Was it desperate to text Ezra at 2:30 A.M.? She still hadn’t heard back from him. Aria felt for her phone in her bag and pulled it out. The screen read, NEW TEXT MESSAGE. Her stomach swooped, relieved and excited and nervous all at once. But as she clicked READ, a voice interrupted her.
“Excuse me. Um, you can’t use your cell in school.”
Aria covered her phone with her hands and looked up. Whoever had said it—the new teacher, she guessed—stood with his back to the rest of the room and was writing on the chalkboard. Mr. Fitz was all he’d written so far. He was holding a memo with Rosewood’s insignia on the top. From the back, he looked young. A few of the other girls in the class gave him an appreciative once-over as they found seats. The now-fabulous Hanna even whistled.
“I know I’m the new guy,” he went on, writing, AP English, under his name, “but I have this handout from the front office. Some stuff about no cell phones in school.” Then he turned. The handout fluttered out of his hand and onto the linoleum floor.
Aria’s mouth instantly went dry. Standing in front of the classroom was Ezra from the bar. Ezra, the recipient of her haiku. Her Ezra, looking lanky and adorable in a Rosewood jacket and tie, his hair combed, his buttons buttoned correctly, and a leather-bound lesson planner under his left arm. Standing at the blackboard and writing…Mr. Fitz, AP English.
He stared at her, his face draining of color. “Holy shit.”
The entire class turned around to see who he was looking at. Aria didn’t want to stare back at them, so she looked down at her text message.
Aria: Surprise! I wonder what your pig puppet will have to say about this… —A
Holy shit, indeed.
6
EMILY’S FRENCH TOO!
Tuesday afternoon, Emily stood in front of her green metal locker after the final bell of the day had rung. The locker still had her old stickers from last year—USA Swimming, Liv Tyler as Arwen the elf, and a magnet that said, COED NAKED BUTTERFLY. Her boyfriend, Ben, hovered next to her.
“You want to hit Wawa?” he asked. His Rosewood swimming jacket hung loosely off his lanky, muscular body, and his blond hair was a little messy.
“Nah, I’m good,” Emily answered. Because they had practice at three-thirty after school, the swimmers usually just stayed at Rosewood and sent someone off to Wawa so they could get their hoagie/iced tea/Cheats/Reese’s Pieces fix before swimming a billion laps.
A bunch of boys stopped to slap Ben’s hand as they headed toward the parking lot. Spencer Hastings, who was in Ben’s history class last year, waved. Emily waved back before realizing Spencer was looking at Ben, not her. It was hard to believe that after everything they’d been through together and all the secrets they shared, they now acted like strangers.
After everyone passed, Ben turned back to her and frowned. “You’ve got your jacket on. You’re not practicing?”
“Um.” Emily shut her locker and gave the combination a spin. “You know that girl I’ve been showing around today? I’m walking her to her house ’cause this is her first day and all.”
He smirked. “Well, aren’t you sweet? Parents of prospective students pay for tours, but you’re doing it for free.”
“Come on.” Emily smiled uneasily. “It’s like a ten-minute walk.”
Ben looked at her, vaguely nodding for a little while.
“What? I’m just trying to be nice!”
“That’s cool,” he said, and smiled. He took his eyes off her to wave at Casey Kirschner, the captain of the boys’ varsity wrestling team.
Maya appeared a minute after Ben loped down the side stairs out to the student parking lot. She wore a white denim jacket over her Rosewood oxford shirt and Oakley flip-flops on her feet. Her toenails weren’t painted. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” Emily tried to sound bright, but she felt uneasy. Maybe she should’ve just gone to practice with Ben. Was it weird to walk Maya home and walk right back?
“Ready?” Maya asked.
The girls walked through campus, which was basically a bunch of very old brick buildings off a twisty back road in Rosewood. There was even a Gothic clock tower that chimed out the hours. Earlier, Emily had shown Maya all the standard stuff that every private school has. She’d also shown her the cool things about Rosewood Day that you usually had to discover on your own, like the dangerous toilet in the girls’ first-floor bathroom that sometimes spewed up geyser-style, the secret spot on the hill kids went when they cut gym class (not that Emily ever would), and the school’s only vending machine that sold Vanilla Coke, her favorite. They’d even developed an inside joke about the prim, stick-up-her-butt model on the anti-smoking posters that hung outside the nurse’s office. It felt good to have an inside joke again.