Cover

As If on Cue

Marisa Kanter

Title Page

Dedication

For Sam—

it all started with a script

CHAPTER ONE

It is six a.m. and I am debating the opposite of frozen with Reid Callahan.

“It’s ‘melted,’ ” I mumble into my pillow, salty, because how dare he wake me up before the sun on a Monday? In my current state of bleary-eyed rage, I throw a pillow vaguely in the direction of my doorframe, where Reid is standing.

“No way. The opposite of frozen is definitely boiled. I’m serious. ‘Boiled’ is the only valid title if you’re going for parody. ‘Melted’ is fundamentally flawed.”

“You’re fundamentally flawed.”

He snorts, and I hear the clink of metal against ceramic. A spoon swirling in cereal. By now, I’m used to Reid in my house in the early hours of the morning, mastering complex arpeggios on the clarinet under the instruction of my father. Reid is pretty much the only person in the entire universe who matches Dad’s intensity for a musical instrument. Which means he’s always here.

It’s kind of unbearable.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

“It’s Monday,” Reid says slowly, as if I don’t know the days of the week. Monday morning lessons have been a thing since school started two weeks ago—and will continue to be a thing that makes Monday even more Monday for the duration of my junior year.

“I mean here, Reid. Why are you in my bedroom?”

“To pay up,” he says.

He nods toward my desk, where a large iced chai from Kiskadee sits on top of an elephant coaster. Of course, he decides six a.m. is the perfect time to deliver my Wow, you actually wrote a play chai. Winning a bet against Reid Callahan is still always losing, in a way.

“Your timing is impeccable.”

I fall back onto my mattress and roll over, facing the wall and closing my eyes in an attempt to return to my dreamscape. Before Reid woke me up with three staccato knocks, I was sitting at a table read for my big-budget Broadway play featuring the Chrises. We were staging a fight scene between Pine and Evans. Hemsworth leaned over to whisper in my ear, You’re bloody incredible, Jacobson. And I didn’t brush off his praise or downplay my talent—I owned it. Thor called me, Natalie Jacobson, incredible. I felt incredible. In my dream, playwriting is more than a high school hobby. It’s possible.

Reid flips the switch next to my door and my eyelids twitch as synthetic light tries to push through them. “Don’t want you to oversleep!”

“Thanks,” I deadpan, sitting up because I am now officially awake and Reid has Won. I reach for my glasses while my eyes adjust, already plotting my revenge for his ruining of the epic Pine-Evans fight scene.