“You know, Nick, I can’t really rationalize it. I think part of it is that she’s my sister, and I wouldn’t really want her to date anyone at all, and then there’s that track record you have . . .” He didn’t need to say it.

“For crying out loud,” I said, my foot pressing back on the gas as my distraction grew, “this Nick Maguire is a player extraordinaire thing is really starting to get annoying.”

“Why?” asked Carter. “You usually take that as a compliment.”

We flew past a cop car, and I held my breath. Seventy in a 55 would be an expensive ticket. After a few seconds and no sirens, I exhaled.

I understood why Carter wouldn’t trust me with his sister. For whatever reason, his sister wasn’t another girl. Even I knew, however, that being trapped in the car with him for another million hours wasn’t the place to divulge that information to him.

“Sure is a lot of traffic for six in the morning, eh?” I sighed.

“Asshole.”

By the time we’d driven through all of upstate New York and arrived at Clarkebridge, I’d mostly succeeded in pretending the tension between us no longer existed. As far as I was concerned, what to do about Eliza was a problem for future Nick. And before I could get to that, there would be tryouts for the Clarkebridge team, a campus tour, and our admissions interviews. Big things on the horizon, to put it lightly.

As potential soccer recruits (fingers double crossed), we were set up to bunk with two current freshmen on the team: Luke and Tyler. Since we got to Clarkebridge well before the tryout, Luke and Tyler were happy to show us around. Their recruitment tour started with the dining hall (very important) and ended with the science center, since Carter had specifically requested it. The campus hosted about fifteen thousand students and was filled with high-rise dorms and towering academic buildings. It looked new, it looked legit, and it looked like it had one heck of an endowment.

Luke and Tyler were cool too. Luke was from L.A., had a man bun, and wanted to go into nursing; and Tyler was from Florida, had short hair like Austin, and majored in finance. Like us, they’d both been recruited to try out in high school and had wanted to go to Clarkebridge since well before that.

“Clarkebridge pre-meds have a 100 percent acceptance rate to med schools,” Luke told us, but mostly Carter. “If you decide to come here, you’ll be in good hands.”

“We’re one of the only universities that let undergrads research at the Cancer Center,” added Tyler, “which is a big part of it.”

“Wow, that’s awesome.” Carter snapped a picture of the center, like he’d snapped pics of every building we’d stopped at.

It was more than a center. It was an entire section of the campus, with three of its own buildings and its own courtyard. The crowning glory was a holographic statue of DNA in the main building. Luke and Tyler kept insisting that it wasn’t a school for rich kids either.