There was just this way that Kael was looking at me that made me wonder. The fact that he’d agreed to come to the party at all made me wonder. But as with everything with this man, I couldn’t be sure.

We were still sitting next to each other on the couch. Kael’s empty plate rested on a napkin on his lap. The plate was clean and the napkin was spotless. My plate had a splinter of hard crust on it and a bit of stray pepperoni. My white paper napkin was splotched with pizza sauce. My black jeans didn’t show my greasy handprints, though. Small mercies. I wasn’t neat and tidy. Not like Kael. And certainly not like Estelle, the perfect housewife, whose picture was hanging in a thick black frame above us. A black cloud was more like it. I couldn’t see her face, but I could feel her bearing down on me. I knew that picture well—it had been taken on one of their many vacations. My dad was next to her, wearing a big smile and a Florida tan. A beachfront American Gothic.

Kael leaned up to grab a pizza box. “Can you hand me a napkin?” I asked.

Another guy might have made a crack about the red sauce massacre I had going on, but he didn’t say anything, just grabbed some pizza and napkins, then leaned back into the couch cushion. I could feel the heat rising off him. My imagination was playing with that. My body, too.

“Want some?” he asked. He offered his plate, which had two thick slices, glistening with cheese.

I shook my head, thanking him.

“I see you have a new twin.” Austin pointed to Kael and mostly everyone looked at him, then me. His shirt and jeans were practically identical to mine, only my shirt was plain gray. I thought back to the photograph of my dad and Estelle, standing side by side in their matching Hawaiian shirts from Old Navy, and burned with embarrassment. Kael cracked a smile. A very small smile, but it was there, all right.

“Ha, ha,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You were gone awhile, sooo—”

Laughter bounced around the room.

“Fair enough.” Austin took a bite of pepperoni pizza.

Cheese slid down the slice and he caught it with his tongue. He was so much like a younger teenage boy sometimes, as if he had stopped maturing after tenth grade. It was part of his draw, I guess—the innocence of him. He really did have a good soul, and it was easy to see. He was the kind of boy who would start a fire and then save you from it.