The Stratford Saints crush it, and Chase practically skips out of the locker room to pick me up from where Shannon, Kiki, and I are discussing celebrity bullshit. “I’m so flattered, being driven by tonight’s MVP,” I tell him with an exaggerated flutter of my lashes as we head out to his X-Terra. He laughs, but his joy and pride are palpable. It’s one of the things I’ve always liked most about him—he wears whatever he’s feeling on his sleeve.

It’s also one of the things I’ve always hated. He’s so clear about his emotions, I could never wonder if he might be secretly into me or hope he might be harboring a crush. But that clarity makes this moment, when I catch him shooting glances at the low back of my T-shirt, all the more delightful.

“As much as I love talking about myself and my win,” he says once we’re buckled in, “I wanna hear more about you. What’d you do this summer? Clearly you spent some time at the beach.”

Talk about the last thing I wanna discuss. Jasmine does not factor into this equation, I remind myself, though we’re literally going to her house. I take a deep breath. “Actually, I spent the entire thing at the beach. My mom and I went to the Outer Banks.”

“Oh, where’s that?”

I’d had the same reaction when my mom first mentioned it, although it seems impossible to imagine now. While OBX is full of people from the mid-Atlantic down, up here, everyone with a summer house on the beach goes to the Hamptons. It’s where I’d normally spend a week or two, lying out by the pool at the house Shannon’s parents rent every summer. But though she extended the usual invitation so we could hang out before school started, I’d passed in favor of starting my job at the Book and Bean, where I would’ve spent the summer. It was beyond gracious of the owner, Beth, to give me another chance, including weekend shifts during the school year, and I wasn’t gonna screw it up again—not with my car fund on the line.

Plus, it kept me busy, which was way better for distracting myself from Jasmine than lazing around a pool would’ve been.

“They’re islands off the northern coast of North Carolina. You know Kitty Hawk?”

“First flight?”

“Yeah. That’s there.”

“Cool.”

I’d thought so too. Jasmine had teased me mercilessly, but she took me there for a tour and a photography session in front of the monument until the heat wore us down. One of those photos was my phone wallpaper for a couple of weeks until I got sick of feeling like every time my phone lit up it was a challenge to call her, and I changed it to a picture of my mom and me instead.