He walks toward me as if there aren’t three hundred people staring at him—the new kid—as if it doesn’t matter in the least that the popular girls are tossing their hair and batting their lashes like they’re at a photo shoot, or that the jocks are all sizing him up as competition. He walks as if the only thing he can see is me.
Oliver wraps his arms around me and swings me in a circle, like I weigh nothing at all. He sets me down, then gently holds my face in his hands, looking at me as if he has found treasure. “Hello,” he says, and he kisses me.
I can feel everyone’s eyes on me, their mouths gaping.
Not gonna lie: I could get used to this.
I met Oliver inside a book. Last year, I got obsessed with a kids’ fairy tale that I found in the stacks of the school library—inparticular, with the prince who was illustrated throughout the pages. Now, lots of readers crush on fictional characters, but mine turned out to be not so fictional. Oliver wanted out of his book, where every day was the same, and into a life that didn’t have such a rigid plotline.
We had a bunch of failed attempts—including one involving a magic easel that reproduced him in the real world but flat as a pancake, and a brief period of time where I got sucked into the book and found myself swimming with mermaids and fending off a deranged princess who fancied herself in love with Oliver. Our last-ditch attempt to get him written out of the story included a covert trip to Cape Cod to find the author of the book, Jessamyn Jacobs, who had written the story for her son, Edgar, after his dad died. As it turned out, Edgar was a dead ringer for Oliver, and just the replacement we needed in the book for Oliver. For the past three months, Edgar’s been living in the fairy tale, and Oliver’s been living on Cape Cod, impersonating him—American accent, teenage moods, twenty-first-century clothing, and all. After weeks of persuasion, Oliver finally convinced Jessamyn to move here, to New Hampshire, so he could be with me.
Oliver and I walk down the hall, where girls bunch together, jockeying into position to take a Snapchat selfie; bros try to jam a shipping container’s worth of sports gear into a locker the size of a carry-on suitcase; cheerleaders gaze at themselves in their locker mirrors, putting on lip gloss in slow motion, as if they’re starring in their own Sephora commercial. Suddenly two nerds zoom down the hallway, clutching stacks of books to their chests, careening off bystanders like human pinballs.Oliver nearly gets mowed down in the process. “Is there a fire?” he asks.
“No, we only have fifteen minutes till class starts. To a nerd, that means you’re already a half hour late.” I glance down the hallway. “They runeverywhere. All the time.”
I can feel everyone’s eyes on my back as Oliver and I pass. As we move through the crowds, I purposely bump into him every so often. I do this so I can make sure he’s really here. You have to understand—I’m just not a lucky person. I never win a raffle; every penny I come across is tails-up; my last fortune cookie saidGood luck with that.This is literally a dream come true.
Suddenly I realize that Oliver is doing the queen’s wave as we head down the science wing. I grab his hand and pull it down. “These are not your subjects,” I whisper, but when he threads his fingers through mine, I completely forget to be frustrated.
Before I realize what he’s doing, he’s pulling me around a corner, into the narrow hallway that leads to the photography lab. In a delicate choreography, he spins me so that my back is against the wall and his hands are bracketing me. His hair is falling across his eyes as he leans forward, lifts my chin, and kisses me.
“What was that for?” I ask, dizzy.
He grins. “Just because I can.”
I can’t help smiling back. Three months ago, I never imagined that I could even reach out and touch Oliver’s hand, much less sneak away during school for a secret kiss.
The terrible thing about falling in love is that real life always gets in the way. I sigh, taking his hand. “As much as I’d like to stay here, we have to get you to class.”
“So,” Oliver says. “What’s my first task?”
“Well,” I reply, taking the printed schedule out of his hand.EDGAR JACOBS, it reads, startling me. It’s hard for me to remember that Oliver is masquerading as someone else; how difficult must it be forhim? “Your firstclassis chemistry.”
“Alchemy?”
“Um, not quite. More like potions.”
Oliver looks impressed. “Wow. Everyone here hopes to be a wizard?”
“Only the ones with a death wish,” I murmur. I stop in front of a bank of lockers, matching the number to the one on his schedule. “This is yours.”
He tugs on the lock, frowning at the numerical puzzle of the combination. Then suddenly he brightens and, out of nowhere, pulls out a dagger and hacks it against the metal.
“Oh myGod!” I shout, grabbing the knife and stuffing it into my backpack before anyone else can see. “Do you want to get arrested?”
“I’m really not that tired,” Oliver says.
I sigh. “No knives.Ever.Understand?”
His eyes flicker with remorse. “There’s just so much here that’s . . . different,” he says.
“I know,” I empathize. “That’s why you’ve got me.” I take off the numeric lock, using the code on the back of Oliver’s schedule, and replace it with a padlock whose combination is five letters. “Watch,” I say, using my thumb to roll the wheels until they spellE-D-A-H-E.“Everyone deserves a happy ending.”
“I think I can remember that.” He grins and backs me against the lockers. “You know what else I remember?”
His eyes are as green as a summer field, and as easy to get lost in.
“I remember the first time I saw you,” Oliver says. “You were wearing that shirt.”
