She's So Dead to Us

I only knew one thing for sure: I was not ready to find out the answers to those questions. I laid into my pedals, putting Chloe’s place behind me. And then, there it was. At the end of the cul-de-sac was my house. My home. The mansion where I’d grown up. I’d assumed the gate would be closed, but it wasn’t, and as soon as I saw the opening, I accelerated. I didn’t even think. I just rode. Through the gates and up the hill of the driveway. At the top was the circle with the apple tree at the center, surrounded by little pink flowers and a stone border. My dad had taught me to ride my tricycle around that circle, and later my bike. All the scraped knees and tears and shouts of joy came flooding back out of nowhere. I rode around it once and everything unexpectedly blurred.

A set of shrubs had been planted under the library window. Someone else’s bike tossed on the grass. New planters in front of the door with happy little marigolds dancing in the breeze. Not my house anymore. Not my home.

My gaze drifted to the right, to the row of evergreens that shrouded the view of the basketball court in the backyard. My dad had built it for me for my twelfth birthday—a state of the art outdoor court complete with scoreboard, bleachers, and a hand-painted sign that read RYAN ARENA. It was the best birthday of my life. All my friends were there, and Dad had jerseys made up for each of us with our last names emblazoned across the back. At my mother’s insistence, the number was the same on each, because she knew that if, say, Chloe had been given number one everyone would think that meant I had chosen favorites—like she was my best friend. But my mother knew I hated putting labels on the group. They were all my best friends. Chloe, Sha

Which made the fact that I’d ditched this place without saying good-bye potentially unforgivable.

I wondered what my father would say if he could see me right now. “Chin up, bud,” I heard him say in my ear. “No use dwelling on the past. What you do tomorrow and the next day and the day after that is what matters.” Was that what he was doing out there right now, wherever he was? Forgetting about this place, about us? Starting a new future? Two weeks after he’d moved us out of Orchard Hill and in with my grandma in Baltimore, my dad simply disappeared. One night he was there, and the next morning he was gone. He hadn’t left a note. Had canceled his cell. No one—not even my mother or his mother—knew where he was. Grandma had told me that my father was ashamed. That he couldn’t handle being around us every day when he had hurt us so badly. That he’d probably come back when he felt himself worthy again. That was his way, she said.

But it made zero sense to me. Because his leaving hurt way worse than the fact that he’d lost all our money and our home. Way worse.

The thing was, my dad had always been there for me. He was the one thing I had that always made my equally privileged Crestie friends jealous. All our dads had these high-powered jobs in New York. Chloe’s father owned a bunch of successful restaurants and was never around at night or on weekends. Sha

Until he made some bad investments and lost everything. And not just for us. He’d lost a lot of my friends’ parents’ money, too. I’d never been clear on the details. All I knew was it meant we’d had to sell our house and cars and our shore house—and that we’d had to leave. I think that was part of the reason I hadn’t been able to face calling any of my friends. What my dad did . . . it made me feel like an idiot. I’d thought he was so perfect—the greatest dad on the crest—and then he’d talked everyone’s parents into some stupid risky investment and lost tons of their money. My dad, as it turned out, was a fake. A loser. And it made me feel like a loser too.

My mom was always telling me that my dad hadn’t done it on purpose. After all, if he’d known that stock was going to tank, he wouldn’t have put all our money into it as well as some of our friends’. She said he’d simply messed up. But he’d messed up so big-time that my life had been completely turned upside down.

So yeah, I was angry. But not so angry that I’d never get over it. At least, I would have. If he hadn’t bailed on us.

The tears that had blurred my vision started to sting. I placed my feet on the stone and took a breath. I had not come here to cry. I was not going to cry.

I heard a noise behind me. The unmistakable sound of a window sliding open. My feet hit the pedals.

“What the hell are you doing?”

My fight-or-flight reflex was overruled by curiosity. I had to see who was living in my house. I looked over my shoulder. The first thing I thought was, That’s my room. The second? Who are you and why are you not on television?

The guy who lived in my room was shirtless. He folded his bare, tan arms on the windowsill and gave me an arch look. His hair was wet, as if he’d just come in from a swim, and his eyes danced as he looked down at me. He had the most perfect shoulders I’d ever seen, and his biceps bulged as he settled in. An athlete. Definitely. A possibly naked male athlete of the highest hotness order. And he was living in my room.

“Are you lost?” he said.

He was amused. One of those guys who was so confident in himself and his position that even the appearance of a scraggly-looking girl trespassing on his property presented nothing more than an opportunity to tease.

I turned my bike around to face him, still straddling it, just in case I needed to make a quick getaway.

“You’re in my room,” I said.

He laughed, and I felt it inside my chest. My toes curled inside my beat-up Converse. “Oh, really?”

“Yep.”

He looked over his shoulder. “So, that’s your jockstrap on the floor.”

I grimaced. “Okay, I’ve known you for two seconds, and already that’s too much information.”

His smile widened. “How is this your room?”

“I used to live here,” I told him, swallowing a lump that suddenly popped up in my throat. “I moved a couple of years ago.”

Now he was intrigued. He shifted position and looked me up and down. “Prove it.”

“Okay. Go look inside the closet, above the door. I used to write down my box scores up there.”

“What sport?”

“Basketball.”

He narrowed his eyes but went. The second he was gone I noticed that my hands hurt. I released the grip on my handlebars and looked at my palms. Dozens of tiny red lines had been pressed into them from the rubber. I’d been holding on for dear life. He came back.

“You scored forty points in the state championship?”

“JV championship,” I clarified modestly.