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When he looks back at me, his brows pulling together in this incredibly adorable pained expression, I say, “You feel guilty, don’t you? Just lift her up.”

“Thank God.” He holds a hand to his chest.

When she’s on the dock, Lexie uses him as a crutch before standing. “Okay, we’re even now.”

“Fine,” I say, and make the mistake of believing her.

She rushes over before I can move and wraps me in a hug. Water pools from her onto me, and the more I try to move, the more she tightens her grip and snakes herself around me, getting me as secondhand wet as possible.

“Now we’re even.” She smiles.

“And in need of showers,” I add, fighting a smile of my own.

“But not yet,” Theo says, approaching us. “Technically we only did one thing. Two things left.”

I shove Lexie off me, then gesture to my wet clothes and Theo’s soaked ones. “Look at us.”

“I have a solution,” he says.

“And a crush,” Lexie whispers so only I can hear.

CHAPTER 11

Notes and Observations

Connections?

Rachel and Chloe (closer than just friends) but Chloe had a crush on Theo? Won’t Rachel’s + Chloe’s statements be biased?

Chloe’s and Rachel’s testimonies have been accepted for the trial

Where were Mr. Deaver’s glasses night of incident?

Jake (opposing council) seems to be leaning on eyewitness statements for case

For forgiveness, Lexie shoved twenty dollars in my pocket for my choice of snack and went off to talk to a friend she ran into. The more Theo orders me around, the more I wish I’d followed her.

I put on the third set of clothes he picked out for me—a tie-dyed sweater with the words RUBY’S CREEK emblemed across the front, and bright sky-blue sweatpants with the same lettering. When I open the door to the porta-potty I’ve been changing in, Theo is outside of it, wearing the exact same clothes.

I burst out laughing.

“You look amazing,” he says, then drops a bucket hat with a polka-dot pattern over my hair. “Now it’s perfect.”

“This feels like a humiliation ritual.”

He snickers. “Wearing souvenir-worthy clothing with ridiculous patterns is a rite of passage when at a festival.” He pulls at my sleeve and leads us up around the building, back to the boardwalk. “It makes the food taste better.”

Theo pulls me toward a setup of pumpkins on a railing with different-size stumps. A girl in a floral dress asks us, “Pumpkin toss?”

Theo pauses. “What if the ring misses and falls into the creek?”

“Ah, no worries.” She grabs some from the couple of buckets beside her, lifting the rings for us to see. “Biodegradable. It’ll break down in the water.”

“Sure, then.”

I didn’t peg Theo for an environmentally conscious kind of guy before—well, I didn’t peg him for much at all other than what I knew from rumors. I look at you more than you know. And if you looked at me, you’d see that.

When Theo holds out a set of rings for me, my face is burning. Thankfully he doesn’t notice, but I need a distraction, so I snatch them from his hands. “Twenty bucks says I don’t miss.”