“So are you, like, in love with my brother?” Jenny shouted into my ear.“What? No!” I replied.I sucked half the punch from my cup. If there was alcohol in it, I couldn’t taste it, so I had decided to pretend that there wasn’t any. After the last few days and that “family time” comment from my mom, I deserved to let loose a little. Suddenly, a cheer went up from across the yard. Someone had built an elaborate catapult worthy of a physics fair blue ribbon, and half the party’s attendees had spent most of the evening flinging various items at the wall of the abandoned house next door. From the looks of things, this catapult had been in use for months—the dilapidated structure on the other side of the fence was peppered with holes, cracks, and stains of various hues and sizes—and as Jenny and I looked on, Cooper and Dex were helping some other guys load it up with a huge, dimpled watermelon.“Really?” Jenny was incredulous as she smacked my arm with the back of her hand, spilling half her beer over the rim of her cup and not noticing. Both of us wore hoodies with the hoods up to ward off the misty drizzle, and she pushed hers back slightly, as if to better see me. Her blue eyes were wide. “Everyone’s in love with him.”I glanced over at Cooper, who was stepping back to yank the release on the catapult. There were quite a few girls eyeing him over their drinks. I wondered if he knew they were all in love with him.Probably.He let her rip. The watermelon surged through the air and exploded against the white-shingled wall of the house. Everyone within ten feet of the catapult was pelted with watermelon bits. The resulting cheer was the loudest yet.“This is the coolest party ever!” Annie cried, bouncing over to us with an old crab-trap crate full of potential catapult items gathered from the vicinity. Inside I saw a lawn gnome, a rusty spade, and an actual crab, which I hoped was already dead.“Agreed,” I said. And the best part about it? No Cresties to be found.Annie’s expression drooped a little. “What’s wrong? Are you upset that Cooper’s not talking to you?”“Annie!” I said through my teeth. Jenny snorted a laugh and held her hand to her nose.“No. No, no, no.” She dropped the crate of launchables at her feet and took hold of my arm. “You made me come here and miss a perfectly good Crestie party. I could be taking notes right now . . . watching Faith upchuck her meager lunch all over the Rosses’ state-of-the-art automatic toilet bowl. I did not miss that so you could come here and not talk to him.”Cooper was slapping hands with Stoner, his biceps flexing under the sleeve of his clingy black T-shirt.“He totally likes you,” Jenny said, toying with her braid.“He does?” I asked.“Um, yeah!” She sucked down some more of her beer. “He mentions you at least three times a day. With my brother, that’s like he may as well have bought a ring.”At that moment, Cooper looked over at me. He said something to Stoner, then walked across the overgrown grass, dodging revelers as he came.“What’re you, avoiding me?” he said with a smirk.I blinked. “What? No! I—”He took my hand and tugged me toward him. My knees bumped his and I blushed. Then he turned both my hands so that my palms were facing out, and matched his palms to mine for a second before lacing our fingers together. He had this way of throwing me off balance and then suddenly grounding me that made me feel like his own personal Ping-Pong ball.“Wanna go somewhere?” he asked.“Where?” The word was a squeak.He looked over his shoulder, tilted his head, and pulled me away from my friends.“Don’t worry about me!” Annie shouted after us. “I’ll just be here flinging gnomes!”Cooper and I laughed as he walked me around the side of the house, helping me carefully step over a fallen section of the rotting picket fence, which had been lain flat by weather or time or some less-natural disaster. At the front of the house was a short wooden deck with a crooked railing. On the deck was an untrustworthy porch swing, with some gray-haired dude splayed across it, snoring. Cooper roused him, and the guy loped off into the night, toward the bay, where dozens of people were partying on a rickety dock, a cloud of smoke muting the twinkle lights strung above their heads.The porch swing creaked loudly as we sat, but didn’t crash to the ground like I expected. Cooper settled into the corner and put his arm out, like he expected me to cuddle into his side. I thought of Jake suddenly, and sat down on the opposite end.Stupid, stupid, stupid. What was the matter with me? It wasn’t like I’d be cheating or something. Jake and I had never even officially been together and we definitely weren’t now. I wished I had taken Cooper up on the unspoken invitation, but it was too late. He cleared his throat and sat up.“You hate this party, don’t you?” he blurted.My face scrunched. “What? No. I’m having fun.” I turned my knees toward his. “Why would I hate this party?”“I don’t know. Because—” There was a huge crash, followed by a gasp, then a screaming cheer. We locked eyes for a second, then laughed. “Maybe it’s not . . . sophisticated enough for you.”My insides went all squirmy. “Why? What do you mean?” He gave me this look. Like duh. And now I was offended. “Wait, you think because I’m a Crestie this isn’t my type of party? Because I am not a Crestie, okay? I just currently live with one.”“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Cooper held up a hand, shaking his head at the same time. “Back up. Beep, beep, beep.” He motioned like he was guiding a reversing truck into a parking space. “What’s a Crestie?”My face burned bright enough to replace the busted porch light. Overhead, the sky suddenly opened up again and the world filled with muffled screams and shouts and pounding feet as everyone crowded inside. The raindrops pinged and plinked off of the various discarded items—tapped kegs, an old tin fishing boat, a coiled garden hose—in the dirt patch that was the front yard.“Right. Um, forget I said anything.”Cooper laughed. “No, no. There’s no forgetting anything now.” He inched closer to me and rested one arm on the back of the swing. “What’s a Crestie?”I blew out a sigh and rolled my eyes. “All right. Back home there’s this crest and all the rich kids live on it. At some point, like, a million years ago, the kids on the other side of town nicknamed them the Cresties and they’ve been called that for so long that it’s, like, who they are now. Sometimes they even use it to refer to themselves. Sarcastically of course. But I think they secretly like it.”Cooper gaped. “That might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”“I know. And I live it,” I said. “So what does that make me?”Cooper narrowed his eyes. One of the gutters on the porch overflowed, suddenly sprouting a gushing waterfall behind our heads. Little splatters peppered my arms. “So wait. I’m confused. You are a Crestie, or you’re not a Crestie?”I could have told him the whole story. How I used to be one, what had happened with my dad, why I was no longer one, how my mom was dating one. But suddenly, it all seemed too exhausting. And too silly to waste time explaining. I was here, with him. And the Cresties didn’t matter. They didn’t matter so much, he didn’t even know who they were.Suddenly, I’d never felt so free.“I’m not,” I said, sliding a little bit closer to him. Our knees touched, and when I laid my own arm along the back of the swing, our fingers touched too. “And you know what? I don’t want to talk about them anymore. I’m just a normal girl who’s loving this party. I swear.”Cooper looked into my eyes. His hand shifted and suddenly it was holding on to mine. “You are not what I expected.”Who ever is? I thought. Jake wasn’t. My mom wasn’t. My dad wasn’t. Even Shannen, Hammond, Faith, and Chloe weren’t exactly what they appeared.“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said.“You should.”And then he grazed my bottom lip with his thumb. And then he kissed me.