Emma leaped up and whirled around her room. She didn’t know what to do first. She wanted to cheer, to dance, to celebrate with someone! She swung open her door and ran out into the hallway. Her mother’s angry voice from the kitchen stopped Emma in her tracks.
“William! Are you kidding me with this? You are not wearing basketball shorts to school!” her mother yelled. “Go change. Now.”
Emma tiptoed backward into her room and quietly closed the door. Nope, she wasn’t about to get in the middle of whatever was going on out there. Charlie! She had to tell Charlie the good news. She grabbed her cell phone out of her school bag and hit the speed-dial.
“Whaaat?” Charlie whined after the second ring.
“Did I wake you?”
“Obviously,” Charlie grumbled. “This better be good.”
“It is, I promise!” The words tumbled out as she told him about the blog post on StylePaige. “And she even says at the end that she’s ‘going to have her eyes peeled for more from Allegra Biscotti!’ How cool is that?”
“That so rocks!” Despite the remnants of sleep in his voice, Charlie sounded truly excited. “You’re famous. Or Allegra is.”
Emma couldn’t stop grinning. “You know what’s kind of weird, but in a good way? I’m reading about myself but not, you know? Right now, you and I are only two people on the planet who know that Allegra Biscotti is really me! I can’t wait to tell Holly.” She clicked on “Print” so she could take a copy of the posting with her to school.
Charlie yawned. “Can I go back to sleep now?”
“Sure, but don’t you have to get up in like five minutes anyway?”
“Every minute counts.”
Emma tapped her fingers against the metal door of her locker, her eyes trained on the end of the hall. She felt like she’d been waiting forever for Holly. She flipped open her phone to check the time—again. Less than ten minutes before the last bell. She was literally going to explode if she didn’t get to tell Holly about Allegra.
The corridor became more crowded by the minute. Now she couldn’t see the top of the stairs. Standing on tiptoe, she craned her neck to peer above her classmates’ heads. Where could Holly be?
Suddenly, her eyes locked with Jackson Creedon’s.
For a split second, the chaos of the students filling the hall dropped away. His eyes were so blue, his gaze so steady. What am I doing? Emma thought. He’s going to think I’m staring at him! She ducked for cover behind Coco and pretended to organize her books. Had Jackson asked about her? Holly better show up soon!
Leaning back ever so slightly, Emma snuck another look at Jackson. She couldn’t help it. After three weeks of being in the same few classes with him, she still didn’t know much about him other than what she could observe from brief glances—okay, fine, when she stared—at him:
1. He was super-cute (obvious).
2. He was quiet (or at least not as loud as the guys he hung out with).
3. He spent a lot of time writing or drawing or doodling in his notebook, which made him seem like he was not paying attention in class, kind of like Emma, now that she thought about it. She so wished she could get her hands on that notebook… Yeah, like that was ever going to happen.
4. When he did look up at the teacher or the board, he had the cutest way of squinting and biting the right corner of his bottom lip. She couldn’t let herself look at the whole lip-biting thing for too long because it made her stomach spin…but in a good way.
The only other thing she knew about Jackson was that he played on Downtown Day’s soccer team—not that she had ever been to a school soccer game before. Maybe I should go one of these days, Emma suddenly thought. Then I can stare at him freely. In fact, she reasoned, if I went to a soccer game and didn’t watch, it would be rude.
In Emma’s mind, Fantasy Jackson was deep and super-thoughtful. She imagined that he sometimes felt like he didn’t fit in, even though he so clearly did. And after seeing him put a few pieces of scrap paper in the paper-recycling bin before leaving the classroom once during the first week of school, she imagined that he was super-caring about the planet.
In the Real World, a massively huge ocean separated them socially. He was in the cool crowd, and Emma was… not. Even though she had been going to school with most of these kids since the fourth grade, Jackson had been able to walk into school and immediately fit into the most popular crowd.
Then again, Emma hadn’t ever tried to get into the popular crowd—not like Holly seemed to be doing now for some reason. Emma had realized that the only hope she had of getting to know Jackson was through the new Holly-Ivana alliance. At least that was a teeny, tiny ray of hope…because otherwise, there would have been no chance of their worlds ever crossing beyond the few classes they were both in.
There was a major downside to this social bridge to Jackson. Ivana came with Lexie, who so obviously wanted to be Jackson’s girlfriend. Emma had seen Lexie purposely sit next to Jackson in biology on the first day of school, so she would wind up being his lab partner. And even though Lexie’s locker was on a different corridor, Emma noticed that Lexie was always hanging out at Kayla’s and Shannon’s lockers, which were much closer to Jackson’s.
It was within the realm of possibility, Emma supposed, that that particular piece of evidence could have less to do with Lexie being after Jackson and more to do with the Ivana-Bees’ inability to be separated for more than thirty seconds at a stretch, but Emma highly doubted it.
After years of being in the same small school together, Emma knew that Lexie wasn’t the type of girl who ever lost at anything. She got straight A’s; she was the captain of the middle-school field-hockey team, which was undefeated last year; and most importantly, every semester since sixth grade, Lexie had decided who was going to be her boyfriend, and within a few weeks, she and the guy were a couple.
Not that Emma would ever admit it to anyone, but sometimes she envied Lexie’s focus, drive, and determination. Lexie saw what she wanted and went after it. As Emma’s brother, William, always said, probably parroting his favorite sportscaster, “You gotta be in it to win it.” Lexie was definitely in it. Emma? Not so much.
“Earth to Emma!” Holly was suddenly standing next to Emma and waving her hands in front of her face.
“It took you long enough to get here!” Emma exclaimed. “We only have like two seconds before the next bell. Tell me everything that happened at the park yesterday. What did you find out?”
“Well,” Holly began, clearly happy to dish. “Let’s see. Jackson was there, of course. Looking very cute. Not that I thought so exactly, but you probably would. And he talked a lot more than usual. He was actually kind of funny, but you had to be paying attention or you wouldn’t really notice.”
I knew it! Emma thought. “What else?” She desperately wanted more detail so she could begin replacing Fantasy Jackson with Real Jackson.
“He was telling us about how he goes off to some crazy place in New Jersey on the weekends to ride dirt bikes with his cousins.”
“Wow, that’s pretty cool,” Emma said, digesting this new tidbit. Suddenly Real Jackson and Fantasy Jackson melded as she pictured him wearing a black leather motocross jacket with red and white padded stripes on the elbows and shoulders, ripped jeans covered in mud, and heavy black motorcycle boots with silver rings on the ankles.
She could see them hanging out together, her wearing, of course, a matching leather jacket with brass studs, a black lace top, and a white gauzy skirt with lots of stiff crinoline underneath to give it that fun pouf—very rocker chick meets third-grade ballet recital. Emma’s fashion reverie was interrupted by the grating sound of Ivana’s voice.