“Elliot.” Jaya’s eyebrows knitted together without her permission. Isha had been spending a lot of time with that boy. Just yesterday she said Elliot and she had lain on the hilly green by the astronomy building and just watched the clouds float by. The clouds. Float by. Like Isha had ever cared about floating clouds before.

“Yeah,” Isha said, fiddling with the gold ring on her finger. Amma had given them matching ones when each of them turned thirteen. “He’s my friend. I asked him if he wanted to come tonight, but he’d already made plans with Carlos.”

Oh, he was her friend. Of course. Just like Romeo was Juliet’s friend. “The sushi restaurant’s downtown?” Jaya said, instead of the million and twenty things she really wanted to say about Elliot. “I don’t know. It’s getting dark out and that’s ten miles away.”

Isha laughed. She actually laughed at Jaya. Her older sister. “ ‘It’s getting dark.’ You sound like you’re fifty, Jaya. Come on. We’re young.”

“Our age has nothing to do with it,” Jaya said serenely, even though her blood pressure was rising. Why was Isha always so quick to flout the rules? To do whatever she wanted? “It’s not safe to go traipsing around a town that you don’t know. We’re still getting acclimated. We don’t have an escort.”

“St. Rosetta’s has a car service!” Isha said, sighing. “The driver will literally drop us off right at the door; we can set it up right now. You know the office is open 24/7. It’s not that hard.”

“I could be your escort.”

Isha looked over Jaya’s shoulder at the bearer of that deep, rather growly voice and smiled hesitantly. Even though Jaya had managed, in the interceding days, to convince Isha that Grey knew nothing of the scandal (there was no reason for both of them to constantly be on high alert. Also, if Isha believed Grey knew nothing of the scandal, Jaya could socialize with him without Isha getting suspicious), it was understandable that she was a little unsure of him.

Jaya took a breath and turned around with the sweetest smile on her face. “Grey!” she said, in a hearty so-nice-to-see-you voice. “We couldn’t trouble you that way.” Like she was going to let him anywhere near her little sister.

He was dressed in his after-school outfit—ratty long-sleeved T-shirt with some obscure-but-certain-to-be-cool band logo on the front, his big feet clad in boots that looked like they’d been run over by several buses, his jeans hanging just so from his hips. His hair was unbrushed and mussed. Annoyingly enough, it gave him a certain savage charm.