I was especially convinced of this right after lunch, which is when I finally saw him. The guy from the ravine, I mean.

  I was looking down at my schedule, trying to remember where Room 209 was from my orientation tour, when he came hurtling around the corner, and practically smacked into me. I recognized him at once—not just because he was so tall, and there aren’t a lot of guys who are taller than me, but also because he had such a distinctive face. Not handsome, really. But attractive. And nice. And strong-looking.

  The weirdest part was, he seemed to recognize me, too, even though he could only have seen me for, like, five seconds that day in the park.

  “Hey,” he said, smiling, not just with his lips, but with his sky blue eyes, too.

  Just Hey. That’s all. Hey.

  But it was a Hey that made my heart flop over inside my chest.

  And, okay, whatever. Maybe it was the eyes, and not the Hey so much. Or maybe it was just, you know, a familiar face in this sea of people I’d never seen before.

  Except…well, I’d seen the girl standing next to him—it was the blond girl, the same one I’d seen him drive away with—before, and my heart hadn’t flopped over at the sight of her.

  But maybe that’s because she was plucking on his sleeve and going, “But I told Lance we’d meet him at the DQ after practice.”

  To which he replied by putting his arm around her and going, “Sure, that sounds great.”

  Then the two of them went by me, and were swallowed up in the hordes flooding the hallway.

  The whole thing had taken maybe two seconds. Okay, three.

  But it left me feeling like someone had kicked me in the chest. Which just—well, it isn’t like me. I am not that way. You know, the Oh my God, he looked at me, I can barely breathe type. Nancy’s the romantic optimist. I’m the practical one.

  Which is why it made no sense at all that the minute I got to my next class, I was whipping out my copy of the student guide and frantically thumbing through it until I found him, paying not the slightest bit of attention to the reading syllabus my new World Lit teacher was trying to go over with us.

  He was a year ahead of me, a senior. His name was A. William Wagner, but he was known as just plain Will.

  I thought that suited him. He looked like a Will.

  Not that I know how a Will should look, really. But whatever.

  According to the book, A. William Wagner was quite a star. He was on the school football team, as well as a National Merit Finalist and president of the senior class. His interests included reading and sailing.

  It didn’t say anything about Will’s dating status, but I’d seen him twice now, both times with the same stunningly pretty blonde. And the second time he’d put his arm around her, and she’d talked to him about meeting someone at the Dairy Queen after practice. She had to be his girlfriend.

  Guys like A. William Wagner always have girlfriends. You don’t have to be the practical type, like I am, to know that.

  Since I had nothing better to do—Mr. Morton, my World Lit instructor, was trying to interest us in Gaelic legend, which I probably would have found interesting if I didn’t eat, drink, and breathe Gaelic legend whenever I was in the presence of my parents—I looked the girlfriend up in the guide, too. I found her picture—in my class—and saw that her name was Jennifer Gold, and that her interests included shopping and, what a surprise, A. William Wagner.

  Her extracurricular was cheerleading.

  It so figured.

  I flipped through the student guide, looking for the blond boy I’d seen with Will and Jennifer that day in the park, I found him, eventually. Lance Reynolds. He was in Will’s class, a senior. He was listed as a guard—whatever that was—on the football team, as well as having an interest in sailing.

  As first days of school went, this one hadn’t been all that bad. I’d even made some new friends. Some of the girls I’d sat down next to at lunch turned out to be on the track team. One of them—Liz—lived on the same road as me. She said she’d see me on the bus in the morning.

  When I came outside after school and saw Mom and Dad sitting there in our car, I didn’t melt with relief or anything. I just got into the car and said, “Home, Jeeves,” in a jokey way. On our way back to the house, they asked me about my day, and I told them it had been fine. Then I asked them about theirs. Mom went on about some new text she’d found that actually mentions Elaine—not me, her Elaine—in Arthurian legend, unconnected to the famous Tennyson poem about her. Which, you know, is so exciting. Not.

