Maddy let me crowd her those first few days, smiling and encouraging me to go off on my own and make some new friends. I tried: sitting next to people who I didn’t recognize in my classes and saying hi to the few kids who looked my way. But when none of them said hi back, I ignored them and minded my own business.

That first Wednesday, I went to find Maddy in the cafeteria, excited about the drawing I’d done in open studio. The lunchroom was as loud as always, the smell a cross between burned pizza and nasty gym socks. Looking forward to a half hour of peace, I grabbed a tray and bought something I deemed safe enough to eat—a hot dog—and headed in to find her. But she wasn’t sitting in the corner of the cafeteria like she had been on Monday and Tuesday. That table was empty—eight vacant chairs surrounding an equally deserted table. I searched the other tables, automatically focusing on those kids sitting alone. No Maddy. It wasn’t until I scanned the center of the room, my eyes skating across the six tables that had been jammed together, that I saw her. She wasn’t sitting in a chair. She was perched on top of the table, her arms draped around some kid’s neck. And she was laughing.

I stood there watching her, debating whether to go over and sit down next to her or to seek out one of the empty tables that littered the corners. Luckily, I didn’t have to make the decision. Maddy made it for me.

She extricated herself from the boy’s hold and hopped down off the table. I couldn’t hear her over the noise, but I gathered from the flick of her wrists that she was telling him she’d be back in a minute.

“Hey,” she said as she stopped in front of me. “I waited for you outside the cafeteria, but—”

“Yeah, sorry, I had a question about a geometry problem,” I said, cutting off her lie. She’d never waited for me outside before. Not once during junior high and not once since we started here.

“Who are they?” I asked, looking past her to the group of people now staring at us.

“Alex Furey,” she said, smiling in his direction. Here was a smile I hadn’t seen before—head cocked and perky.

“Okay,” I said, taking a step toward the table. I didn’t care who we sat with so long as I didn’t have to sit alone.

Maddy stopped me, her perfectly pink nails encircling my wrist. I stared down at them, wondering when she’d had time to paint her nails and when she’d started wearing pink. And were those tiny white flowers painted in the middle?

We’d come to school looking nearly identical, so much so that our homeroom teacher did a double take. We were wearing the same jeans, the same hair twisted into a bun, the same boring beige tank tops when we left the house, but somehow she had changed and redone everything from her shoes to her makeup in the last three hours.

“Alex has a cousin your age. He thinks—”

“You mean our age,” I interrupted.

She shrugged that off and steered me toward a table in the back of the cafeteria. “I think you’ll like him. From what Alex says, you two have a lot in common.”

Which translated to: he was smart, quiet, and too quirky for his own family to acknowledge. Apparently, so was I.

“He’s starting an anime club,” she continued, fingering the notebook I had tucked under my tray. It was covered with manga drawings I’d been working on during History class. Some of them were good; most of them were doodles. I had the one I wanted to show her on top. I’d ripped it out of my notebook, thinking I’d give it to her at lunch.

Maddy took the tray from my hands, not once looking at the drawing underneath. “Come on. I’ll introduce you.”

She was a good five steps ahead of me before my feet started moving. I tucked the drawing into my notebook and followed her over. The two kids sitting there looked up when she dropped my tray onto the table. I recognized both of them from Honors English but had no clue who they actually were. They were two guys with longish hair and Mountain Dew T-shirts eating their food and minding their own business until my sister interrupted them.

I swung my head from them to Maddy. Her food, if she had any, her books, and her phone were at the other table.

“It’s Ella, right?” I turned toward one of the boys at the table and nodded, wondering how he knew my name. “I’m Josh.”

“Yup, her name’s Ella,” Maddy offered up when I remained silent. “She’s into that Japanese-cartoon stuff you guys like.”

Maddy nudged me closer, and I stumbled into the corner of the table. “Right, Ella?”

I nodded, still confused, still mute. Until five minutes ago, she was into my “Japanese-cartoon stuff,” too. Last I checked, she had an entire bulletin board dedicated to my drawings. Now she was talking about it like it was some noxious side effect of having an identical twin sister. I followed her gaze to the other table and watched as her entire personality changed instantly in front of my eyes. She shook her head, tossing her hair as she smothered a giggle. Alex winked, and I swore she blushed.

“You’re good, right?” Maddy asked over her shoulder as she danced away. I didn’t bother to answer. I was too busy trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

“You gonna sit?” Josh asked.

“What?”

“I said are you going to sit?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

I pulled out a chair a safe three seats away from him and sat down. I didn’t speak, just focused on my food, confused and hurt that I’d been dumped—literally dumped—by my own sister.

Three years later I was still sitting at that same table with Josh, but now my sister’s exclusion didn’t bother me.

3

I parked as close to Alex’s house as I could, which was still fifteen cars away. I could hear the music now, the faint thump of the bass echoing through the windows. Out of habit, I locked the car. Not that anybody would think to steal it. My sister’s ten-year-old Honda was nothing special compared to the shiny new toys parked around it. That, and nobody messed with anything that belonged to Alex Furey. And my sister most definitely belonged to him.

I followed the music up the walkway. The front porch was littered with plastic cups and empty pizza boxes, the occasional soda can tossed in between. I made my way up the stairs, careful not to look at the two kids making out on the railing, and opened the door to the house.

I don’t know what hit me first, the music or the smell, but both sent me in search of clean air. Three steps and the stench of perfume, pot, and sweat finally cleared. The pounding in my head … well, that dulled to a tolerable level. I hadn’t been to a party like this since I was a freshman and Mom paid Maddy to take me out with her. Something about me needing to make friends. Since then, I’d spent plenty of time running pick-up duty but had done my best to avoid ever having to enter into this social scene again.

“Hey, what are you doing here?”

His voice echoed over the drumming in my head, and I looked up to see Josh coming out the front door. I thought about asking him the same question—he wasn’t exactly top man on his cousin’s list—then I remembered his parents were away, Alex’s with them. A family vacation that didn’t include kids.

Surprisingly, both sets of parents thought it wiser if Josh and Alex stayed together while they were gone. My guess was that that had nothing to do with Josh’s parents and everything to do with Alex’s father wanting to make sure his son didn’t trash his house while they were gone. Josh would stay to make his parents happy, but there was no way he’d run babysitting duty for his uncle.

“Looking for Maddy,” I said. “She called and said she needed a ride home.”

“Stay for a while and hang out with me. I brought some movies from home. We can watch them upstairs.”

He’d been bugging me for weeks to spend more time with him, but I’d been obsessed with my art school application and passing AP Physics. Plus, he had Kim now, and she was more than willing to occupy every second of his time.