When life gives you a blank canvas, make art.

Sloane Whitaker hates everything about moving to Texas. She hates leaving behind her friends and half her family in New York, starting over senior year at Austin’s NextGen Academy, and having to say she lives in Texas. Most of all, she hates that it’s all her fault. If she wants to earn her way back to the Big Apple, she has to prove she can still be the perfect daughter.

Which means no vandalism art, no trouble at school, and absolutely no Tru Dorsey, her serial screw-up neighbor, who loves nothing more than pushing her buttons.

But from the moment he vaults onto the roof outside her bedroom, there is something about him that makes her want to break every rule. Suddenly it’ s not the ten things she hates about Tru that are at the top of her list. It’s the ten reasons she doesn’t want to be without him.

a Creative HeARTs novel

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

About the Author

Discover more of Entangled Teen Crush’s books…

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Center Ice

The Truth About Jack

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Tera Lynn Childs. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Entangled Publishing, LLC

2614 South Timberline Road

Suite 109

Fort Collins, CO 80525

Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

Crush is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

Edited by Stacy Abrams

Cover design by Heather Howland

Cover art from iStock

ISBN 978-1-63375-425-6

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition September 2015

For Tracy, because she collected me, too.

Chapter One

Back home, whenever I needed to think, I would climb out on the fire escape and listen to the sounds of the city. The mix of car alarms, angry horns, and screeching tires was like a lullaby, its chaotic energy soothing me better than chocolate, a hot bath, or a full-body massage ever could. New York City is the soundtrack of my life.

Austin is like a silent film.

Our new suburban neighborhood is unnervingly quiet. No car alarms, no angry horns, no screeching tires. No human sounds at all. Only the occasional dog barking and the irritating chirp of some kind of bug. I’m picturing giant grasshoppers.

No fire escape, either. Instead, I had to push an unopened box under my second story window so I could climb out onto the roof above the living room.

The sky is an unfamiliar shade of midnight, the kind of dark blue you see in pictures and paintings but almost never in Manhattan. My city always has a kind of glow. Easter-egg colored, like a protective bubble of light. This darkness is too vast, too unending.

But at least out here I can breathe.

Inside, with the house too full of boxes and too empty of people, with Mom at the kitchen table, finishing the paperwork to enroll me at Austin NextGen Academy in the morning, telling me how much I am going to love this new place, I was suffocating. My heart rate sped up, and I started to see spots at the edges of my vision.

Rather than pass out on the kitchen floor, I fled to my room and out into the night.

Everything is wrong here. Not just the quiet and the dark. My whole world is missing. No Dad, no Dylan, no Tash or Brice. None of the friends I’ve gone to school with for the last three years.

Starting over senior year is bad enough, but to do it halfway across the country and with no friends and only half my family? That’s torture.

And the worst part is that it’s all my own fault.

I may not have made the decision to uproot and start over—had, in fact, fought tooth and nail to stay in New York—but my actions led to The Plan, and for that I can never forgive myself. Mom and Dad may have put the nails in the coffin, but I handed them the hammer.

Before the panic spots return, I flip open the cover on my tablet and open up my favorite drawing app. When in doubt, create. Stylus in hand, I start sketching out the first cell of the next issue of Graphic Grrl.

This week, Graphic Grrl finds herself in the middle of an empty, desolate ghost town, surrounded by crumbling gray buildings, grasshoppers sporting six-shooters, and fields full of cows. She is about to face down a herd of aggressive tumbleweeds.

Okay, so I haven’t actually seen a tumbleweed yet, but we’ve only been here a couple of days. They must be hiding somewhere.

When life gets too tough to handle, I retreat into Graphic Grrl. She’s my alter ego, a better me in a world I can control. The best therapy technology can buy.

I lose myself in the art. Sketching in the initial shapes and actions. Refining and filling in with detail. I make sure everything in the first cell is perfect before saving it and moving on to the next one. When I’m done, I’ll export them to my laptop so I can clean them up, finalize the line work, and add the color.

I’ve finished the first three sketches when my phone vibrates in my back pocket.

A name flashes across the screen: Tash.

I debate not replying. I’m not supposed to talk to her—or any of the other so-called “bad influences” in my life. We’re not supposed to have any contact at all. It’s one of the “Three Rules of Sloane Surviving to Legal Adulthood” that Mom and Dad laid out after The Incident.

That’s not why I consider ignoring the text. Things have been strained between us since The Incident. We’ve only spoken a couple of times all summer, including when I texted her about the Texas plan.

But with so many miles between us—between me and my home—that all seems like a waste of energy. Tash has been my best friend for years. Despite everything that happened, I don’t want to throw that away because I’m mad about one little thing—okay, two not-so-little things. I’ll get over it. I always do.

Besides, at this point I’m desperate for contact with civilization.

I open my messaging app.

Tash: R u in redneck hell?

Me: x1000

Tash: :( kept hoping shemonster would back out