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But, of course, it didn’t take long for him to then go on to become best friends with my older brother.

Any shot I dreamed I had with him disappeared the moment Dean said hello for the first time.

There had been a line between me and Dean—he didn’t talk to my friends and I didn’t talk to his.

At best, I figured Sebastian might see me as another little sister, of which he already had enough.

But there were times that I wondered if I was actually just invisible to him instead.

It broke my little pre-teen heart to know that he probably didn’t even notice me when I thought he was the cutest guy I’d ever seen.

When I looked at him and saw the dark brown hair that never seemed to lay quite right, or listened to his British accent that was so dreamy that I’d suggested he should start doing ASMR because his voice would put me to sleep—which he didn’t seem to take necessarily quite as much of a compliment as I meant it as—it was hard to see him just as my brother’s best friend.

Then I started high school and realized just how different our lives were.

He was a cool jock. I was a shy nerd. When I first joined the swim team, I thought that would help propel me into his world, until I found out the only girl’s sport that automatically made you popular like that was cheerleading.

Everything else was fine, but it didn’t add to your cool factor and that was what I desperately needed to be noticed.

So until I somehow figured out a way to completely change my social standing, a feat which seemed impossible and probably not even worth it, I’d resigned myself to never having a relationship with anyone in high school, but least of all with Sebastian.

I came downstairs twenty minutes after getting to the house, after changing into an old pair of shorts and managing to wrangle my wet hair into a couple braids to get it out of my face.

When I walked by the living room, I glanced in to see Dean and Sebastian playing some soccer-themed video game on the TV.

I laughed softly to myself as I thought about Sebastian spending all his free time playing soccer in real life, and then coming back inside to play soccer on a screen. He really was obsessed.

I bypassed them to go into the kitchen for a snack, and when I came back out, the game was paused.

I threw myself down on the couch closest to the doorway and pulled out my phone, trying to act like I didn’t care that either of them were there.

Dean hated when I came and sat with them, but what else was I supposed to do?

I already spent enough time in my room to hide from my parents, I didn’t want to have to hide in there just because he had friends over on top of that.

Sometimes, I went down to the other TV in the basement, but there was no natural light down there, so it got downright depressing during the afternoons.

“You coming, Nora?” Sebastian asked. I looked up at the sound of my name and saw Sebastian looking at me expectantly, but I had no idea what they were talking about.

“Coming to what?” I asked, at the same time Dean said, “She’s not.”

Sebastian rolled his eyes at Dean, then looked at me again. “We’re going to the party tonight down at Jacob’s place to celebrate the end of the first full week of school. It’s gonna be fun. You’re welcome to join. There’s plenty of space in my car.”

“No there isn’t,” Dean said. “With us and your sisters, there will be nowhere for her to sit.”

Sebastian had three sisters, so if they were all coming along, Dean wasn’t wrong. But I hated that he was trying to use that as an excuse anyway.

Sebastian shook his head. “No, Lavender’s not coming, and Imogen and Ainsley are catching a ride with one of their friends, so it’s just gonna be us in the car.” He flashed a wicked grin my way. If I’d been standing, I knew my knees would go weak. “What do you say? You in?”

Honestly, I already had plans for my evening, and none of them involved going to a party at some senior boy’s house.

I was going to stay home, take advantage of Dean’s absence, and marathon some Barbie movies on the TV with way too much junk food.

But even though that was exactly how I wanted to be spending my night, I couldn’t tell Sebastian that.

On the off chance he didn’t already see me like a little kid, he definitely would if I told him that.

But did I want to go to a party? It wasn’t something I ever thought to consider, because I’d never been invited to a party before.

Well, maybe that wasn’t true. Clementine, who was on the swim team with me, liked to go to parties and she tended to offer open invitations to anyone who wanted to come.

But this was different. This was Sebastian inviting me.

It didn’t matter if I wanted to go—I couldn’t say no, unless I had cooler plans. And I definitely did not.

