“Calm down,” Shannen said, looking me up and down. “It wasn’t even my idea.”

“Oh, please. Don’t talk to me like I don’t know you,” I said, unzipping my hoodie and tossing it onto the ground. “You’re always the mastermind of these things.”

“Not this time! This one was all Faith,” Shannen protested.

I looked at her doubtfully. “Okay, fine. Let’s say I believe you. That means you had nothing to do with it? What is Faith, the Megatron of the crest or something? She’s so freaking unstoppable? You can’t talk her out of doing something intensely mean and stupid to people you supposedly like?”

“I didn’t know Jake was going to be there,” she said.

“Right. So if you did, then you would have stopped her,” I said, turning away as my face started to burn. “Thanks a lot.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Shannen said, the eye roll obvious in her voice. “Come on, Ally, take a joke.” She bounced her ball off the center of my back, right between my shoulder blades.

“It’s not a joke,” I said through my teeth, turning to face her. “And you can take your truce and choke on it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

I stepped up and squared off with her. “It means unless we’re on the court, don’t talk to me. Don’t come near me. Just leave me alone.”

Shannen took a step back, shoving her tongue into her cheek. “Fine.”

“Fine.”

“Are you sure about this?” Shannen said, her tone growing darker.

“Sure about what?”

“About making an enemy of me, knowing what I know?” she said.

My cheeks colored. She was threatening me now? My adrenaline took over, even as fear sliced through my heart. “I’m pretty sure you won’t say anything about that, knowing what I know.”

She gaped at me, stunned. It was a low blow, considering how much more personal and potentially devastating the secrets were that I held. What she didn’t know was, I would never tell anyone about them, even if she called my bluff.

Which was why it was called a bluff.

Then Shannen’s eyes flashed with ire, and for a moment I felt uncertain. She looked like she was about to say something—something devastating—and my stomach hollowed out. What? What horribleness was hanging on the tip of her tongue?

Coach blew her whistle to start practice, and I turned around, acting casual. Trying not to let her see that I was shaking. I grabbed a ball off the floor and shot one last three, which bounced off the rim and flew toward the bleachers. As we lined up for drills, I made sure to avoid any and all eye contact with Shannen and tried not to think about what we’d just done. What she’d been about to say. What it might actually mean.

jake

It turned out I didn’t care. That was the thing. I didn’t care that Hammond and Ally had hooked up. I thought that every time I looked at her I was going to see him, but I didn’t. All I saw was her.

And I couldn’t stop staring.

“What? Do I have something on my face?” Ally lifted her rubber-gloved hands toward her nose.

Snagged. “No. Sorry. I just zoned out for a second,” I said.

It was our third morning of detention, and we were still scraping gum. I never knew the people at my school chewed this much gum.

“Oh. Okay.” She got back to scraping. “So, Jake Graydon, tell me about yourself.”

My brain went completely blank. I picked up my putty knife and went to work on a wad of pink gum. “Tell you about myself?”

“Yeah. I mean, we’re gonna be here every day for the next seven days.” She smiled over her shoulder at me. “May as well talk.”

We’d talked yesterday. And the day before. About basketball and soccer and lacrosse and swimming and the shore and the city and Baltimore, where she’d lived before moving back. But I guess we hadn’t talked about anything real, really. The way girls seemed to love to do.

“What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. What’d you do for Christmas?” Ally asked. She tossed her ponytail over her shoulder as she bent over the table.

“Visited my grandparents in Philly,” I said. “It’s the only time all year I get to see all my cousins at the same time, so it was pretty cool.”

“Really? How many cousins do you have?” she asked.

“Twenty-three.”

Her jaw dropped. “Shut up!’

“Why? How many do you have?” I asked, sitting up straight.

“Um, five,” she said. “And they all live in California, so I never see them. Can you, like, name them all?”

“Sure,” I said. I recited the list from oldest to youngest. Told her all about how everyone was excited to see my crazy cousin Devon, who’d spent the past year studying art in Italy and then come back and acted so superior we’d all ended up throwing canapés at him until he finally broke and launched a counterattack. I told her about Leanna, who had sent in applications to be on The Bachelor for five years in a row and had finally made the cut, so she refused to consume anything other than celery and water. When I told the story of how the toddlers had tried to use my uncle’s old waterbed as a trampoline she laughed so hard coffee came out her nose.

“Omigod!” she said, lifting a paper towel to her face. “I’m so gross!”

That was it. She didn’t squeal, scream, run for the bathroom, or leave the school never to return. She sniffled and got back to work, telling me all about her chill Christmas and how her mom had loved her present.

This girl was effing awesome. As I listened to her relate the details of the Christmas tree and the dinner and the presents, I realized I wasn’t bored.

“Then, of course, we spent the day after Christmas with the Nathansons,” she said, shaking her head. “This is a new tradition, apparently. Day-after dinner with le boyfriend. Except this time it was at their place, so I got the full tour of Quinn’s very pink, very huge bedroom suite. Not that she wanted to show it to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s just say I’m not so sure Princess Quinn is too psyched about having to hang out with a Crestie reject like me,” Ally said, then blushed.

I felt hot all of a sudden, too. Since it was my friends who had made her a reject. I sat back on my butt and fiddled with the putty knife. “Is that weird, your mom dating someone?”

“Everything’s weird,” she replied, sitting back as well.

“What do you mean?”

She dropped her knife and leaned back on her hands. Her gloves made squishy, squeaky noises on the floor. “I don’t know . . . it’s like I’m back but I’m not back. I’m here . . . I’m home . . . but nothing’s the same. My friends are here but they’re not my friends. My house is here but it’s not my house.”

I looked down at my hands, feeling responsible somehow. I would’ve given her her room back if I could.

“And my family . . . it’s just weird being here without my dad. Everywhere I go it’s like I expect to see him there waiting for me. There are all these memories, but he’s not here.”

Her voice broke, and she stopped. My heart did this weird clenching thing at the mention of her father. But I couldn’t tell her what I knew. Because I didn’t really know anything for sure. And it also was none of my business. Wouldn’t it freak her that someone she barely knew kind of knew where her dad was?

I wished my friends were here listening to this. They’d never be able to blame her for all the crap her dad did if they knew what it was doing to her. And they also wouldn’t be able to laugh about where her dad was now. Or about the fact that they all knew and she didn’t. Not that there weren’t other reasons for them not to like her, but only Shannen and Hammond knew about those.

“You know that box score?” she said suddenly. “The one from the JV championship?”

“Yeah.”

“That was the night we left. I wrote that in while my dad was yelling at me to get in the car,” I said. “I had this, like, need to record it there before we left. Like it would somehow mean something if it was there. It should have been the best night of my life, but instead it was the worst. I never got to go to the banquet and get my championship ring. I never even got to go over the play by play with Shannen and Hammond like we always did. Instead it was all just over. My life as I knew it was just over.”