“Reid, when we get home I want your clarinet,” Leonard said.

“What?” Reid cried.

The adrenaline from the crash was still wearing off and it occurred to me—my clarinet was being taken away too. I couldn’t play with one hand! I’d be stuck in my purple cast for at least six weeks—and school started in four. I wouldn’t recover in time to start my first year of band.

“For the rest of the summer,” Leonard said. “It’s only fair, since Natalie can’t play.”

“It’s not my fault Natalie can’t control her bike!”

Dad shook his head in the rearview mirror. “That’s an interesting spin on it.”

“Natalie.” Reid looked at me, his eyes wide. “It was an accident, I swear.”

“You didn’t mention the pothole,” I said through my tears.

The more I thought about the obstacle course, that kind of scary speed, how hard the crash was—the more it felt like Reid’s fault. I couldn’t shake the thought that he did this on purpose. Ever since he picked up the clarinet, he’d been obsessed with catching up to me. So he took me out to get ahead. Reid tried to have a whole summer of the clarinet to himself.

Reid and I cried the entire car ride home.

A week later, Reid came over with a first draft of Natalie vs. Reid.

“Six weeks without clarinet is torture. We need rules.”

I’d been reading under the sycamore tree in my backyard, actually enjoying the break from clarinet lessons. At the sound of Reid’s voice I looked up from my tattered copy of The Lightning Thief. Reid was miserable without the clarinet. It was the only explanation for the list he’d held out to me, written on wide-ruled notebook paper in red marker.

I dropped my book and took the list. “We can’t tell our parents.”

“Obviously,” Reid responded. To say our parents didn’t find our competitive streak endearing anymore was a massive understatement. “They’ll take it away.”

I read Reid’s list and had some notes, of course. Reid rewrote the list as a book, each rule getting its own page of computer paper. He did the heavy lifting in terms of the creative, since I couldn’t write with my cast, but I directed.

“Does it hurt?” Reid asked, nodding at my cast as he wrote “RULE 10” in his giant print.

I shrugged. “Not anymore. It’s mostly just annoying now.”

“That stinks. I’m sorry.”

“Is that an apology for breaking my arm?”

Reid rolled his eyes. “You broke your arm.”

I still wasn’t convinced of that. But then Reid dropped my crayons and we admired his work of art, the result of every competition that had already passed and the code for all to follow.

Natalie vs. Reid: Pranks, Bets, and Everything Else