Jacob
because A) he had no freaking clue what a binomial was and B) his little brother, Chad,
was torturing his little sister Lindsay by turning his eyelids inside out and making
zombie noises.
table in front of him and throwing it in their direction. It bounced off Chad’s shoulder
and took out an open bottle of orange juice on the tiny kitchen island, spilling it all
over the floor. Chad booked it out of the room to ensure he would escape the blame while
Chewie, the family’s scruffy rescue dog and owner of said squeaky toy, began dutifully
licking up the mess.
“Damn it,” Jacob said wearily as he snatched the roll of paper towels off the
counter.
“You said a curse word!” Lindsay gasped, covering her mouth. At age six, Lindsay was obsessed with bad language and the rules against it. She was also missing her two front teeth, so the word curse came out as curth. Jacob looked up at her
and noticed she had approximately twenty-seven plastic barrettes hanging from her curly
blond hair, plus ruby-red lips from a Ring Pop she probably wasn’t supposed to have. It
was hard to be irritated with someone that adorable.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he said with a secret smile.
“Don’t tell anyone what, dipwad?”
Ford, the eldest Reilly sibling currently living in the house, walked past and whacked
Jacob hard on the back of his head, as was Ford’s standard greeting. At a muscly six
foot four, Ford, a senior at Woodmont High, already had D1 offers in football and the
attitude to match.
“He curthed!” Lindsay said, giggling.
“Traitor.” Jacob sighed and tore off more towels from the roll.
Ford picked up their sister, turned her upside down, and shook her, making a few of her
barrettes rain to the kitchen floor. “No change? Again?” he said in mock disappointment.
“What good are ya?” Ignoring her shrieking giggles, he set her right side up and smacked
her little butt as she ran cackling into the backyard. “Ooooh,” he said, turning around.
“What’s this?”
Ford snatched the pair of homecoming tickets Jacob had won at the bake sale off the counter and held them up. “My little bro is going to homecoming! Awwww! That’s so sweet! Are you bringing an actual girl?”
Rolling his eyes, Jacob dumped the soaked, bright-orange paper towels into the garbage
can, grabbed the tickets, and shoved them into his backpack.
“No seriously, though,” Ford said. “How’d you afford those? I thought all your pizza
delivery money was going directly into your college fund.” Ford picked up the orange
juice bottle, which still had some liquid in the bottom, and drank right from it.
“It is. We can’t all get full scholarships like you,” Jacob said. “I won those tickets.
At the bake sale. Which I didn’t see you attending. Aren’t you the captain of the
football team?”
“Who the hell works a bake sale?” Ford demanded, then burped. “I’ll tell you who. JV.”
Then he cackled, sounding just like their little sister. Come to think of it, the
football table had been manned mostly by freshmen and sophomores.
“Well, I sold all Willow’s extra cookies and we won, so I got the tickets,” Jacob
told his brother, feeling suddenly exhausted.
“All right, that’s not not cool,” Ford said, putting the now empty bottle
back down on the counter. “So? Who ya gonna bring? You still pining after that Rory
chick?”
“See, this is why you don’t have a girlfriend. You can’t call girls
chicks.”
“Way to deflect,” Ford shot back. “That means you looooove her.”
Jacob’s face burned. All afternoon he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about how Rory had looked at him in his borrowed Girl Scout costume.
She’d been appalled, definitely, but also impressed.
He could tell. Rory might have disapproved of their secondhand cookie sales, but he knew she appreciated a genius idea when she saw one.
What he didn’t know was whether she ever thought about him. Like ever. Even in a passing
I wonder what Jacob is eating over there for lunch kind of way. Because he
thought about her all the time. An unhealthy amount of time, if he was being honest.
It had all started in fifth grade when Jacob’s friend Jordan had dared him to do a flip
off the monkey bars. Jacob had overrotated and landed flat on his back, knocking the
wind out of himself. While the rest of his friends had stood around laughing at him,
Rory had recognized what was going on and had rushed over to help, kneeling at his side.
What was going on was that Jacob had been unable to take in a breath for what felt like
way too long a period of time. He’d honestly felt like he was going to die.
“You’re okay. Look at me,” she’d instructed. “The same thing happened to me at
gymnastics once. You’re gonna be fine. It’s all going to be fine.”
When he’d finally choked in a breath and rolled onto his side, Rory had patted his back and told off his friends.
He’d basically been in love with her ever since.
And whenever he was in a challenging or nerve-racking situation, he could still hear her voice in her head: You’re gonna be fine. It’s all going to be fine.
Not that he’d ever tell anyone that.
“First of all, I had a crush on her in eighth grade,” Jacob told his brother.
Which wasn’t a lie. That just happened to be when Ford figured it out after catching
Jacob watching Rory dance in the school talent show all gooey-eyed. “And second, Rory is
Tucker’s girlfriend, remember?”
“Tucker Panagopoulos? Eff that douche. He’s a total asshole.”
“You don’t have to hate him just because you guys are locked in some competition of
who’s the most manly team captain or whatever,” Jacob said.
“Actually, it does. That’s exactly what it means,” Ford said with a straight face and
his shoulders thrown back. “And I’d love it if my little bro stole his girlfriend
right out from under him.” He tore open a box of doughnuts and ate a powdered one in a
single bite. “Get it? Under him?”
“Gross, dude.” He looked Ford up and down, sweat stains everywhere, hair dripping,
powdered sugar all over his face and shirt, and grimaced. “Everything about you is
gross.”
“And that’s the way I like it.” Ford whacked Jacob on the back of the head again and
strode out of the room, cradling the open box of doughnuts like a baby.
Jacob took a deep breath and looked down at his precalc book.
He was about to sit in front of it again when his mom came in through the back door with Willow in her cheerleading uniform.
Willow was the least insane of the Reilly siblings—outside of Jacob’s two older sisters, who were both in college—and the captain of the middle school cheer squad.
“Hey, Jacob. How was the bake sale?” Willow asked.
“Crushed it. Thanks for the goods, Will.” They fist-bumped.
“Oh, Jacob, good,” their mom said. “I’ve got to take Willow to buy new hair bows for her
competition tomorrow. Can you please go outside and watch Lindsay and her friends on the
trampoline?”
Jacob blinked. “Friends? What friends? She was just in here with Chad.”
“I don’t know. The neighborhood kids.” His mom absently waved a hand toward the
backyard. “You know how they just show up. If you keep everyone from breaking a limb,
I’ll get you Domino’s while I’m out.”
“Who could turn down a deal like that?” Jacob joked.
“Bless you,” his mother said, ignoring the sarcasm in his voice. She stood on her toes
to kiss him on the forehead, grabbed her keys, and exited with Willow through the front
door.
With a sigh, Jacob picked up his books and went out back to the rickety patio table to
listen to the neighborhood kids screech. Maybe he could get some studying done after
everyone else went to bed.