Last but not least, a huge thank-you to everyone who cheered Love Songs & Other Lies into the world and made this second book possible. Having one book published was a dream come true, and having a second out in the world is absolutely surreal. Thank you for reading and letting me do this thing I love.

Excerpt: Meet Me at Midnight

Read on for a sneak peek at
Jessica Pennington’s next book

MEET ME AT MIDNIGHT

Available now from Tor Teen

Copyright © 2020 by Jessica Pennington

Day

One

SIDNEY

Here’s the problem with knowing someone since you were ten and vacationing with them since you were thirteen: they know way too much. They’ve seen things. The neurotic things you only did once. The embarrassing things you wish you could forget. Usually it’s people we love who know these seemingly harmless things. But when it’s someone you hate … those tiny bits of your past become the ultimate ammunition. And with the right arsenal, it’s war. The war I call summer lasts exactly fifty-six days. It doesn’t end, and it has only two sides: mine and his.

Asher Marin doesn’t let me live anything down, and he doesn’t let me forget. I don’t let him, either. It’s why we’re both darting out of our cabins at 8:37 a.m. on the first full day of summer vacation. Why I sat by the window, barely able to make out the shadow of him at his, as I ate my bowl of cereal this morning, twitching out of my seat with every flutter of activity from the kitchen window that mirrors mine. It’s our sixth year vacationing together in twin houses that sit atop a little hill overlooking a sprawling inland lake. And saying that we know each other doesn’t even begin to describe the two of us. To survive summer, I don’t just have to know Asher, I have to get in his brain.

“Your hair looks pretty today,” he says. I’m walking out of my door as he walks out of his, my cereal bowl discarded so quickly I’m not positive it isn’t in shards in the old metal sink. We’re mirror images starting our days, as we each make a hard turn onto the concrete sidewalks that run alongside our houses—toward the deck that juts out from the hill rising up from the shoreline. He’s lazily smiling, and someone who didn’t know him—didn’t know us—would think he was being sweet. Complimenting me. But he’s not smiling, he’s smirking. I don’t have to look at his face to know; I can hear it in his voice. In the way the word hair comes out on the whisper of a laugh he didn’t allow himself to let loose.