  And Dad talked about his sword until my eyes started to cross.

  But I listened politely, because that’s what you do.

  Then, when we got home, I went up to my room, put on my bikini, came back downstairs, and got onto my raft.

  My mom came out onto the deck a little while later and looked down at me as I floated.

  “You’re kidding me with this, right?” she said. “I thought we were through with this, now that school has started.”

  “Come on, Mom,” I said. “Summer’ll be over soon, and we’ll have to close up the pool. Can’t I just enjoy it for the short time I have left?”

  My mom went back inside, shaking her head.

  I leaned back against my raft and closed my eyes. The sun was still hot, even though it was after three. I had homework—homework, on the first day! I’d been right about that Mr. Morton, the World Lit teacher…he was a bad public speaker and a tyrant with the essay assignments—but that could wait until after dinner. There were e-mails, too, from my friends back home, that needed to be answered. Nancy was begging to come visit. She’d never been to the East Coast, let alone stayed in a house with its own pool before. But she had to come soon, or it would be too cool to swim.

  I had established a very strict floating regimen. I floated on my back, in the center of the pool. If the raft drifted too close to any of the kidney-shaped pool’s sides, I shoved off with my foot. The guy who owns the house had put all these big rocks around the edges of the pool, to make it look more like a naturally occurring pond, or something (except you don’t see that many ponds with chlorine and filters in them. But whatever).

  Anyway, you had to be careful how you shoved off from the rocks, because there was this one really big rock that had a huge—as big as my fist—spider that lived on it. A couple of times when I hadn’t looked where I put my foot, I’d almost squashed the spider. I didn’t want to upset the delicate ecosystem of the pool, so, like with the snake, I was trying hard not to kill this spider. Also, of course, I didn’t exactly want him to bite me and send me to the emergency room.

  So I always opened my eyes whenever my raft floated to the edge of the pool, just to make sure I didn’t step on the spider when I shoved off again.

  That afternoon—on the first official day of school—when my raft bumped into the side of the pool, and I opened my eyes before shoving off, I got the shock of my life.

  Because A. William Wagner was standing on top of Spider Rock, looking down at me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d;

  On burnish’d hooves his war-horse trode;

  From underneath his helmet flow’d

  His coal-black curls as on he rode,

  As he rode down to Camelot.

  I screamed and almost fell off the raft.

  “Oh, sorry,” Will said. He’d been smiling. After I screamed, he stopped. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Wh-what are you doing here?” I stammered, staring up at him. I couldn’t believe he was just…well, standing there. Beside my pool. In my yard. On Spider Rock.

  “Uh,” Will said, starting to look a little self-conscious. “I knocked. Your dad said you were out here, and let me in. Is this a bad time? I can come back, if it is.”

  I stared at him, completely dumbfounded. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I had lived for sixteen years without any boy ever having paid the slightest bit of attention to me, and then one day, without any warning at all, the cutest guy I had ever seen—and I do mean ever—just shows up at my house. Having come, apparently, to see me.

  I mean, why else would he be here?

  “How—how do you know where I live?” I asked him. “How do you even know who I am?”

  “Student guide,” he said. Then, seeming to realize that I was more than a little freaked, he added, “Look, I’m sorry if I startled you. I didn’t mean to. I just thought…well, never mind. You know what? I was wrong.”

  “Wrong about what?” I asked. My heart was still thumping really hard inside my bikini. He had startled me much more than that spider that lived on Spider Rock ever had.

  But it wasn’t just that he’d startled me that was making my heart hammer. I have to admit, a lot of it was because of how good he looked, up there on that rock, with the late-afternoon sun glinting off his dark head.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just—I mean, you smiled at me that day in the park like…”

  “Like what?” I sounded casual, but inwardly, I was freaking out on multiple levels: one, that he remembered me—he really remembered me!—from that day at the park, and two, that it hadn’t just been me. The smile thing, I mean. He’d felt it, too!

