"Just your brother."

I thought she"d nod. I mean, she already knew Jared had been there. But when I looked over, her expression had hardened. Making me think she either didn"t like that he and I had been together, or that I was starting to sound like Jared was a regular fixture in my life, like we were going out or something.

I grabbed my water bottle and got real busy drinking.

Then it struck me that Jared hadn"t pointedly ignored me or called me that annoying nickname for days. (Which I still hated, though it was definitely better than "Chunky.") But now, since our blowup, we were back to square one. As if the past week had never happened.

But it had. And unfortunately, instead of mending fences, the past week had actually brought tensions to a boiling point. Between nearly everyone: Jared and me. Jared and Rascal. Rascal and Kylie. And Kylie and me.

While I was spinning my locker combo later, Rascal and his big red nose appeared beside me. My first instinct was to disappear inside the gray metal hole. Not because I was afraid. I was just, well, done with him.

"Nicolette," he said, looking down at me over broken blood vessels and nasal swelling.

I held my gaze even and my grin in check. "Hey."

"Look, I don"t know if you heard, but Kylie and I worked things out," he said, moving in closer.

"Yeah, she told me."

"And you told her ..." His voice trailed off in question.

"Nothing that"s going to get you in serious trouble."

"See, I knew there was a reason I liked you."

I stared at him blankly.

"So what went down between you and me yesterday," he went on, "or should I say what didn"t go down ..."

I shrugged. "Is our little secret."

He grabbed my arm and held it. "You"re okay, you know that? Maybe sometime, someday, you and me-"

I thrust up my hand, my palm rigid. "Stop while you"re ahead, Rascal."

He let out a laugh, then turned and walked away.

For the first time, I didn"t stare after him. I knew I"d never again quiver in his presence, or get all hung up on what could have been. Because now it had been. Okay, not the prom. But some of the other stuff I"d dreamed about. And it had been okay, but not fall-on-my-face fantastic. In fact, most of it had left me with a sort of raunchy aftertaste.

So when his best buddy, Harrison, tried to get my attention by putting his hand on my arm as I pa.s.sed in the hall later, my first reaction was to shake him off and keep walking. "Nicolette," he said, and flicked his head toward an open cla.s.sroom door. His pale green eyes (with little hazel specks, which seemed weird when you stared into them, but could probably grow on you) peered into me. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"

I knew Harrison about as well as I knew Orlando Bloom. The only thing he could possibly want was my a.s.surance that I"d keep quiet about kissing Rascal. He was looking out for his friend, and since I did understand loyalty and friendships, I moved alongside him to the doorway.

"Don"t worry," I told him. "Rascal and I already talked. Everything"s fine, everything"s forgotten."

"Great."

A slow smile crept to his face. One that seemed, well, kind of personal for two people who didn"t really know each other. So I gave him a quick nod and turned away. Only to feel his hand on my arm again.

I tugged away but this time could not shake him loose. "What?" I said.

"Just because it didn"t work out for you and Rascal doesn"t mean you and I can"t be friends."

"Friends?"

"Yeah. And I don"t have a girlfriend to complicate things."

Complicate ... oh, this was more than I could take. Way more. I wriggled free and walked off. Harrison called something after me, but I didn"t hear and I didn"t care.

Zoe was doing warm-up stretches when I shuffled into the locker room later. I was beat from the long day, but even with all the stuff going on in my life, I couldn"t think of a place where I"d rather be than practice. I needed some mind-numbing, physically exhausting, plain old girl time. I didn"t even care if Coach Luther spent the two hours screeching at me.

"Did you see Rascal"s nose?" Zoe asked as I was pulling my hair back into a ponytail.

I nodded and asked her what she"d heard.

"A weekend football scrimmage. He"s lucky he didn"t break his neck."

"Did you hear that from Kylie?"

"No. At my lunch table. Kylie hasn"t spoken to me since I didn"t show up for the group facial, remember?" Her dark eyebrows came together. "A hundred bucks just to wash your face. As if."

The furrow in her brow didn"t soften as she resumed her stretches. In fact, when she glanced at me moments later, she looked downright b.u.mmed out.

