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“Cool,” I said and sat down, not on the couch, but at a table, and brought out my phone. It didn’t zap me again, which was good, and I started texting Lacey as I heard the shower go on.

I know ur still mad at me.

Just wanted to be the one to tell you—before you heard it on ZB—I’m at Liam’s tonight.

He thinks I’m helping him study.

But I’m actually looking for clues.

Just in case.

I turned the volume off again. I figured she’d text me back, mad at me, or she’d ignore me completely. Either way, I didn’t want to know just yet.

Then I got up and made a circuit of the rooms Liam wasn’t currently in.

The first one I found was his room. Everything in it was blue-themed, curtains, pillows, desk chair, and photos of him and his team were all over the walls, looking down on his ribbons and trophies. Best runner! Best second baseman! Even in elementary school—when he’d played soccer—MVP! I did the math for the year on the trophy. Most valuable player in second grade?

What was it like to go through life being told you were a winner every time you turned around?

I heard the shower turn off and raced back to the table like I’d never moved from it. There were intermittent bursts of sound from below as someone made a score, and minutes later Liam came out, smelling like soap, with still wet hair, and for the second time in a week I found myself alone with a boy.

“So!” I turned to the textbook, all business. “What part don’t you get? Where’d it stop making sense to you?”

Because everything had stopped making sense to me about a week ago.

CHAPTER 22

It was strange to be in the same room with Liam and not be ignoring him on purpose, to think that the whole reason I was here was to actually talk to him for once. We sat side-by-side but far enough apart that both of us were actually a little angled, so we could see each other. I was overly conscious of the ways our knees almost but didn’t touch beneath the table.

“So you think you get Boyle’s Law now?” I said, watching him do a problem on his own.

“Yeah.” He pushed away from the table and looked at me. “What’s the next one?”

His hair had dried in disheveled waves and right now his eyes were more gray than green, looking at me, andgoddammit Jessica get your head on straight.“Avogadro’s,” I said, ducking down to write it out. “So, do any of your other teammates require tutoring?”

“Why?” he asked. I could feel him watching me write. “You looking for a second job?”

“No. It’s just that if they do—”I want to know which ones are rapists— “I don’t want to help the one who pinched me that night.”

“You’re still hung up on that?” he asked. I felt a flush start. I wasn’t a prude, honest, and I didn’t want to seem like one, but I also didn’t want random guys thinking they had the right to grab my ass. “Well, it was Danny. According to him, you should feel honored,” he explained, matter-of-fact. “It was his pitching-hand.”

This, from the same boy who’d apologized for their behavior two days ago? Once again, Liam Lewis did not make sense. And if I thought about being ‘lucky’ Danny’d chosen my right butt cheek, there was a chance I’d explode Mr. Lewis’s precious big screen TV.

“Hooray,” I said, to defuse the situation and myself. Then I shoved the paper with the equation on it toward him before I could get off track. “Pick a volume, any volume.”

We solved more problems, ones in the book and ones I made up. For someone with just a ‘solid C’, he really didn’t seem to need much additional instruction, and he contributed to the conversation just as much as I did, which, over the course of the evening, only served to make me nervous. He didn’t need me here—so why was I? I kept a close eye on my soda all night, just in case.

“You tutor anything else?” he asked, as we were winding down.

“I could. I’m good at everything.” I regretted my word choice the moment they left my mouth, and then I watched him wonder if I was flirting with him.Was I?“Except being humble,” I clarified. “I totally suck at that.”

“You don’t have to be humble, when you can back it up.”

“That something your coach says?”

“No, Colton.” He started closing his text books. “What about English?”

“I’m not writing your papers for you. If I do, you’ll never learn to spell—and if I got caught, we’d both get expelled.”