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“You’re working with Heather!” Lowell said. “I’m so jealous.”

“You know, you could have applied for the job yourself,” Rose said.

But Lowell made an ick face. “And work at a hospice? No thank you.” He jabbed the seek button on the radio, but no matter how many times he did, the Jonas Brothers continued their crooning. “If I can’t change the station,” he said, “I don’t think this is going to work out.”

Rose tried jabbing too, but she secretly didn’t mind the song coming from the speakers. Also, not having to give Lowell a ride everywhere wasn’t exactly the threat he thought it was.

The car had been a gift from Rose’s dad, three days ago.

“For real?” she’d said, gaping at the dusty brown thing parked half on the overgrown lawn and half on the cracked driveway. In New York, Rose didn’t know anyone who had a car. Not even the rich Upper East Side kids who paid top dollar for private driving lessons senior year as a rite of passage. The only reason Rose had gotten her license was because her friends had done it, not because she actually expected to drive .

“For very real,” Dad said. “But think of it as an advance. I still expect you to pay back half.”

“Remember when you used to get book advances?” Rose asked, patting him on the shoulder.

Dad let out a long sigh. “Barely.”

The Toyota Corolla was older than Rose and had had three previous owners, but Dad was very proud of the purchase. “I know you’ve been a trouper, walking everywhere this past week, but now that you have a job, you’re going to need a better way to get around. And you deserve it. Working in a hospice is very brave of you.”

Rose nodded, not wanting to spoil the moment by admitting that her new job wasn’t that hard or depressing at all. So far, she’d worked three shifts, and the part-time hours had mostly been spent restocking supplies on the shelves and filing papers away into the right cabinets. She’d also made friends with one of the patients, Mr. Davis. It started with refilling his pitcher of water whenever it got low, and eventually Rose got up the courage to ask if she could draw his portrait. The last time she was at work, she spent half her shift sitting at Mr. Davis’s bedside, sketching, while her subject griped about his grandson’s latest haircut. Not a bad way to earn fifteen bucks an hour.

Dad helped Rose brush up on her driving basics, trying not to pass out in the passenger seat every time she hit the gas pedal. And though Rose still harbored some anger toward her dad for the move to Meadow Falls, the flames of her ire dimmed to embers in those moments. Even as he nagged her about checking her side mirrors and signaling her turns, Rose remembered that her mom was somewhere across time zones, while her dad was just one seat over.

Rose had warned Lowell that she wasn’t a great driver yet, but putting his life in her hands must’ve been a worthwhile trade so long as he didn’t have to break a sweat riding his rusty bike.

Lowell flipped down the visor and angled his head toward its mirror. He pressed the tips of his index fingers against a spot on his chin. It wasn’t much more than a bump, but he seemed determined to raze it before it grew into a mountain.

“Why does Heather work at the hospice anyway?” Rose asked. “I thought the Hargroves were rich.” Though, now that she thought about it, maybe Heather enjoyed working at the hospice. Maybe it gave her a weird, twisted thrill. She seemed like the type.

“Heather doesn’t work -work there,” Lowell said. “It’s community service.”

Rose’s mouth formed a little O. She wanted to hear more, but before she could ask, Lowell flipped the visor shut with a groan, his blemish flaming now. “Got any candy?” he asked.

Rose’s eyes darted around the dashboard and console before finally flicking to the rearview. “Uh, maybe some gum in my bag?”

Lowell reached between the seats, grabbed hold of Rose’s messenger bag, and brought it to his lap so he could rummage through it. “Oh, you’re down bad,” he said.

Rose snapped her head in Lowell’s direction only to find that he’d abandoned his search for candy in order to casually flip through the pages of her sketchbook. The car swerved involuntarily as she grabbed for the book, nearly clipping a mailbox off somebody’s front lawn. Lowell held on to the dashboard for dear life but still kept a tight grip on the book.

“What are you doing?” Rose asked. What she wanted to do was pull the emergency brake, but that would’ve been an overreaction. What she did was breathe evenly through her nostrils, place her hands on ten and two again, and watch Lowell out of the corner of her eye like this wasn’t a huge invasion of her privacy.

“Just looking,” Lowell said. “You don’t mind, right?”

