Jordan squawked out a laugh that sounded like a seagull’s cry. “Alooooone time? Why not?”

Annabelle had to change the subject. She hadn’t wanted Connor and them to ignore her, but this kind of attention was all wrong, like an icy blast of air-conditioning instead of a nice, calm breeze.

“My turn! I’ll go next!” she said.

And now she had to come up with something good. Something that would convince them she wasn’t just some innocent little kid. Come on, think!

“What, are you going through the whole alphabetical roster in your head?” Jordan asked.

The two girls had to be equally matched in some way, she got that. Jeremy and Scotty both had close to the same color hair and were around the same height. Coach Colette and Paige, too. Maybe two of the girls on the freestyle relay team? Then she had it.

“Coach Katherine or Elisa.”

Katherine was the old high school coach who left after last summer. She and Elisa both had freckles, bright blue eyes, broad shoulders, and muscular legs.

“Good one!” Connor said. But then Jordan chimed in.

“The manly girls!” he said in an extra-deep voice.

“No!” Annabelle said. “That’s not . . . I didn’t mean . . .”

“You guys.” Ruby shook her head, but she was smiling. Smiling, even though Elisa was her friend!

Connor and Jordan both picked Elisa, but Annabelle’s heart lurched.

It wasn’t hard to make guys laugh if you acted sort of mean—either about them or about someone else. But she didn’t want to be the kind of girl who had to be mean to make guys like her. And she definitely didn’t want to be mean about Elisa.

Before she could think of any way to fix things, Jordan puffed his chest out, and in an extra-deep voice he said, “All right, ladies. Me or Madison?”

Ruby threw a piece of lettuce across the table at him. It stuck to his gray T-shirt and left a Parmesan-cheese-flecked wet spot when he flicked it off.

“Hey!” He threw one fry that hit the front of Ruby’s shirt, and then a second fry, which bounced off her shoulder and hit Annabelle.

“Geez,” Connor said. “Maybe Hummingbird and I need to move to another table.”

He looked at Annabelle, his green eyes open a little extra wide and his mouth twitching at the corners. Expecting her to join in the joking.

Ruby would have come up with a funny, flirtatious reply. Mia, too. But Annabelle’s mind went as fuzzy as it did when she was taking one of Mr. Derrickson’s history tests.

Her phone buzzed with one text and then another, and she reached for it.

“Is it Jeremy?” Ruby teased, which set Jordan off into another round of shouting, “Jer-e-my!”

But it was Mom. Of course.

Chapter 13

Until Annabelle saw Mom’s name on the screen of her phone, she’d managed to keep her guilt about skipping tutoring at the edges of her mind. Like gray clouds in the distance, threatening a rainstorm far enough away that it wasn’t time to go inside yet. But now those gray clouds were ready to open up right over her head.