“I’ll play but only if I’m Brazil,” Blue says.
Percy walks to the couch and takes a controller.
“Reeve, we need you—”
I put my phone in my pocket and take one more look at the photo. Then I go to the couch and play FIFA.
Stanley nods his head, handing me a remote. “What’d your sister say?”
“Disappointed that I’m failing,” I mutter.
He laughs.
My phone buzzes, and I ignore it. I don’t need my sister making me more anxious than I already feel.
Tomorrow is tomorrow and today is fine.
The game starts up, and we play.
Chapter 2
Lucy
Thephotoonthefridge is staring back at me, and for a very long moment, I wish Gianna hadn’t put photos of her family across the apartment. It’s awkward for me to know exactly what Benson Reeve looks like, and he has no idea who I am. In the photo, he’s in a Camden U jersey, and he’s laughing next to Gianna. I can’t fully comprehend how he is that much taller than her when she’s already so tall. I glance at the background, hating that I have studied this picture every time I’m in the kitchen. It’s been on this fridge for the past year. But is it my fault? I need to access the fridge, and I just so happen to see his faceeverysingletime.
I understand why the tutoring center paired us together, but it doesn’t erase the fact that he’s Gianna’s older brother. She’s had very strict rules about her family that I don’t dare cross. So, theanxiety thrumming through my body is mostly because of her. The other part is seeing his face in photos across the apartment I live in, and he has no clue who I am.
From down the hallway, through the cracked door of Gianna’s bedroom, I hear her voice.“All of it. The captain thing. The voice. The whole — the whole Benson Reeve thing. Bring sixty percent.”
I freeze.
My heart starts racing. He sounds like a real piece of work if his sister has to call to tell him to tone himself down. I open the fridge to stop myself from staring at the face she’s talking to right now. The hum of the fridge gets louder, somehow, or my hearing tunes her out. The cold air is on my face. There is a half-empty container of pho broth from downstairs.
“Don’t be weird,” she says.
I am two things at once. Mortified, in a way that is sitting between my shoulder blades like cold water. And — embarrassingly, against my will — grateful. Because she’s doing this for me. She has, ever since I met her freshman year, been the person who goes ahead of me into rooms.
I have to stop listening, so I reach for something and hum “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to myself. Then I walk on the balls of my feet across the kitchen and around the half-wall to the living room couch. I sit down, pick up the throw blanket, and pull it over my legs. By the time Gianna’s bedroom door creaks open thirty seconds later, I have arranged myself into a person who appears to have been here for ten minutes.
“Hey.” I smile, eating a small container of yogurt.
“Hey.” She comes down the hallway in leggings and an old t-shirt, phone face-down in her hand, hair piled in the bun she puts in when she’s going to be home all night. She drops onto the other end of the couch and exhales.
“Okay,” she says. “He’s going to behave. I scared him.”
I keep my face very still. “Is that so?”
“Mm-hm. I scared him deeply.”
“Okay.” I lick my spoon.
“I told him not to captain at you.”
“That’s a verb now?”
She smiles. “As of tonight, it is.”
I tip my head back against the cushion. “There’s really no way out of this.”
