Kai’s talk with Hannah doesn’t go down the way he hoped. Apparently, all she wanted to do was flirt with him and talk about how hot she looked.
“God, she’s so annoying,” he gripes as we get into his car.
I giggle. “You just figured that out?”
He shakes his head. “No. I was just painfully reminded of it.” He backs down the driveway toward the road. “Sorry, I couldn’t get her to talk.”
“That’s okay.” It’s the truth, too. While I’d love for Hannah to confess she did it, I still ended up with my birth certificate.
“I did go through her phone to see if maybe she’s just blocked her number and that’s why it’s coming up as unknown,” Kai adds. “But either she’s deleted all the texts and photos or she’s sending them from another phone.”
I give him a suspicious look. “How’d you get on her phone? She has a password.”
He shrugs. “I have my ways.” When I continue to stare at him, he sighs. “I’m kind of good at cracking people’s passwords.”
I wait for him to embellish. Instead, he turns up the radio and focuses on driving, leaving me to come up with my own assumptions.
* * *
The house where the party is at is way the hell out near the foothills, about a thirty-minute or so drive from the suburbs where Kai and I live.
For the first half of the drive, Kai and I argue about what song we should listen to. He wants to turn on his party song, which is pretty much just bass and dirty lyrics. When he turns the song on, my ears groan in protest, and I reach forward and snatch up his iPod.
“Hey.” Kai blasts me with a zombie rage, I’m-going-to-eat-your-brains-out look. “I know you’re new to riding with me, so I’m going to tell you the rules as nicely as I can.” He extends his hand over the console to steal the iPod away from me, but misses. “No one, under any circumstances, ever gets to touch my stereo.”
Smirking, I line my back against the door so I’m out of his reach, quickly scrolling through his songs.
“Isa,” he warns, his gaze dancing back and forth between the road and me as he drives down the busy street. “I’m being serious. I have issues with music.”
“Clearly.” I snicker as I note some of the songs he has on the device. “Dude, your music taste sucks. What happened to that obsession with 80s punk music? There aren’t any songs that are even close to punk.”
“I go through music phases.” His fingers tighten around the steering wheel as his expression darkens. “And I’m super touchy about people insulting my current music tastes.” He suddenly relaxes, shaking and rolling out his shoulders. “You know what? I’m going to let that one slide just as long as you put the iPod down.”
I quickly tap the folder labeled “For Your Eyes Only,” click the first song, and set the iPod down. A song by Violent Soho flows through the speakers, and I smile.
“Okay, this one’s not too bad.”
“Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. You turned on one of my private songs,” he says then grins and turns up the volume, singing along.
Private songs? God, I don’t even want to know what he does when he listens to those.
I laugh at my own thoughts and end up doing an awesome snort.
“What’s so funny?” Kai asks, giving me a curious, sidelong glance.
I swiftly shake my head. “It’s nothing.”
A grin creeps up his face. “You were thinking something dirty, weren’t you?”
“No, I was just thinking about … something.”
“About something dirty with my private playlist.”
I stick out my tongue at him, and he just laughs. Then I relax back in my seat and cross my legs, moving carefully since I’m wearing a skirt and don’t want to flash him.
I matched the skirt with a long-sleeved black shirt, clunky black boots, and a studded leather jacket I bought in one of the shops on Oxford Street in London. I hope I look good enough for a party, but since I’ve never been to one, I’m unsure.
I run my fingers through my wavy hair, trying to add volume, being careful not to snag any of the braids.
“You look fine,” Kai says, misreading my primping.
My hands fall to my lap. “I was just trying to make my hair bounce more.”
He taps on the brakes to slow for a stoplight then twists in the seat, looking at me with his brow cocked. “Bounce? I didn’t know hair bounced.”
“Tell that to my cousin Indigo. She seems to think hair needs to bounce all the time.”
“I’ll never understand girls.”
“And I’ll never understand guys. It’s like, one minute, you’re sweet, and then the next, you’re all like”—I drop my voice to a low baritone—“ ‘Whatever, I don’t care about anything anymore.’ ”
“I always care about stuff,” he says, driving forward as the light turns green. “Sometimes, I just can’t show it.”
“That’s really silly.”
“About as silly as pretending we were wizards.”
“Hey, I was a witch.” I smile as I remember how, during our walks home, we’d sometimes stop at the park and pretend we were awesome enough to possess the power of magic. “Not a wizard.”
“Whatever. It was still silly. I mean, we were almost thirteen years old, for God’s sake. We were too old to be playing make-believe.” Though his eyes are glued to the road, I can sense the tension flowing off him.
“Well, I didn’t. And I still don’t think it’s silly.” I focus on the shops, the local bank, and the small grocery store lining the street, trying to ignore the pain over how he thinks our time together was silly—that I’m silly.
“You’re still the same,” he remarks. I can feel his eyes on me.
