“Are you crazy, Hail?” She threw a pillow at me. Good thing it missed, or I probably would’ve stabbed my eye with the pencil. “I mean, he’s flawless. He must be some alien being, he’s so perfect.”

“He’s not that perfect,” I mumbled. “He has a birthmark.”

Luisa got this professional cosmetics trunk for her fifteenth birthday, and it was filled with all these goodies. She’d been trying to give me a tutorial on making cat’s eyes. The closest I’d achieved was a raccoon after a hard night of drinking. She rolled over to pick through the trunk and looked up. “No, he doesn’t. Where?”

“On his butt or something. I saw it when we were kids,” I said vaguely. I pulled away from the mirror and blinked. “How’s this?”

She inspected my work and winced. “Uh…”

I swiped the wet washcloth off my dresser and swabbed at my eyes. “This is hopeless.”

“Oh, no it’s not,” she said, batting her cat eyelashes at me and making me rue the day I ever thought I’d be able to do anything half as well as Luisa could. Luisa didn’t need makeup, truthfully. We’d had countless sleepovers, and even after a night when we’d gotten a collective two hours of sleep, she’d wake up ready for a camera. She didn’t get crud in the corners of her eyes or drool on her pillow like I did, and all she had to do was shake her head, and her blond hairs would fall dutifully into place. “So what’s the stepbrother like?”

“His name is Declan. He’s…kind of different.”

She studied me. “Different, meaning hot?”

Well, yes, definitely—but I wasn’t about to admit it. “Kane said that Declan’s father was a mix of, like, six different ethnicities. Hawaiian, Japanese, and…I forget. He was an officer in the navy.”

“Black?” she asked, surprised.

“Maybe. What difference does it make?”

“None. I mean, that’s cool. I can’t wait to meet him. I can’t believe Kane’s dad would just go off and do that,” she said, shaking her head. “No wonder Kane is pissed.”

“He told you?” I asked, confused. Sophomore year had only started a couple days earlier. I didn’t think Kane had had any contact with anyone but me during the summer. I thought I was the one he complained to. The only one. The idea of him confiding in someone else made me a little queasy.