"Something wrong, Zoe?" I felt I had to ask.

She shrugged. "Other than how my relationship with Matt seems to be disintegrating?"

I sat down on the bench. Not so close as to invade her body s.p.a.ce, but close enough to let her know I cared if she wanted to talk.

"It"s like he only wants me for one thing. Like today, he was going to pick me up after practice? We were going to go to his house for a while, you know?" she said, and almost smiled.

I did know, and realized Zoe"s relationship was a gazillion miles more advanced than anything I"d ever experienced.

"Then he found out his mom was going to be home. Suddenly he"s not picking me up ... he"s all like, what"s the point?" She squinted so hard it looked painful. "He"s making me feel like one of those friends with benefits couples." Then she interrupted herself. "Oh," she said, touching my arm. "Not that there"s anything wrong with that, if that"s what you"re into."

I studied the guilt etched in her brow. Moments pa.s.sed while my thoughts gelled.

She meant Jared and me.... Oh G.o.d, she believed those stupid rumors! Did that mean other people did, too?

Suddenly things made sense. Rascal on my doorstep. Mitch wanting to be "study buddies." Harrison wanting to be "friends." They were getting in line for their turn, to get some of the goods they thought I was giving Jared.

And the thing was, short of pleading my innocence, there was very little I could do. Sure, I"d straightened Zoe out, but that was like putting a Band-Aid over a gushing wound.

I threw my frustrations into my practice, slamming ball after ball. Coach Luther actually complimented me as she dismissed us, calling me a player who was "giving it her all." I just hoped the other girls weren"t thinking I was giving my all to the male student body, too.

That night, I did my homework at the kitchen table while my mom worked on her laptop. Even though she kept biting her lower lip in frustration, I kind of liked just being near her.

By the time I closed my geometry book, it was too late to call Alison. Or maybe I"d delayed the call on purpose because, while I knew she would try to make me feel better about the friends with benefits thing, I didn"t really want to talk about it, to give her more reason to suspect things were changing between Jared and me.

Lying in bed later, I tried telling myself that there were worse things that could be said about a person- although I had trouble thinking of many.

When the clock flashed midnight, however, I decided I had better do something or I"d never sleep. Talking to Jared was the obvious course of action. But it was way too late to call. Pulling him over for a sudden heart-to-heart at school would most definitely be a disaster. So I got up, turned on my desk lamp, and wrote him a note I could fold up and slide under his windshield wiper: Call me. Stuff"s going on. We need to talk. Nic.

The next morning, energy hummed in my chest as I rounded the block to the street Jared parked on. I might not have happened upon a miracle cure, but I was doing something toward the betterment of my reputation and to settle the unspoken static between Alison and me.

All this internal rambling was probably why the sharp pebbles of broken gla.s.s on the sidewalk up ahead didn"t automatically register as disaster. I looked out at more gla.s.s on the street, and then the angry, splintered hole in Jared"s windshield, before I truly understood what I was seeing.

That was when I broke into a run toward the car, as if it was a dying person or something.

Jared"s beloved Camaro. The windows were smashed. Gla.s.s glittered on the dashboard, the seats, the pavement.

And only one suspect came to mind.

Rushing toward the school office, I thought about how Rascal had told me his football coach sometimes ran early-morning practices. If there"d been one this morning, Rascal would have an alibi. But come on, who would have done this but Rascal and his idiot friends?

I ran through scenarios of how to report the crime. What to say and what not to say. As much as I wanted to rat Rascal out, there was an unwritten code that students held against authority, and the last thing I wanted to add to my list of problems was revenge for turning in a football player.

When I got to the office, however, I could see that the dirty work had already been done. A lady in a tennis outfit was talking in hushed tones with Princ.i.p.al Carmody, the words "smashed" and "group of boys" escaping the huddle.

Before I could take a breath, Jared blew into the office. His gaze flew past me and straight to Mr. Carmody. "Yeah," he said, storming toward the group. "That license plate you announced over the PA is mine. What happened?"

I tucked myself in between the counter and a photocopy machine to get out of the line of fire.

