Page 21

Hilleboe College was out in the countryside in a smaller town, but close enough to Minneapolis and St. Paul that the light pollution washed out a lot of the fainter stars. Theo was right: The stars in Itasca were so much brighter and more numerous than she’d seen back at Hilleboe, and suddenly she was swamped with an odd sort of homesickness. “Do you miss it? Itasca?” she asked.

Theo shuffled his feet. “Two days ago, I would have said, hell no. And it’s not like I want to move back here or anything, but I think I do miss it sometimes. Or parts of it anyway.”

“Same,” she said, and a companionable silence fell between them. As they walked, she couldn’t help but ruminate over the way her parents had acted during dessert, and why on earth they cared so much about this.

Avery had never been totally sure why her parents didn’t like Theo as much as Cameron—it wasn’t just that they were friends with Cameron’s parents, since they weren’t friends with Grace’s either, but they adored her. Maybe it was that Theo’s mom wasn’t from Itasca originally, which marked them as outsiders, as silly as that sounded. Most people in the area had been there for generations, her father included, and her mother was from close enough by that it counted to most people. But Theo, Jake, and Tiffany weren’t from up north, and while Karl was, he also wasn’t Theo’s or Jake’s dad. Maybe it was because his mom and dad weren’t together, and because Theo hadn’t seen his dad in nearly a decade. They could be snobbish and judgy, even her dad, and Avery was always uncomfortable when that side of them came out.

Theo’s house wasn’t too far away, but it might as well have been in a totally different town. The houses shrank the farther they walked from Avery’s house—from streets with large, robber baron–style semi-mansions to a neighborhood of more staid middle-class homes, where both Harper and Grace lived (Tommy lived on a farm a few miles from town), and then across the train tracks (yes, Theo literally was from the wrong side of the tracks) to the neighborhood where Karl and Tiffany lived. It wasn’t a poor neighborhood, but it was definitely shabbier than the others.

“Is everything okay at home?” Theo asked, interrupting her thoughts. He chuckled awkwardly and cleared his throat. “Sorry, that sounded bad. I meant, are your parents okay? Things seemed . . . tense.”

“Things are always tense,” Avery said, shrugging. She knew what was wrong, of course, and had known for a while, but she hadn’t managed to tell anyone, not even Theo. Mostly because if she did, well, then it was real. And she couldn’t deal with that.

“It seemed even more tense than usual, is all.”

“Why do you care? It’s not like you like them,” she snapped. It wasn’t fair and she knew it, but she didn’t like the implication that he noticed something she had been working hard to pretend wasn’t happening.

“Hey,” he said, voice gentle. “I was just worried, that’s all.”

“It’s fine, I promise,” Avery said, feeling guilty for her flash of anger already. “Mom just gets stressed at the holidays,” she added. That wasn’t a lie, even if it wasn’t the whole truth either. Theo let it drop, and after half a block her shoulders started to relax.

Theo’s house was a long, low ranch, the bottom half a light creamy brick and the top part a deep dark navy blue that Theo had helped his stepdad paint two summers ago. Avery had done a little bit of the window trim on one lazy Saturday afternoon, listening to Theo’s angstiest playlist and teaming up with Jake to threaten him with the hose.

Avery was still biting back the grin on her face at the memory when they walked through the front door and saw Karl sitting on the living room couch, looking unreservedly pleased to see her. “Happy Thanksgiving,” he said cheerfully, because Karl was nothing if not a permanently cheerful man. That had always irritated the crap out of Theo, since his natural disposition was not exactly sunny. “How’s school going?”

Avery let Karl take her jacket and gave her now well-rehearsed speech about her semester. But in comparison to her parents’ friends, it seemed like Karl actually cared. “Where’s Tiff?” she asked.

“Mom has to cover for someone for a few hours tonight,” Theo said as he untied his boots. Jake was nowhere in sight, and Karl had the TV tuned to a football game, so she was guessing Jake was holed up in his room.

“Tommy just messaged to say they’re heading back from his grandma’s, so we’ll just hang out in my room for a little bit,” Theo said to Karl. “You don’t have to work tonight, right?”

Karl nodded. “They’re not saying it’ll snow much again tonight, so no. You guys aren’t going to be drinking tonight, are you?”

Of all the parents who might ask that question, Karl was probably the least intimidating. He would probably offer them a ride rather than a lecture, but they shook their heads in unison. “Tommy’s mom would kill us,” Theo reminded him.

Karl made a face. “She would, yeah, and then I’d have to explain it to your mothers.” He nodded toward the hallway that led to Theo’s and Jake’s bedrooms. “Door open, okay, Theo?” he added with just the slightest undercurrent to his tone.

Avery waited until they were in his room with the door cracked open just enough to meet Karl’s request before turning to Theo. “He knows, huh? He’s never made you have the door open before.”

“Yeah,” Theo said, flopping down on his bed. “Jake told him right before Evelyn came over.”

“How did that go?”

“Karl is thrilled, Mom is delighted, and when Gran Gran found out, she basically started planning our wedding.”

Avery had spent countless hours in his bedroom in high school, working on homework or just goofing around, but something felt different tonight. It shouldn’t, since it wasn’t real, but it did feel like something significant had shifted between them. Avery sat down on the edge of his bed, her legs crossed, like she had hundreds of other times. She considered moving to his desk chair, but then that felt like making a statement, like telling him that the kisses had meant something to her that they weren’t supposed to.

Maybe that was what threw her about the kisses. She was still having a hard time shaking them, after all. She was struggling to square her adamant, years-long insistence that she had never even considered Theo as anything but a friend with the fact that two kisses from him had turned her entire world upside down. She kept telling herself it was just that they had obvious chemistry as friends that meant they would have chemistry physically, but a stubborn whisper in the back of her mind pointed out that she had excellent friend chemistry with Grace, Tommy, and Harper but she didn’t think kissing any of them would send her into such a spiral.

Theo propped himself up on his elbows, head cocked to the side. His hair fell across his forehead and she had to curl her hands into fists to keep from reaching out to brush it back. She hated this, feeling like she was second-guessing herself constantly around him, when before she wouldn’t have hesitated. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said hastily.

But she should have known Theo wouldn’t buy it. He sat up, fixing the wanting-to-touch-his-hair problem but creating a whole new one by bringing his face entirely too close to hers. He was within unfortunately easy kissing distance, which was probably the last thing she needed.

“Aves, come on. I know you. What’s wrong?”

Avery’s traitorous eyes dropped to his lips. “It’s nothing,” she said, and under normal circumstances, Theo would have seen through her in an instant. But Theo didn’t seem normal, which was good, because neither was she. He was staring at her lips too. It was like he was caught up in whatever spell had grabbed ahold of her, and she both desperately wanted to break out of it and desperately wanted to stay inside the bubble and see what happened.