“If I had stats like that, they’d be spray painted on the walls.”

“My dad,” I told him. “He was always lecturing on being a team player. Didn’t want me to get all me, me, me about it, so I had to hide it.”

Which, considering how things had turned out, was pretty ironic.

He disappeared. Suddenly a basketball was hurtling toward my head. I reached up and plucked it out of the air with both hands before it could break my nose.

“Thanks for the warning!” I shouted, my heart in my throat.

He pulled on a maroon and gold T-shirt. Orchard Hill soccer. Of course. “I gotta see these skills,” he said. “I’m coming down.”

My palms started to sweat all over the ball. Who was this guy? If he was on soccer, he obviously knew Hammond. Was he friends with Chloe and them as well? Who was I kidding? Of course he was. He lived on the crest. Suddenly my brain was flying three steps ahead. He was definitely going to tell them I was here. Then everyone would be talking about me. What would they tell him? What would he think? He was just coming out the front door—tall . . . very tall . . . taller than me, even—when my cell phone trilled.

I considered not answering, but my mother would freak. I tucked the basketball between my hip and forearm and fumbled the phone from the pocket of my jeans.

“Hey,” I said.

“Ally, I really need you back here,” she said. “They want to know where to put your furniture, and we have to get something for dinner. Where are you?”

I looked at the hot boy who was standing in front of me expectantly with his perfect calves and ready smile and the lightest blue eyes I’d ever seen, the house that wasn’t my house looming behind him.

“I’m on my way,” I said.

His face fell.

I closed the phone and tossed him the ball. “I gotta go.”

“Wait,” he protested.

“What?”

Wow. Way to sound belligerent, Ally.

“If you used to live here, then you must know the crew,” he said, taking a few steps toward me, passing the ball back and forth from hand to hand.

The crew? Seriously? “Um, the crew?”

“Hammond, Chloe, Shannen, Faith, the Idiot Twins,” he said, rolling a hand around.

I laughed. The Idiot Twins. It was our nickname for Trevor and Todd Stein, local daredevils. Hadn’t heard that one in a while.

“Yeah, I don’t know who came up with that name, but it fits,” he said with a smile.

“I did,” I told him.

His eyebrows shot up. “Yeah?”

“There was this whole thing where Trevor and Todd rigged up a homemade bungee cord and tried to bungee jump off their jungle gym,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Let’s just say the results weren’t pretty.”

He laughed. “Is that why Trevor’s nose is like that?”

“Yep.”

“Nice.” He nodded, dribbling the ball. “I must mock them endlessly about that later.” He looked me in the eyes, and my knees went a tad weak. Just from eye contact. “So, you coined the Idiot Twins. Nice work.”

“Thank you,” I said, bowing my head slightly.

“There’s a party the night before school starts. At Connor Shale’s house.”

Connor Shale. The boy who’d shoved his tongue down my throat in Shannen’s tree house the summer between eighth and ninth grade while his parents played Mexican train dominoes with mine on the patio down below. I’d been too polite to shove him off me and had let the heinousness go on for at least two minutes until, thankfully, Hammond Ross had appeared at the top of the rope ladder and laughed until Connor finally stopped. Then I’d practically fallen the ten feet to the ground trying to get away. My first kiss. Not my finest moment. Even more unfortunate? I’d only kissed one other guy since.

“You should come,” Bedroom Boy said.

I experienced an unpleasant twisting in my lower gut. It was amazing how casual it was for him. Like he wasn’t inviting me into the very scene I had both dreaded and looked forward to with a mixture of excitement, apprehension, and abject fear for so long.

But it was kind of nice that he wanted me there. And wasn’t this a good sign, anyway? Clearly my friends hadn’t been slandering me all over the place for the past eighteen months. If they had, he never would have invited me to a party with them. Right?

“Um, yeah. Maybe,” I said. My phone trilled again. “I really gotta go.”

“Oh, come on. Just one game?”

“Rain check,” I told him, turning and peddling away.

“I’m holding you to that!” he shouted.

It wasn’t until I was halfway down Harvest Lane that I realized I’d never even gotten his name.

jake

“Am I running some kind of geriatric summer camp here?” Coach shouted. “Let’s hustle!”

I didn’t hustle. I looked at Hammond and he rolled his eyes. I hate laps. If you’re going to make us run distance, at least let us out on the streets. What am I, some kind of lab rat scampering in circles for your block of cheese? Upperclassmen, at least, shouldn’t have to do this shit. It was so fucking hot out. And my brain was fried. And I still had three hours of practice ahead of me and back-to-school shopping with my mom tonight and all I could think about was the girl who used to live in my room.

The girl was hot. Not, like, model hot, but hot. I like a girl who dresses down. Who doesn’t need all those bows and doilies and jewelry and crap—’cause she knows she’s hot without it. And the ponytail? That sealed it. She even had those little curls behind her ear just, like, touching her neck. . . . Shit. So effing sexy. All night, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I mean, she used to sleep in my room. How could I not think about that?

“Dude, that’s ten,” Hammond said, smacking me in the chest with the back of his hand.

“Thank God.”

We grabbed paper cups full of water and dropped down on the grass to watch the stragglers.

“Jonah! Pick it up!” I shouted at my brother. Just to be a dick. He was a freshman, and all freshmen and varsity virgins get hazed. He shot me an annoyed look but sprinted the last turn. Hammond laughed and crushed his cup before tossing it onto the ground.

“Look at that little fucker,” he said, nodding at David Drake, who had finished ahead of us and was now running stairs on the bleachers, for no apparent reason. “He doesn’t watch out, he’s gonna get a kick in the head.”

“Maybe he’s on something,” I suggested, not at all serious.

Last year David Drake had been the most pathetic player on J V. This year he’d added at least ten pounds of muscle and had shown some respectable skill on the field. It was obvious he’d been working his ass off all summer, which I respect. Not everyone cares that much. I know I don’t. But Drake didn’t live on the crest, and he still had the balls to play soccer, which around here was a Crestie sport. So that meant Hammond didn’t like him.

Which brought up a question. Where was the new-old girl living? As far as I knew, none of the Crestie families had moved this summer. I glanced sideways at Hammond. “What do you know about the girl who used to live in my house?” I asked.

Hammond’s head whipped up so fast I heard a crack. “What about her?”

“Who is she?” I asked. “Were you, like, friends with her?”

“Why? What do you know?”

I stared at him. Why was he so tense all of a sudden? “She came over yesterday,” I said. “Guess she wanted to see her old place or something.”

“Shut the fuck up. You saw Ally Ryan?” Hammond shifted position. He reminded me of a dog waiting for a treat. A pit bull –German shepherd mix. The kind of dog that would take the Milk-Bone out of your hand and then bite your fingers off just for fun.

“Yeah,” I said. Ally Ryan. Her name was Ally Ryan. AllyRyanAllyRyanAllyRyan. “Wait. Ally Ryan. I’ve heard that name before.”

“She comes up every once in a while,” Hammond said.

Right. Now I remembered. She was the girl in the picture in Shannen’s room. The one of a whole mess of Crestie girls taken at the country club pool in, like, sixth grade. I’d asked Shannen about her once, and she hadn’t wanted to talk about her. Interesting.