  Or maybe not.

  “Look, never mind,” Will said. “It’s stupid. When I saw you—first in the park, and then again today, it just seemed like…I don’t know. That we’d met before, or something. But we haven’t, obviously. I mean, I can see that now. I’m Will, by the way. Will Wagner.”

  I didn’t let on that I already knew this, from having looked him up the same way he’d looked me up. Because I didn’t want him to think that I had a crush on him, or anything. Because how could I have a crush on him? I had only seen him twice before. This made it three times. You can’t get a crush on someone you’ve seen only three times. I mean, if you’re Nancy, you can. But not if you’re practical, like me.

  “I’m Ellie,” I said. “Ellie Harrison. But then…I guess you knew that.”

  The blue-eyed gaze was back on mine, but this time, it didn’t seem as intense. Plus, Will was grinning.

  “Pretty much,” he said.

  He really was very good-looking. It wasn’t often that good-looking guys so much as looked my way, let alone showed up at my house to see me. I’m not ugly, or anything, but I’m no Jennifer Gold. I mean, she’s one of those Oh, I’m so little and helpless, please rescue me, you big strong man types of girls. You know, the kind all the cute guys in school fall in love with? I’m more the kind of girl little old ladies come up to in grocery stores and ask, “Can you get that can of cat food down off that really high grocery store shelf for me, dear?”

  Which basically translates to Invisible to Boys.

  “I just moved here,” I said. “From St. Paul. I’ve never been to the East Coast before. So I don’t know how we could have met before…. Unless”—I eyed him uncertainly—“you’ve been to St. Paul?”

  Which was nuts, because if he had, I’d have remembered.

  You better believe I’d have remembered.

  “No,” he said, grinning. “Never been there. Look, really, forget I said anything. Things have been really weird lately, and I guess I just…”

  His expression darkened, just for a split second, almost as if a shadow had passed across it.

  Except that that was impossible, since there was nothing standing between him and the sun.

  Then he seemed to shrug off whatever dark thought had occurred to him, and said brightly, “Seriously, don’t worry about it. I’ll see you in school.”

  He turned like he was going to jump off Spider Rock and go away. I could almost hear my best friend Nancy’s voice screaming in my head, Don’t let him get away, you idiot! He’s hot! Make him stay!

  “Wait,” I said.

  Then, when he turned expectantly, I found myself frantically trying to think of something witty and brilliant to say…something that would make him want to stay.

  But before I could think of anything, I heard the sliding glass door being thrown back. A second later, my mom called down from the deck, “Ellie, would your friend like to borrow a suit and go for a swim, too? I’m sure one of Geoff’s would fit him.”

  Oh my God. My friend. I was sure I was going to die. Besides which, go for a swim? With me? She had no idea she was talking to one of the most popular guys at Avalon High, or that he was dating one of the prettiest girls there.

  But still. That’s no excuse.

  “Uh, no, Mom,” I called to her, giving Will an apologetic eye roll that he grinned at. “We’re okay.”

  “Actually,” Will said, looking up at my mom. I have to go now.

  That’s what I thought he was going to say. I have to go now, or I made a huge mistake, or even, Sorry, wrong house.

  Because guys like Will do not hang around girls like me. It just doesn’t happen. Clearly, Will had thought I was some other girl—maybe someone he’d met at camp and had a crush on when he was eight, or whatever—and now that he’d realized his error, he’d be leaving.

  Because that is how things are supposed to go in an ordered universe.

  But I guess the universe had tilted on its axis without anyone mentioning it to me, or something, because Will went on to say, “A swim might be nice.”

  And not three minutes later, against all laws of probability, Will was emerging from my house in a pair of Geoff’s baggy swim trunks, with a towel around his neck. He was also holding glasses of lemonade that my mom had scrounged up from somewhere, one of which he knelt down at the side of the pool to hand to me.

