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Rose carefully rolled the bike into the looped rack, but Lowell just let his clatter against a lamppost. “Aren’t you going to lock it?” Rose asked.

He looked at her like she was brand-new, which she technically was around here. “Do you see the rust on the wheels? No one’s stealing this.”

Rose looked around. It wasn’t like the bustle of New York, but Main Street seemed like the place to be on a summer Saturday. Small groups ambled in and out of stores, and no one seemed interested in Lowell’s bike. Not even Lowell. Rose felt like she’d stepped into an alien world. Every shop was a neat boutique, boasting wooden signs over striped awnings and planters bursting with flowers beneath big picture windows. They passed a clothing store, a burger place, an ice cream shop, a bookstore, a pharmacy. Benches dotted the sidewalk, and thoughtfully planted trees provided shade. No litter sullied the curb, no graffiti mucked up the storefronts, not even a single black circle of old chewing gum was stamped into the sidewalk. Rose had left New York and accidentally walked into a Norman Rockwell painting. It made a shiver run down her spine.

“Why are you walking so fast?” Lowell asked, practically panting as he caught up with Rose.

Was she walking fast? “Why are you walking so slow?” she countered. Why was everyone here walking so slowly? Rose had reached the end of the block, and she’d had to sidestep at least four different people to do it—three of them lapping up ice cream cones, oblivious to her unwarranted hurry. She had the sudden New York urge to wring some necks. But it took her a moment to realize she wasn’t in a rush to get anywhere. And that maybe she needed to embrace the “leisure” in “leisurely pace.” When she made an effort to slow down, she got her first real sense of what Meadow Falls was like. The thing that stuck out to her the most was that there was so much space here.

Up until now, Rose hadn’t realized how tightly she’d always pinned her shoulders, how rigidly she held herself, cooped up between the boxes of the city. The skyscrapers, the narrow bodega aisles, her high school, squeezed between an office building and a condo. Even her apartment on the seventh floor, which only got exactly fourteen minutes of natural light in the winter, before the sun dipped behind a building across the street and out of view for the rest of the day.

Rose didn’t know what to do with all this space, with all this room for her to claim. Should she be skipping? Was that what the kids of Meadow Falls did? To them, who’d been basking in this light since the day they were born, Rose must’ve looked like a vampire. Pale, pried free of her coffin so recently that her joints were still creaky, squinting away from the glare of the sunlight and getting reacquainted with breathing fresh air again. Nearby, a bell rang in the church tower, and it made her jump, which then made her laugh. Rose was decidedly unfamiliar with the customs of the living.

Lowell pointed across the street, to the town square. “Let’s go over there.” Manicured green stretched on for a square block, looking like just the kind of place that yearned for a gingham picnic blanket on a nice day and a spray of fireworks overhead on a clear night. As they jaywalked across the carless street, Rose caught stray glances from passersby. They didn’t look like the people back in New York. Actually, they looked like the type who visited New York to catch a Broadway show. Their clothes matched and bore brand names from stores that you could find in every mall in America. Nothing stained, nothing torn, no shoelace untied.

Rose looked down at her own shoes—combat boots—and despite the fact that she’d gone out in her paint clothes, the shoes were her one regret right now. The boots were meant for city living, and she was used to hard concrete underneath them, but as she trudged through the park, her feet sank into the grass with every step, making even her gait different from everyone else’s.

It wasn’t just that she’d walked into a Norman Rockwell, it was that—with her splattered clothes and paint-crusted hair, and her stomping, dragging footsteps—Rose literally felt like she was defacing the whole town, just by being in it.

As soon as they reached the first tree, she sank onto the grass. “Let’s stop here,” she said.

Lowell folded his legs beneath him and sat beside her. He windshield-wiped the front of his glasses with an index finger, which left them looking even smudgier. “So, why are you, like, constantly covered in red gunk?” he asked.

Rose looked down at herself. The mural she’d painted last night was mostly made up of different shades of red, and the freshest layer of splatter on her clothes reflected that. But there was really no excuse for how the color remained splotchy all over her arms. She’d tried washing it off, but it clung like angry hives, making her look contagious. Rose dug her hands beneath her thighs, sitting on them. “I don’t think I’m constantly—”

“Last night you were covered in red stuff, and right now—I mean, you look like you’re about to telekinetically annihilate the kids at prom.”

Rose’s eyes went slowly wide as she stared at Lowell. She didn’t know this boy at all, but somehow, all it’d taken was an impromptu bike ride through town for him to act like they’d known each other forever. His question was on the wrong side of kind, and if Rose had to guess, she’d say this was probably one of the reasons he didn’t have the “social cachet” he was seeking. And yet, Lowell’s blunt, prickly sense of humor reminded her of home. She was surprised by the sound of her own laughter.

