Chapter 11

When it was time for practice, Jeremy took his book over to the shade to read and Mitch went back to the office.

Annabelle joined Elisa and Kayla at the side of the pool. Elisa was only wearing her suit, but Kayla still had on a T-shirt and gym shorts. She usually kept them on until the last second and then left them with her towel instead of in the locker room. If it had been anybody else, somebody might have said something. But everybody knew where Kayla had been last summer, so maybe everybody understood that the bathing suit thing might be hard.

“Hey! I hear you got Jeremy to swim when he wasn’t required to,” Kayla said, tucking her pin-straight light brown hair behind each ear.

She had the exact same hair as Jeremy, and the same shade of fair white skin and pale brown eyes. Their features were different, but if someone were painting them, they’d use all the same colors. They looked so much alike that when Jeremy had started at the Academy, the older kids had called him “Boy Kayla.”

“Well, there were mozzarella sticks involved,” Annabelle said, and Kayla laughed.

“That’ll do it.”

“I’m sure it helped that Annabelle was the one who asked,” Elisa said, nudging Annabelle’s arm.

Annabelle’s cheeks burned, and she glanced over at Jeremy to make sure he hadn’t heard that, even though he was too far away and, anyway, he never heard anything when he was reading.

Then she changed the subject. “Hey, do you think your mom could drive me to practice tomorrow?” she asked Kayla.

Mitch had reminded her twice that she needed to find a ride, since he and Mom were both busy.

“Aw, I actually have a doctor’s appointment, so I’m coming late,” Kayla said. “Any other day, though!”

“I could pick you up,” Elisa offered, but then she smacked herself in the forehead. “Oops, no I can’t. I’m working at the coffee shop and coming straight from there.”

And then there was Connor, right behind Annabelle. “I can give you a ride if you need one.”

He didn’t touch her this time, but all of her skin sizzled, anyway.

Elisa and Kayla exchanged a weird look, but Annabelle didn’t have room in her brain to think too much about that or anything else, other than the fact that tomorrow she would be in the same car as Connor Madison. They’d pull up to the pool together. Walk in together. It was almost too amazing to visualize.

At the end of practice, she wrapped herself in her soft purple towel and waved to Mia, who stood over by the snack bar with some other middle school girls. She was about to go over to say hi when Connor called out, “Annabelle! I need your number for tomorrow.”

And Mia stared, her mouth partway open, as Connor jogged over to Annabelle and plugged her number into his phone.

“Thanks again,” Annabelle said, and Connor grinned. He grinned wider than most people, as if he had more to be happy about.