Another blemish is that Arden Moss is prettier than me. So I’d spend my time being jealous of his flawless skin or something, and that’s not healthy for anyone.

And who names their son Arden? It’s an awfully girly name for a guy, I think. Maybe because it’s so similar to “garden” and that reminds me of pink flowers and such.

So by the time the bell rings, I’ve magnified all his faults to the point where I’m actually disgusted with him. Which is way more convenient than being starstruck.

Four

Carly Vega.

Carly Vega.

Fearless Carly Vega.

Arden can’t get her out of his mind. God, she would make the perfect partner in crime for so many reasons. She’d tried to convince him that the robbery was nothing to her, but her face told a different story; she’s a terrible liar, at best. But the most important takeaway from the conversation in social studies is that she was afraid during his prank—and she took matters into her own hands anyway.

Which means that, one: She’s fond of Uncle Cletus, and that wins her likeability points, and two: She handles scary situations with finesse, which wins her respect points.

He leans against the kitchen counter, sipping his coffee. Now he reckons all he has to do is convince her that she’s perfect for the position of accomplice. That she has what it takes. More than that, he has to convince her of why she should cross over to the dark side with him. Right now she seems a bit uptight—proper, even. But he can tell her manners are false. They have to be. Her mouth says one thing and her eyes say another. Her lips spew boring politeness. But her eyes? The first thing he noticed about them is that they’re the color of his favorite kind of coffee in the winter. But it wasn’t long before he realized they’re full of sarcasm. Mischief. And a little bit of pride.

She probably doesn’t even appreciate what she’s capable of. And Arden aims to change that.

“Good morning, sweetie,” his mother says, startling him. The mug of hot coffee in his hand spills out, burning him. She stops then, the rustling of her silk robe hushing seconds later. Only a tinge of remorse glints in her hollow eyes. “Sorry,” she says. She helps herself to a cup of coffee and sits on a barstool at the kitchen island, staring blankly at the refrigerator.

Arden remembers a time when she would have helped him soak up the coffee off the floor with a handful of paper towels, fussing over his minor burn and probably scolding him for his messy hair—all this while walking out the door to some social event or another. But all that changed when Amber got sick. And it stopped completely when she died.

From that day forward, everything that made Sherry Moss a mother seemed to dry up inside her and shrivel into the heavily medicated waif she’s become. Arden throws the soaking napkins in the trash can. “Did Dad give you your medicine last night?”

“I think so. I don’t remember.” She takes a fistful of pills to help her sleep, Arden knows. But they mess with her memory too. In the very beginning, after Amber passed, she got Arden’s doctor to write him a prescription too, when she found out he wasn’t sleeping. But Arden didn’t take up her offer, flushing the pills down the toilet instead.

“Why don’t you go back to bed?”

She gives him a small smile. It clearly says she doesn’t feel like talking. She arranges that smile on her face often. “I’m going to check on your Uncle Cletus this morning.”

Oh, she definitely doesn’t need to be driving like this. “Cletus doesn’t need your help. He’s tough as a coconut. You should go back to bed.”

His mother looks him straight in the eye then. “You want to talk about things that should be done, do you?”

Here we go. Deep down, the ghost of a mother in her occasionally feels obligated to bring up how he should rejoin the football team to make his father happy. How he should start caring about his grades again. How he should care about something, period. “Touché,” he says, holding up his palms in surrender. He doesn’t want to have this conversation any more than she does. In truth, Arden doubts she really cares, she’s just trying to take the spotlight off what she perceives as her own failure. Or maybe she’s just parroting his father’s rants.

“You used to like football,” she says more to herself than to him. She takes another sip of her coffee, as if dismissing the thought, the conversation, altogether. The vacancy sign is definitely on now. That’s the mother Arden’s used to these days.

But she’s right, of course. He did like football. He loved it, lived it, breathed for it. And he kept his grades up too, because if he didn’t, he’d get kicked off the team. Nothing Coach Nelson could do about that, especially after he’d fought so hard to get Arden on the varsity team as a sophomore. But football took too much away from him. His practices, his games. It was all time he could have spent with Amber. It was different when she actually came to his games. She’d sit beside his father and scream and shout when touchdowns were scored and refs made bad calls. She’d eat hot dogs and spill her drink when he landed the ball wherever he aimed.

But when she couldn’t handle the pressure of being around people anymore, he should have stopped too. He should have been there for her. He should have seen the downward spiral she was trapped in. But he was too busy to notice.

It was only when she stopped wanting to go pranking on Sunday nights that he realized how skinny Amber had become. How inaccessible she really was. And how blind he had been. But by then it was too late.