It didn’t make any sense.

  But then, I’m not sure it made sense to him, either.

  So instead of asking him about it, I asked him something else that had been bothering me: just what, exactly, he’d been doing in the ravine that first day I’d seen him.

  “Oh,” Will said, sounding surprised I’d even ask. “I don’t know. I just end up there sometimes.”

  Which pretty much answered my question about what he was doing in my pool instead of his girlfriend’s: He was clearly mentally unstable.

  Except that—the being-in-my-pool-instead-of-Jennifer’s thing aside—he seemed totally normal. He was able to make perfectly lucid conversation. He asked me why we’d moved from St. Paul, and when I told him about the sabbatical, he said he knew what that was like—having to move around a lot, I mean. His dad, he said, was in the navy, and had been stationed lots of different places—forcing Will to change schools every other year or so when he was younger—before finally taking a teaching position at the Naval Academy.

  He talked about Avalon High, and the teachers he liked, and the ones I should try to stay away from—Mr. Morton he declared, much to my surprise, a good guy. He talked about Lance—he described the month off he and Lance had taken over the summer to sail up and down the coast, just the two of them.

  The only thing Will didn’t bring up again was Jennifer. Not even once.

  Not that I was counting.

  I didn’t have any trouble figuring out what Nancy would have made of that. Clearly all was not happiness and joy in that relationship. Why else was he floating in my pool, and not hers?

  Not, of course, that I imagined his interest in me was at all romantic. Because who’d want hamburger when they could have filet mignon? Which isn’t—despite what Nancy would say—putting myself down. It’s just being realistic. Guys like Will go for girls like Jennifer: perky little blondes who seem to know instinctively what color eyeshadow looks best on them, not girls like me—gangling brunettes who aren’t afraid to pull snakes out of the pool filter.

  The sun was starting to slide behind the house, and there was more shade than light on the surface of the water when my mom came back out onto the deck and announced that she’d ordered some Thai food, and asked if Will wanted to stay for dinner.

  To which Will replied that he’d love to.

  Will was the perfect guest, helping me set the table, then clear it afterwards. He finished everything on his plate. And when my parents and I declared that we were stuffed, he ate everything that was left over in the cartons—to my dad’s very obvious admiration.

  He was nice to Tig, too, when she came over and sniffed the back of one of his shoes. He bent down and put his finger out so she could smell it before she decided whether or not to let him pet her. Only people who’ve actually spent time around cats know that this is accepted cat etiquette.

  He didn’t laugh when I told him Tig’s name, either. It’s kind of embarrassing to have a pet that you named when you were eight. Back then, I’d thought Tigger was the most original, creative name you could give a cat.

  But when I mentioned this to Will, he grinned and said Tigger wasn’t as bad as the name he’d given his Border collie when he was twelve—Cavalier. Which is a pretty weird name for a dog, if you think about it. Especially a naval family’s dog.

  During dinner, Will told funny stories about Cavalier and about the pranks the middies down at the academy sometimes played on one another, as well as on their instructors. He didn’t look bored when my dad told him all about the sword, or when my mom quoted a few more verses of The Lady of Shalott, as she is embarrassingly prone to do after a glass of wine with dinner.

  He even laughed at my impressions of the Graul’s bag boys, and also at my reenactment of the Great Snake Rescue.

  Nancy has always frowned on my joking around with boys. She says boys don’t develop romantic feelings for girls who goof around like stand-up comics. How can he fall in love with you, Nancy always wanted to know, if he’s too busy laughing?

  And while she may have a point—certainly no boys have fallen in love with me, with the exception of Tommy Meadows in the fifth grade, but his family moved to Milwaukee right after he declared his undying devotion…a fact which may, now that I think of it, be what spurred the declaration in the first place—my dad says he fell in love at first sight with my mom because at the faculty party where they met, she had written Demoiselle d’Astolat on her Hello, My Name Is…lapel sticker.

  Which they all had got a terrific yuk out of. It’s actually a really lame joke, but what do medievalists know?

  Not that I was trying to make A. William Wagner fall in love with me, of course. Because I’m perfectly aware that he’s taken.

  It’s just that, remembering the way that shadow had seemed to pass across his face down at the pool, I thought maybe he could use a laugh. That’s all.

  Will left after dinner. He thanked my parents, calling my mom ma’am and my dad sir—which made me crack up—and then he said, “See you tomorrow, Elle,” to me.

  Then he was gone, melting into the twilight exactly the way he’d appeared at the side of my pool. As if from nowhere.

  But I actually waited outside until I heard his car door slam, and saw his car’s taillights as he headed down our long driveway, proving he wasn’t a specter or—what had Mr. Morton been talking about in World Lit today? Oh yeah—a bocan, the Gaelic word for “ghost.” See, I had been paying attention in class. Sort of.

  Elle. He’d called me Elle. As in…El. Short for Ellie.

  No one’s ever called me Elle before. No one. Just Ellie—which, if you ask me, is sort of a babyish name. Or Elaine, which is sort of old-ladyish.

  But not Elle. Never Elle. I’m so not the Elle type.

  Except, apparently, to A. William Wagner.

  “Well,” my dad said, when I came back into the house, after watching Will leave, “he seems like a nice guy.”

  “Will Wagner,” my mom said, as she turned on Jeopardy! “I like that name. It’s a very regal-sounding sort of name.”