And as an added bonus, nothing would make Dean angrier than me tagging along.

“Sure,” I said. Then, not wanting to sound too eager, I added, “I guess.”

I thought Dean was going to kill me with the look that he sent me. And I just smiled back sweetly. He could try to boss me around all he wanted, but I wasn’t willing to let him stomp over every single high school memory that I was trying to make.

“Don’t you have to work on your project?” he asked in a condescending tone. “Which class is it again that you’re failing?”

I glared back at him. “It’s the second week of school—I’m not failing anything. And even if I was, it’s Friday night. I’m sure I can put off my homework for a day.”

Sebastian looked at me curiously. “Which class?”

I’d been hoping that he wouldn’t catch that Dean’s dig had been about something real.

I didn’t want to have to tell him—the popular boy, who played soccer in front of hundreds of people every week—that I was barely scraping by in my public speaking class.

But I knew Sebastian well enough to know that once he was curious about something, he wouldn’t just let it go, so I had to say something.

And I obviously wasn’t going to lie about some other class, especially not with Dean sitting right there and ready to correct me, so I reluctantly admitted, “Public speaking.”

And I was not surprised in the slightest when he laughed out loud at me.

“Public speaking?” he said. “That’s the easiest class there is. All you have to do is perform a couple of speeches and you’re golden. How can you fail it?”

“I said I’m not failing it! Not . It is a very important word in that sentence.”

“Okay, how are you not failing it, then?”

“Because she refuses to speak in front of people,” Dean muttered. He grabbed his Xbox controller and turned the game back on, even though Sebastian clearly had no interest in continuing to play. I guess he was just so bored of talking about me that he would rather play a two-player game by himself.

Sebastian raised his eyebrows at me. “Is that true, Nellie?”

I blushed at the nickname that had been given to me when he first moved here.

He was the only one who called me that. He started after learning my real name was Eleanor, even though I’d corrected him again and again that I went by Nora.

I hated it. It made me feel like a little kid—not that I’d grown up in Sebastian’ eyes, so it was probably exactly why he called me that .

“It’s not that I refuse to speak in front of people. It’s more complicated.”

“Okay,” he said, “Well, how’s it more complicated? Maybe we can figure it out.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I didn’t ask for your help.”

If I needed help in a class—and I hated to admit that I did need help in this one—Sebastian Novak was not the guy I’d go to. He may have been popular and a star on the soccer field, but I knew a lot about his grades from Dean and, suffice it to say, they weren’t great.

He held his arms up in a surrendered gesture. “Hey, sorry. I’ll just go back to playing my video game and leave you to not speaking in front of large crowds of people.”

Maybe I should have tried to explain. I was sure he could understand, even if he couldn’t relate.

Public speaking and I just did not get along.

It made my hands shake, made me nauseous, and in one particularly awful incident, I actually fainted in front of the whole class.

But I didn’t want to be that version of myself in front of him.

Muffled yelling started to carry down from upstairs and Dean shot me a look.

I bit my lip and glanced at Sebastian, who was very politely pretending to be interested in the TV screen instead of what was going on upstairs.

I guess he had a lot of practice at ignoring his own parents’ fights, so it was easy to ignore ours too.

I was only eleven when Dean and I started betting on when my parents would get divorced, although we’d both suspected it would happen long before then.

When we made the bet, he thought the separation was going to happen within a year.

I thought they were going to stick it out through my time in middle school .

As it turned out, we were both wrong because here I was in my junior year of high school, and they were still together.

How? I had no idea. Their arguments weren’t like those of Sebastian’s parents when the truth of his dad’s infidelity came out and they sounded like they were trying to kill each other.

The arguments were smaller, but more frequent and over every small thing.

Mom would find a bowl put away in the wrong spot and immediately go off on Dad for not respecting how she organized her kitchen, or Dad’s briefcase would get moved aside and he would say Mom was trying to get him fired.

Every tiny thing that happened in the house was the other’s fault and every problem could only be solved by screaming.