jake sat there and petulantly criticized her for talking to Harlow, and then that song, that unbelievably angry and just plain mean song.

“Can you believe that, Nina? Suddenly he’s got all kinds of money and he moves across town and what happens? He turns into somebody I don’t even know.”

Nina just smiled at her like it was all a joke, but if so, Elena wanted to ask, What’s the punch line? She didn’t get what was so funny about it.

“I want my Jaybird back,” she said. “The one who makes me laugh. The one who encourages me to dream big. Not the one who dogs me for talking to guys online and treats me like I’m an idiot.”

Nina tipped her head, still smiling that smile, still acting like it was all just so, so funny.

“What?” Elena asked.

Nina kept on smiling.

“What’s so funny? Why do you keep looking at me that way?”

They’d come out for this walk in part because Nina felt like she was up for it for once, and in part because Elena hadn’t been able to sit still at home, where her father had demanded total quiet while he did the books for his Laundromat empire. It was ten thirty at night and most of the bungalows in the neighborhood were closed up, the lights completely off, or at most, a pale flicker of TV peeking out of an arched window.

“You really don’t know,” Nina said.

“Would I be asking if I did?”

Nina sighed and rested herself against a white fire hydrant.

“He’s in love with you, mami.”

“Come on. Be serious,” Elena said. Hearing this at any other time, she would have laughed, but tonight she was in too much of a mood for laughter.

Nina shrugged. “Don’t believe me. I couldn’t care less.”

“He’s like my brother,” Elena said. She scrunched up her nose and gagged at the thought.

“Your brother who wants to get all gooney goo-goo with you.” Gooney goo-goo was their sisterly code for hot, sweaty sex. “What did you expect,” Nina went on. “You think guys just decide they want to be friends with you? That’s not how guys think.” She’d worked up a sweat despite the cool night air and she wiped her brow with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “They all want the same thing. Especially the ones who pretend not to.”

“God,” said Elena. Then she thought about the vision of the world her sister had just described. It was so cynical. It made her angry. “No,” she said. “You know what? Maybe the dirtbags you pal around with think that way. Maybe Matty and his narco friends—”

“Matty’s not no narco.”

Elena couldn’t tolerate the idea of her sister dragging Jake down into the mud where she lived. Not tonight. Tonight had been bad enough already. She said it again. “Matty and his narco friends. Maybe they think like that, but Jake doesn’t. Jake’s got class.”

“Whatever you say, Elena.” Nina kept on smiling that secret smile, like she knew better and nothing Elena would say was going to change it.

“Will you stop it?”

“Stop what?” There it went again.

“Stop smiling!”

“I’m not smiling.”

But Nina was. She wouldn’t stop. And as long as she was smiling in that way, Elena knew, she was implying she thought Elena was naïve.

“Just …,” Elena said. “You know what? Screw you.”

She stalked off, knowing her sister wouldn’t be able to keep up.

She heard her sister call after her, “Elena, wait for me. I might need your help getting back,” but she didn’t care. Or she did care, but she couldn’t stand being in Nina’s presence any longer.

Elena picked up her pace.

The houses in their neighborhood all looked the same, Spanish-style stucco bungalows. The only way to differentiate them was by the varying colors they’d been painted. Elena knew that they were almost half-way around the block because they were coming up on the crazy glossy purple house directly catty-corner from their backyard. It would be a long walk for Nina.

Now the guilt set in. She couldn’t leave her sister behind. Propping herself on a fire hydrant, Elena stopped and waited.

She longed to call Jake. To ask him if Nina’s suspicions were true. But what would she say? Anyway, it was absurd. Jake wasn’t in love with her. He’d seen her belch. He’d heard her fart. He’d laughed with her as she worked out why she felt so bored and unfulfilled by Ricky Thomas and Brandon Stram, the two boys she’d dated briefly during freshman and sophomore year. They’d talked about what a relief it was not to have to try and impress each other—not to have to deal with the other person trying and failing to impress you—how they could actually be themselves with each other.

No way would he betray her by falling in love with her.




11 (#ulink_6aef3e11-bbdc-5f21-8b2a-ffeaa363aad8)

ELECTRA AND THE EMO BOY (#ulink_6aef3e11-bbdc-5f21-8b2a-ffeaa363aad8)


A bright, warm




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