Mr. Carmody (practically bald, no doubt from pulling his hair out over stunts just like this) told Jared that his windows had been broken. He explained that this woman had dropped her kid off and was on her way home when she saw three guys running away from the Camaro with baseball bats. While she couldn"t ID them, they were Caucasian, medium to big, and wore below-the-knee shorts and T-shirts.

Sounded like half the guys in the school. If you didn"t know what I knew. Or what Jared knew.

Jared stood ramrod straight, as if the overabundance of thoughts and emotions rushing through him needed every available inch. But when Mr. Carmody pressed him for possible suspects, he just shook his head. "No idea," he said, so convincingly that I almost believed him.

I swallowed my words. Part of me wanted Rascal called on the carpet. So this insanity would end. Rascal was the worst kind of bully: a bully with a lot of friends. What if they decided to go after Jared"s head with the baseball bat next?

I couldn"t stand it. I wiggled out of my corner, prepared to ruin my life to save Jared"s- But then he turned, caught my eye, and iced me with a glare. A glare with a distinct don"t-you-dare flavor.

"Yes?" Mr. Carmody said to me. "Nicolette, isn"t it?"

I nodded, my gaze still glued to Jared.

"Do you know who vandalized the car?" the princ.i.p.al asked.

My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. I was confused, but I knew I couldn"t snitch if Jared didn"t want me to.

"No," I said, and reached into my pocket to weasel out the folded-up note. "Uh, here, Jared," I said, and pa.s.sed it from my palm to his. "I just needed to give you this."

Mr. Carmody turned his back on me-obviously irritated about the interruption-and told Jared to accompany him outside to identify the car.

I stepped back to let them pa.s.s. Jared touched my arm as he moved by, in what felt like appreciation.

I watched his back as he left, hoping he knew what he was doing. Because I sure didn"t.

It wasn"t too hard to find out if there had been an early football practice. All I had to do was check out the nonsweaty, sleepy faces of the players just arriving.

Why was I not surprised?

Everybody (everybody!) talked about Jared and his car that day. Not just his friends, but people in my cla.s.ses, in the halls, during morning break. At lunch.

Everybody, except Alison. Whose response at lunch was a shrug. "Yeah," she said. "I heard. Sucks to be him."

"You should have seen it," I pressed on, because obviously she didn"t understand how serious it was. "Gla.s.s was everywhere."

"How convenient that you happened to pa.s.s by."

"Convenient?" I stopped chewing some cashews. "Are you implying I had something to do with it?"

"Not at all. It"s just that everything Jared is involved in these days, you are, too."

"That"s not fair." Adrenaline surged through my system, readying me for the defensive. Or offensive. Or whatever.

But she just shrugged and started talking about some new coffee place. And I acted like the subject change was normal.

Still, it would have been great to unload my feelings to my best friend that day. To own up to my worries and my knocking guilt about staying quiet.

And when a cinnamon-apple scent floated by my locker later, my first thought was that I was going to get that chance. With Kylie, of all people. I knew, more than anything else, that the homecoming-queen-to-be wanted peace between the guys-so her dress wouldn"t hang beside mine in the Unworn Hall of Fame.

I turned to her, expecting an ally. Only to see a mascara-rimmed glare targeted straight at me.

"Stay away from Rascal."

Huh?

"I know he was at your house on Sunday. I know Jared was there, and hit him. I know everything. And all I can say is if you even look at Rascal again, you"ll be sorry!"

Considering half the school thought I was "benefiting" Jared, I couldn"t get too worked up over having Kylie or anyone else knowing I"d simply kissed Rascal during their breakup.

Although who told her was a curious mystery.

I decided to lob the ball back to her side of the court. "Come on, Kylie-what are you going to do, go to the prom with him again?"

But her scowl didn"t break. Go figure.

"No-I"m going to have a nice long conversation with Coach Luther."

Huh? Okay, I"d lied to get out of a practice. But that had been for a good reason, and if need be, I could get Dad to vouch for me. And how would she even know? And then there was the friends with benefits rumor, but even if it was true, why would Luther care?

"What," I said, trying to sound all snotty right back, "are you even talking about?"