When I passed Aden in the hall, he actually nodded at me, as did Ian Moseley, his best friend and the star slugger on the baseball team, and the five teammates crowded around them. Had Tegan told them to be nice to me?

Or was it that I was holding Malachi’s hand?

After all, he was the hot foreign guy who, within an hour of arriving at our humble school, had nearly strangled Evan Crociere—who would forever be known as “Dirty Jeans” in my mind—our school’s resident drug dealer. And not only that, Malachi had performed said strangling defending the honor of Lela Santos, who, it was rumored, had killed someone, and who, it was also rumored, was either a lesbian or a stone-cold bitch more likely to shank a guy than let him touch her … or both. Our reunion by the fence behind the school had been the source of gossip that had been building for a week.

I had only two classes with Malachi—Pre-Calc and Senior Lit—which wasn’t nearly enough for me. Apparently, Raphael didn’t think we needed to be together all day. And … maybe he was right. Sitting next to Malachi was a full-on distraction, and I wasn’t the only one who seemed to think so. But if everyone else was distracted, he was totally focused, his eyes on his work, his pen in constant motion, taking scrupulously neat notes.

I watched him like a movie. The way he put his elbow on his desk and pressed his thumb between his eyebrows, propping his head up with his knuckles as he wrote. The way his eyes scanned the hall, not just on guard, I realized, but taking everything in. Every flyer, every person, the lockers and the trophy case—his gaze slid over all of it, tracing and memorizing, and the whole time, his lips were curved up into this tiny smile, easy to miss yet impossible not to stare at once you knew it was there. If I had been tossed into high school cold, I couldn’t have pulled it off. But Malachi looked like he’d won the lottery. It made me want to ask him about it, to hear what kind of future he hoped for now that he was here. And I wanted to be a part of it.

At lunch, we loaded our trays and threaded our way toward an empty table in the corner. As we were walking, Tegan waved us over to hers, where she sat with Aden and a bunch of her friends.

Malachi nudged me with his shoulder. “They want you to sit with them very badly.”

I laughed. “I think it might be you they want to sit with.”

His brows lowered in confusion. “Me?”