“I love how much fun you are,” I say. “You make me laugh, even when you frustrate me.”

Chris smiles, and a dimple appears in the center of his chin. He has such a great smile. If I am pregnant and we do end up having a child together, I hope it at least has Chris’s smile. That’s the only positive thing I can think of that could come from this situation.

“What else?” he asks.

I reach my hand up and touch his dimple, fully prepared to tell him I love his smile, but instead, I say, “I think you’ll make a great dad someday.”

I don’t know why I say that. Maybe I’m testing the waters. Seeing what his reaction will be.

He laughs. “Hell yeah, I will. Clara is gonna love me.”

I tilt my head. “Clara?”

“My future daughter. I’ve already named her. Still working on a boy name, though.”

I roll my eyes. “What if your future wife hates that name?”

He slides his hands up my neck and grips my cheeks. “You won’t.” Then he kisses me. And even though his kiss doesn’t fill up my chest like Jonah’s looks sometimes do, I feel a comforting reassurance in this moment. In his words. In his love for me.

Whatever happens when I finally take a pregnancy test tomorrow . . . I’m confident he’ll support me. It’s just who Chris is.

“Guys, we should go,” Jonah says.

Chris and I separate and look up at Jonah. He’s holding Jenny. Her arms are wrapped around his neck, and her face is pressed against his chest. She’s groaning.

“I told her not to get on that table,” Chris mutters, climbing out of the pool. He helps me out, and we squeeze as much water as we can from our clothes before heading to Jonah’s car. Luckily, the seats are leather. I get in the driver’s seat since Chris assumes Jonah has been drinking. Jonah gets in the back seat with Jenny. Chris is flipping through songs on the radio when we pull away from the party.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” has just started playing on one of the stations, so Chris turns it up and starts to sing. A few seconds later, Jonah is singing along.

Surprisingly, I quietly join them. There’s no way any human can hear this song while driving and not sing along. Even if they’re in the midst of a pregnancy scare at the age of seventeen while feeling things for someone in the back seat of a car that they should only be feeling for the person in the front passenger seat.

CHAPTER TWO

CLARA

Seventeen Years Later

I look at my passenger seat and cringe. As usual, there are crumbs of an unknown source caked in the crevices of the leather. I grab my backpack and toss it in the back seat, along with an old fast-food bag and two empty water bottles. I attempt to swipe the crumbs away. I think it might be pieces of banana bread that Lexie was eating last week. Or it could be the crumbs from the bagel she was eating on our way to school this morning.

Several graded papers are crumpled on my floorboard. I reach for them, swerving toward the ditch before righting the wheel and deciding to leave the papers where they are. A presentable car isn’t worth dying for.

When I reach the stop sign, I pause and give this decision the contemplation it deserves. I can keep driving toward my house, where my whole family is preparing for one of our traditional birthday dinners. Or I can do a U-turn and head back toward the top of the hill, where I just passed Miller Adams standing on the side of the road.

He’s avoided me for all of the last year, but I can’t leave someone I even sort of know stranded in this heat no matter how awkward it might be between us. It’s almost one hundred degrees outside. I have the air conditioner on, but beads of sweat are sliding down my back, being soaked up by my bra.

Lexie wears her bra for an entire week before washing it. She says she just douses it in deodorant every morning. To me, wearing a bra twice before washing it is almost as bad as wearing the same pair of underwear two days in a row.

Too bad I don’t apply the same philosophy of cleanliness to my car that I apply to my bras.

I sniff the air, and my car smells of mildew. I debate spraying a bit of the deodorant I keep in my console, but if I decide to turn the car around and offer Miller a ride, my car will smell like freshly sprayed deodorant, and I’m not sure which is worse. A car that effortlessly smells like mildew or a car that purposefully smells like fresh deodorant to cover up the smell of mildew.

Not that I’m trying to impress Miller Adams. It’s hard for me to worry about the opinion of a guy who seems to go out of his way to avoid me. But I do, for some reason.

I never told Lexie this because it embarrasses me, but at the beginning of this year, Miller and I were assigned lockers next to each other. That lasted all of two hours before Charlie Banks started using Miller’s locker. I asked Charlie if his locker had been reassigned, and he told me Miller offered him twenty bucks to switch lockers.

Maybe it had nothing to do with me, but it felt personal. I’m not sure what I did to make him dislike me, and I try not to care about his feelings behind his avoidance of me. But I don’t like that he doesn’t like me, so I’ll be damned if I pass him up and offer validation to his feelings, because I’m nice, dammit! I’m not this terrible person he seems to think I am.

I make the U-turn. I need his impression of me to change, even if it’s merely for selfish reasons.

When I approach the top of the hill, Miller is standing next to a road sign, holding his cell phone. I don’t know where his car is, and he certainly isn’t on this road because he’s out for a casual run. He’s wearing a pair of faded blue jeans and a black T-shirt, each a death sentence of their own in this heat, but . . . paired together? Heatstroke is a strange way to want to go out, but to each his own.

He’s watching me as I loop my car around and park behind him. He’s about five feet away from the front of my car, so I can see the smirk on his face when he slides his cell phone into his back pocket and looks up at me.

I don’t know if Miller realizes what his attention (or lack thereof) can do to a person. When he looks at you, he does it in such a way that it makes you feel like the most interesting thing he’s ever seen. He puts his entire body into the look, somehow. He leans forward, his eyebrows draw together in curiosity, he nods his head, he listens, he laughs, he frowns. His expressions while he listens to people are captivating. Sometimes I watch him from afar as he holds conversations with people—secretly envious they’re getting his rapt attention. I’ve always wondered what a full-on conversation would be like with him. Miller and I have never even had a conversation one-on-one, but there have been times I’ve caught him glancing at me in the past, and even a simple one-second graze of his attention can send a shiver through me.

I’m starting to think maybe I shouldn’t have made the U-turn, but I did and I’m here, so I roll down my window and swallow my nerves. “It’s at least another thirteen days before the next Greyhound. Need a ride?”

Miller stares at me a moment, then looks behind him at the empty roadway, as if he’s waiting for a better option to come along. He wipes sweat from his forehead; then his focus lands on the sign he’s gripping.

The anticipation swirling around in my stomach is a clear signal that I care a lot about the opinion of Miller Adams, as much as I can try and convince myself that I don’t.