“Trade you some baguette for some of whatever that is,” Jack offers.

“Deal.” I drop off my backpack and my swim bag at the table. “Just one sec.”

I wince when I see there are over a hundred notifications piled up on BLB’s Twitter, knowing every single one of them is cat-related or worse. I pull up a tweet draft, taking a sip of my tea, as if I can burn the wrongness of it down my throat.

Yuck. I forgot to put sugar in it. I glance around to look for the coffee counter, getting up from my chair and bumping into someone who was coming at me from the left. My tea sloshes onto my shirt, and I back into the table, dropping my phone on it.

“Sorry, sorry—”

“Pepper?”

I blink up into the ice blue of Landon’s eyes, so close I can see the distinctive little freckle just above one of them that I memorized my freshman year like his face was some kind of constellation. He cracks a smile just as I swallow down a grimace.

“Sorry,” I mutter again, ducking my head down. There’s a bread bowl full of mac and cheese on a tray in his hands, the cheese still bubbling. The views are both so overwhelming that I’m not sure which to settle on, the cheese or his face.

“Hey, Ethan—”

“Jack,” the two of us correct him at the same time. Jack turns his attention back to his baguette, but not before I see the sliver of a smile on his face.

When I look back at Landon, he is still momentarily disarmed, blinking before the easy smile is back on his face again. “Well, then. My bad. Fancy running into you guys here.”

My throat feels dry. I am staring at Landon’s uncannily symmetrical face and thinking, of all things, of my mother.

“Yeah,” I half croak. “Was just … sorry. I was going to put sugar in my tea, and…” Am now narrating every pedantic detail of my life to you for no reason.

I beeline for the coffee counter, painfully aware that Landon is falling into step next to me. This is it, then—the universe giving me the opportunity I completely missed during practice today. As if it practically is shining a neon light on my mom’s ridiculous request.

I steel my entire body like a truck is coming at me. It’s a letdown, almost, that I have spent the last four years at Stone Hall trying to be worthy of the Landons of the world—the people who just fit here, the way I used to just fit back in Nashville—but even after all this time, I can’t look at him without feeling like the clueless little freshman I was when we first met.

Eventually I force the words out of my mouth.

“So—are you … um, my mom says your dad is coming to dinner at our place?”

Landon takes a step ahead of me and grabs me a sugar packet from one of the little containers on the counter. It’s the wrong kind, one of the fake ones without any calories in it that make your tongue shrivel, but I’m too busy focusing on not tripping again to care.

“Oh, wow, yeah. My dad mentioned something. Didn’t realize it was your place.”

I nod, way too vigorously than the situation merits. “Yep, um, yeah. My place.” This is social suicide, but somehow still not as bad as letting down my mom. “You should come.”

There’s a half second where he’s still trying to catch up to what I said that I think I may die right there in the middle of the bakery, just lie down on the tiles and let the elements take me.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Landon nods. “Yeah, yeah, I’m—that sounds cool. I’ve got some deadlines for my internship, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be out of the weeds soon.”

I better win some kind of Daughter of the Year award for this. “Maybe I’ll see you then.”

Jack

The really stupid part about the whole thing is, right before it all blows up in my face, I decide I like Pepper. Well, not decide, really—it just kind of sneaks up on me. One second I’m tearing through a baguette, relieved my mom is nowhere within a three-mile radius (consuming bread from other establishments is treason in the Campbell family), and the next I’m looking up, seeing this wry look on Pepper’s face as she’s standing in line for her tea—the kind of look you give someone you don’t just tolerate, but maybe care about. The difference between exasperation and mild amusement, that line of what on earth is that guy doing and what on earth is my friend doing.

And yeah, maybe it was kind of happening before that. Ethan asked me to meet up with Pepper the first time, but I kind of hijacked it after that. Ethan doesn’t even know Pepper and I are meeting to go over swim and dive stuff—not that he’d mind, since the organization of the dive team can roughly be described as “extremely hot mess” and his captainship was more of a formality than anything. He’ll still slap it on his resume and call it a day.

He has kind of a bad habit of doing that—overcommitting and pushing stuff onto me. Saying he’ll bring day-old stuff from the deli for a fundraising thing at school, and then asking me to do it when his schedule gets too thin. Promising Mom he’ll pick up Grandma Belly’s prescription, then calling me in a panic when he realizes his student council meeting is running too long for the pharmacy’s hours. I know he doesn’t mean to do it, but he has a tendency to bite off more than he can chew—and then remember, thanks to me, he has a second mouth.