“Yes, I mind!”

“But we’re friends,” he said. “I’m pretty sure this is how friendships work.”

Either he was joking or he truly wasn’t familiar with the mechanics of friendship, but Lowell still kept flipping through the pages, and Rose couldn’t do anything but let him, lest they get into an accident.

Rose drew Hart whenever she thought of him, which meant the book was practically a Hart magazine. Countless sketches of his face, his hands, his eyes. It wasn’t the subject that gave her away. It was the sheer amount of him.

Rose swallowed and snuck a glance at Lowell, her palms growing slick against the wheel. “There’s also Mr. Davis,” she said meekly.

“The old man?” Lowell asked. “Are you also crushing on him ?”

Rose sighed. “No,” she muttered. “Just Hart.”

“Thought so.”

“They’re portrait studies,” she said.

“Studies,” Lowell repeated. “Studies makes it sound creepy. Like you’re studying him.”

Rose wondered if she could unbuckle both their seat belts, lean over to open Lowell’s door, and push him through it. But she swallowed down the instinct and gripped the steering wheel tighter. “I’m an artist,” she said, growing even more mortified under the weight of that word’s inherent pretention. “I like drawing portraits, okay? And Hart has… a good face.”

Lowell’s grin stretched so wide Rose didn’t even have to take her eyes off the road to see it. “Sure, yeah. Great face,” he said. “But I don’t get why everyone’s so obsessed with him. I mean, okay, he’s really good-looking in the conventional sense. And fit. And has great hair. But it’s not like he’s perfect. Where’s the muscle definition? Where’s the bulging biceps?”

Despite all the thought that he had clearly given to the state of Hart’s body, Lowell wasn’t gay. Though most everyone in town was convinced otherwise. Rose had learned that one of the reasons he was so ostracized in school was because of the Locker Room Incident of last year, as he had come to call it. He’d been sitting on a bench, scrolling through his Instagram feed. The thing was, Lowell almost exclusively followed accounts on men’s fitness. Every new pic and reel that popped up featured a ripped, shirtless guy, and when a classmate caught a glimpse of the screen, the situation spiraled pretty quickly. Lowell’s phone got snatched away, the bigger boys (and everyone was bigger than Lowell) teasing him about the jerk-off material. Just a bunch of sweaty, half-naked guys keeping his phone out of his reach, and Lowell, ping-ponging between them all.

Lowell followed those accounts because he was desperate to bulk up. But no matter how many barbells he lifted in his bedroom, or how many push-ups he struggled to get off the ground, he still looked like the scrawny kid who needed to be this tall to ride a roller coaster.

As his gaze swept over the pages of the sketchbook, Rose understood that Lowell was mostly concerned with the surface of things. He put people into two categories: those with hard bodies and those without. Lower on his list of priorities was what people were actually like . Which was the only way to explain his crush on Heather.

“You know, I don’t think the Hargroves have ever had an awkward phase.” Lowell, speaking from deep within his own awkward phase, seemed to resent them for it. “You made him look perfect.”

“I draw them like I see them,” Rose said. “He invited me to a garden party. Is that like a thing people do around here? Throw garden parties?”

Rose, who had tried so hard to keep from careening off the road this whole ride, suddenly had to contend with Lowell grabbing her by the shoulder, screaming in her ear, and trying to kill them both. She was so startled she screamed right back and overcorrected her turn, the car skidding to a screechy stop in the middle of the road.

“What the hell was that!?” Rose panted. But her passenger didn’t even look sorry. He had a crazed gleam in his eye, shock and awe and excitement pouring out of his pores. “You got invited to a Hemlock Hill garden party!?”

Rose stared. Blinked. Inhaled through her nostrils. “Okay, if this is what it’s going to be like driving you, then I quit.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Lowell stammered quickly. “When’s the party?”

“Um, the summer solstice?”

Lowell scrambled to take his phone out of his pocket, nearly dropping it in the process. “That’s tomorrow!”

Rose could not understand why he was freaking out. “It’s a party,” she said. “In a garden. It’s not that big a deal!”

Lowell took a deep breath too, but that gleam in his eye didn’t go anywhere. “Actually,” he said, “it is.”

A car pulled up behind them, the driver slamming down on the horn.