  “Free, fast delivery,” he said, with a wink, as I took the plastic glass from him. If he felt, as I did, a jolt of electricity race up his arm as our fingers accidentally brushed, he didn’t let on.

  “Oh my God,” I said, holding the already-sweating glass and staring at him. He had, I was not at all surprised to see, a terrific body. His skin was tanned bronze—from sailing, no doubt—and he was gorgeously well-muscled—but not in a crazy steroid sort of way.

  And he was in my pool.

  He was in my pool.

  “Did she—” I was in too much shock to think of anything else. “Did she talk to you?”

  “Who?” Will asked, draping himself over Geoff’s raft. “Your mom? Yeah. She’s nice. What is she, a writer or something?”

  “Professor,” I said, through lips that had gone numb. But not from the ice cubes in my drink. From the thought of Will Wagner, alone in my house with my parents, while I, too transfixed with horror to move from my raft, had lain in the pool, doing nothing to rescue him. “Both of them.”

  “Oh, well, that would explain it,” Will said lightly.

  My blood went as cold as the ice in my drink. What had they done? What had they said to him? It was too early for Jeopardy! so it couldn’t have been that. “Explain what?”

  “Your mom quoted some poem after I introduced myself,” Will said, leaning his head back and peering up at the sky through his Ray-Bans. Whatever Mom had said, he clearly wasn’t bothered by it. “Something about a broad, clear brow.”

  My stomach lurched. “‘His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d’?” I asked nervously.

  “Yeah,” Will said. “That’s it. What was that about?”

  “Nothing,” I said, vowing silently to kill my mom at a later date. “It’s a line from a poem she likes—The Lady of Shalott. Tennyson. She’s taking the year off from teaching to write a book on Elaine of Astolat. It’s making her a little crazier than usual.”

  “That must be cool,” Will said, his raft heading perilously close to Spider Rock, though he wasn’t, of course, aware of the potential spider-related danger he was in. “To have parents who talk about poetry and books and stuff.”

  “Oh, you have no idea,” I said, in the flattest voice I could.

  “How’s the rest of it go?” Will wanted to know.

  “The rest of what?”

  “The poem.”

  She was so very, very dead. “‘His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d,’” I quoted from memory. It’s not as if I hadn’t heard it seventy times this week alone. “‘On burnish’d hooves his war-horse trode;/From underneath his helmet flow’d/His coal-black curls as on he rode,/As he rode down to Camelot.’ It’s a very lame poem. She dies at the end, floating in a boat. Weren’t you supposed to meet some people at Dairy Queen after practice today?”

  Will glanced over at me, as the question had startled him. I didn’t blame him. It had startled me, too. I have no idea where it had come from.

  Still. It needed to be asked.

  “I guess so,” Will said. “How’d you know about that?”

  “Because I heard Jennifer ask you about it when I saw you today in the hallway at school,” I said. Nancy, I knew, would freak out if she’d heard me say this. She’d be all, Oh my God! Don’t let on that you know about Jennifer! Because then he’ll know you went to the trouble to look her up, and then he’ll think you like him!

  But not mentioning Jennifer just didn’t seem very practical to me.

  Nancy wouldn’t have liked the next words that came out of my mouth, either.

  “She’s your girlfriend, right?” I asked, looking at him as he floated past.

  He didn’t look at me. He lifted his head up to take a sip of his lemonade, then dropped it back down to the air cushion on his raft.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Going on two years.”

  I opened my mouth to ask what seemed to me to be the next natural question—the one Nancy definitely would have forbidden me from asking. But before I could get a word out, Will lifted up his head, looked right at me, and said, “Don’t.”

  I blinked at him from behind the lenses of my sunglasses. “Don’t what?” I asked, because how was I to know—then—that he could read my mind?

  “Don’t ask me what I’m doing in your pool instead of hers,” he said. “Because I honestly don’t know. Let’s talk about something else, okay?”

  I could hardly believe what was happening. What was this totally great-looking guy doing in my pool? Not to mention, reading my mind?