“I’m a little different,” I reply without looking at him. “But yeah, I’m kind of the same, too.”
“That’s not a bad thing, Isa.” He brushes his fingers right above my injured knee.
I jolt in the seat as his touch ripples across my body and zaps my heart like a defibrillator. What in the wild, wild crazy land was that?
“I know it’s not a bad thing. I know I’m weird, and I’ve always been pretty okay with that. I just wish I knew why.” An unsteady breath eases from my lips as I peek down at Kai’s hand on my leg then over at him.
He quickly withdraws his hand and places it on the steering wheel. “Why what?”
“Why I am the way that I am. I’ve never fit in with anyone, especially my family. And then I found out that Lynn isn’t my mom, and I kind of … I don’t know … felt relieved, which probably makes me a bad person, but that’s how I feel.”
“That doesn’t make you a bad person at all. I’ve heard some of Hannah’s stories about the stuff they’ve done to you. You should hate her.”
“She’s told people about the things she’s done to me?”
Nausea sets in as I think about all the incriminating pictures she snapped of me doing embarrassing, dorky things.
He offers me a look of empathy. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that up.”
“It’s fine.” I scrape at the black nail polish on my fingernails. “Sometimes, I wonder if Hannah’s always known that we don’t have the same mom, and that’s why she’s always treated me so bad.”
“Hannah treats you bad because she’s a spoiled princess.” Kai downshifts the car. “She’s basically gotten everything she’s wanted since we were kids.”
“I know … I don’t get why people even like her.”
“Because they’re afraid of her. They’d rather be her friend than her enemy.”
“So, you were afraid of her, then?” I ask. “Because you liked her once.”
“I never liked her.” He grinds his teeth. “I told you I just hit on her because I knew Kyler had a thing for her and it would piss him off. There was never anything more to it.”
“If Kyler had a thing for her, then why isn’t he dating her anymore?” I attempt not to sound bitter and fail epically.
“He liked her when he was younger, but he grew out of it,” he explains, making a right down a side road that weaves between the rolling foothills. “It’s probably the one smart thing he’s ever done in his life. The whole dating thing at the beginning of the summer pretty much happened only because Hannah’s pushy as fuck when she wants something.”
“I completely agree.” I restrain a smile, though it’s difficult when I just found out Kyler never really wanted to go out with Hannah. He was probably being nice.
“So, you’re still obsessed with him, huh?” Kai asks, jostling me of my Kyler lust trance.
“What? No! I’m not …” My cheeks erupt in flames. Fortunately, it’s dark enough that there’s no way Kai can see my mortification.
“Relax, Isa.” He pats my uninjured knee, all buddy-buddy-like. “It’s not really that big of a secret.”
I frown. “It makes me sound pathetic—obsessing over some guy for years, who I have no chance in hell of ever going out with.”
“Why don’t you have a chance?” he asks, genuinely baffled.
“Um, because I’m me.”
“Yeah, so? He asked you to his football game, didn’t he?”
“I guess he did.” I replay the two-second conversation I had with Kyler, trying to remember if, when he asked me, he was sending out date vibes. I don’t know since I have zilch experience in the boyfriend department. “You think he was asking me out?”
“Probably.” Irritation creeps into his tone. “He’s shallow enough that he would.”
“Why would him asking me out make him shallow?” I ask, offended.
“Because he doesn’t know you, which means he was only asking you out based on the fact that he thinks you’re hot now.”
“That’s kind of harsh. Maybe he knows me and likes me.”
“How could he possibly know you?” Kai asks, flipping the blinker. “You two haven’t ever talked.”
“We hung out a couple of times when I taught him how to improve his free throws, and he used to stop Hannah from picking on me,” I tell him. “There was this one time when he even stopped his own friends from picking on me. A couple of his football buddies had me cornered because Hannah basically had a choke collar on them. He came up and said something about them being late for practice so they’d have to leave.”
“He should have called them out on what they were doing, not just fed them a lame-ass excuse to make them stop without making himself look bad.” He makes another turn, this time down a street lined with single-story, seventies-style homes.
“You didn’t do that for me, either.” I clench my hands into fists as they begin to tremble.
I hate memory lane. Let’s not go there ever again.
“Yeah, well, I was a fucking asshole back then. Still am most of the time. I don’t want to be when I’m around you, though.” He parks the car along the curb at the end of a very long line of vehicles. “My brother, on the other hand, walks around pretending he’s all high and mighty, when really, he’s a fucking arrogant prick who always puts himself first.”
He slides the keys out of the ignition. “You may not want to believe this, but you’re too sweet and smart for Kyler. It’ll never work out.” He shoves open the door to get out. “He’d be better off with your sister. The two of them are pretty much the same, except your sister doesn’t give a shit that people think she’s a douche.”
With that, he climbs out of the car, leaving me to wonder if he’s right. Could Kyler really be the asshole Kai seems to think he is?