Lowell seemed surprised by it too, like he’d just pulled a trick he’d never managed to nail before.

“Not Carrie ,” Rose said.

“It’s like, gallons and gallons of pig’s blood.” Lowell nodded, spurred on. “Is being covered in gunk, like, your entire personality? ’Cause I just wanna know up front.”

Rose wheezed now, trying to catch her breath. She would come to learn that when one of Lowell’s jokes landed, it was so rare that he’d keep going, driving the joke all the way into the ground until it hardly resembled a joke anymore. But right now, Rose couldn’t stop giggling.

“It’s paint,” she finally said after sucking in a breath. She rubbed the pad of her thumb against a red speck on her wrist, to no avail. “I should’ve used acrylics. Oils are so much harder to get off.”

“So you’re, like, an artist?” Lowell asked.

Though that was exactly what she was, Rose couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud. Declaring herself an artist made her feel pretentious. In the end, all she could say was, “It’s just a hobby.”

“And your dad is the famous writer,” Lowell said.

“Famous? Hardly.”

“Famous around here,” Lowell said. “We’ve all heard about you.”

The Paulys had been here for a day and were already the talk of the town. Another thing that would never happen in New York, where she didn’t even know the names of the people in the apartment next door. “What did you hear?”

“That your dad made it out of here, then made it big in New York City as a published author. Your parents got divorced. Though why you’re living with your dad and not your mom is kind of the big question. You don’t have to talk about it.” Lowell casually tore out a few blades of grass, one at a time, but he gazed at Rose out of the corner of his eye, waiting for the answer to the big question.

Rose obliged. “My dad is the opposite of famous. He wrote three novels that not many people read. The only reason he was able to keep writing was because of my mom’s corporate job. I’m living with him because my mom travels a lot for work.”

Lowell nodded thoughtfully. “Everyone thinks you’re a big New York snob.”

“Snob?” The word gave Rose whiplash, especially since Lowell had just compared her to one of literature’s best-known blood-drenched outcasts. “We’re here because my dad can’t afford to live in New York anymore.”

“So you’re slumming it with the rest of us.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Rose said, but Lowell’s attention drifted away from her, to the girl opening the door of a pickup truck parked in front of the shops. Rose recognized her. The girl who’d gotten in her face last night at the party. The same one Lowell said he’d been psyching himself up to talk to. Heather.

“You gonna try to talk to her again?”

Lowell half shrugged, half shook his head. “I’m not Heather’s type.”

“What type is that?”

“The type that clobbers people in front of a crowd and calls it football.”

Rose watched Lowell watching Heather. Yes, she had the whole model-in-an-ad-campaign thing going for her, but her personality seemed inversely proportional to her looks.

“Maybe I’ll join a team,” Lowell said. “Become a jock.”

“You’re kinda small, dude.” It was out of Rose’s mouth before she could think better of it, and she instantly regretted it. But just as before, when they’d laughed over Rose’s hands, Lowell gushed with giggles. Giggles that turned into chuckles that turned into guffaws, until his whole body vibrated with enough laughter to make his glasses slide down the bridge of his nose. He looked over at Heather again and spotted someone new. “Both of the Hargrove twins are here.”

This made Rose turn too, and she saw Hart heading for the truck. “I didn’t know they were twins,” she mumbled. Hart was carrying an enormous bag of soil on his shoulder and hoisted it into the truck bed. Without meaning to, Rose stopped breathing. Why was he always carrying some heavy bag? And why was it the most attractive thing she could imagine him doing? Well, not the most attractive.

She had a perfect vantage point—close enough to get a good look at him, yet far enough where he wouldn’t realize he was being ogled. And that was the word for it; Rose couldn’t help but ogle him. His nose, brow, jaw were all strong lines and contours. His hair swept away from his forehead in short waves of amber and bronze, its own storm at sea. Green eyes shone clear, even from this distance, even from beneath the lush fringe of eyelashes. His tan skin told a story of how much time he spent out in the sun. And his lips—plumper on the bottom than on top—his lips…

Rose’s fingers crawled over the grass until they came upon a dandelion. She plucked it and brought it to her face, grazing the feathery seeds against her own lips as she watched Hart. For no real reason at all, Rose closed her eyes and made a spontaneous wish. She blew the seeds away, and when she opened her eyes, she saw that Hart was watching her.

And then a horn honked, Heather pounding on the steering wheel. The sound tore Hart’s attention away, and he secured the tailgate and jogged to the passenger side.

“Looks like I’m not the only one crushing on a Hargrove,” Lowell said.

Rose snapped out of her reverie. “I’m not crushing,” she said. Though her hot cheeks betrayed her.