  Oh, God. I could so see where all of this was heading. They thought Will liked me. They thought Will was going to be my new boyfriend, or something. They had no idea—no idea—what was really going on.

  But then again, neither did I, really. I mean, the truth is, if somebody had asked me to explain what that all had been about back there—him showing up at the side of my pool, then staying for dinner—I wouldn’t have known what to say. I had never had a boy do any of those things before…let alone laugh at all my jokes.

  I was trying not to make a big deal out of the whole thing, though. Will was nice, but he had a girlfriend. A pretty, cheerleader girlfriend.

  Who he apparently didn’t want to talk about.

  Which, when I thought about it, was pretty weird.

  But the weirdest part of all was that while it had been happening—once I’d gotten used to the idea, I mean, of this hot guy hanging out with me—it hadn’t actually seemed that weird at all. It was like that smile Will had given me that day in the park, the one I hadn’t been able to keep from returning. It had just seemed natural, even right, to smile back, just like it had seemed totally natural—natural and, yes, right—to have Will there, joking around with the silverware as we set the table, laughing at my Graul’s bag boy imitation.

  That was what was weird. That it hadn’t actually been weird.

  Still, when Nancy called later that evening, and my dad answered first, and said, “Ah, Nancy. She has a lot to tell you,” I didn’t try to play the whole thing down as much as I should have. Because I knew Nancy would tell everyone back home. About my having had a boy over for dinner my very first day at my new school. I made sure to mention that he was on the football team, sailed, and was president of the senior class, too.

  Oh, and that he looked very, very good in a swimsuit.

  Nancy practically had kittens right there on the phone.

  “Oh my God, is he taller than you?” she wanted to know. This had always been a problem, because for most of my life, I’ve been taller than the vast majority of boys in our school, with the exception of Tommy Meadows.

  “He’s six two,” I said.

  Nancy cooed appreciatively. At five ten, I’d still be able to get away with heels if we went out, she said.

  “Wait until I tell Shelley,” Nancy said. “Oh my God, Ellie. You did it. You were able to start over at a whole new school and give yourself a total personality makeover. Everything’s going to be different for you now. Everything! And all you had to do was move to a totally new state and start going to a completely new school.”

  Yeah. Things were definitely starting to look up.

  That’s really what I thought.

  Then.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,

  He rode between the barley-sheaves,

  The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves,

  And flamed upon the brazen greaves

  Of bold Sir Lancelot.

  I took the bus to school the next day. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Liz, the girl from the track team who lived nearby, was waiting at the stop, so we started talking, then ended up sitting next to each other.

  Liz is a high jumper. She let me know right away that she doesn’t have a boyfriend or a driver’s license yet.

  I knew we had solid groundwork for friendship based on the latter two facts alone.

  I didn’t mention to Liz that A. William Wagner had visited me after school the day before, then stayed for dinner. For one thing, I didn’t want to seem like I was bragging. And for another, well, Liz seemed to really like talking about people in school, and I wasn’t entirely convinced it was a good thing to have spread around. That Will had come over to my house, I mean.

  I got a pretty good idea, in fact, that it was a bad thing when I closed my locker a few periods later and found Jennifer Gold standing on the other side of it, not looking too happy.

  “I hear Will came over to your house for dinner last night,” Jennifer said, in a distinctly unfriendly voice.

  Since I hadn’t told anyone that Will had been over, I knew the spillage was courtesy of him. Unless Jennifer had spies in my neighborhood, or something, which seemed unlikely.

  So I just said, wondering why tiny girls like Jennifer always get the tallest boyfriends, leaving all the pip-squeaks for giraffes like me, “Yes. He did.”

  But Jennifer didn’t say what I expected her to say. She didn’t go, “Well, he’s my boyfriend, so hands off,” or “If you so much as look at him again, you’re a dead woman.”

  Instead she asked me a question: “Did he say anything about me?”

  I looked down at Jennifer wondering if she, like her boyfriend, was also suffering from some kind of mild form of psychosis—only in her case, not on account of liking me.

  She looked sane enough in her pale pink cotton sweater set and capris. But it’s hard to tell if someone’s crazy just by how they dress. The cheerleaders at my old school dressed totally regular, but a couple of them were certifiable.

  “Um,” I said. “No.”

  “Or Lance?” Jennifer’s perfectly made-up eyes narrowed. “Did he say anything about Lance?”

  “Only,” I said, “that the two of them sailed up the coast this summer. Why?”

  But Jennifer didn’t answer my question. She just went, “Good,” looking relieved. Then she walked away.

  But Jennifer Gold wasn’t the only person who asked me about Will that day.

  Mr. Morton, my World Lit teacher, announced that for our first nine-week project, he was assigning us each a poem to study and then deliver an oral report about. In front of the whole class. The report would count toward twenty percent of our semester grade, and had to include critical, secondary, and source materials.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, he was also assigning us partners to work with.

  Gee, thanks, Mr. Morton.

  He handed out our partners’ names first. When I got mine, I raised my eyebrows.

  Because my partner’s name was Lance Reynolds.

  Which didn’t seem possible, since I’d been certain yesterday that I didn’t have any classes with the guy. I mean, after all, he was a year older than me, like Will.

  But sure enough, when I turned around, there he was in the back of the room. He was looking down at the slip of paper Mr. Morton had handed him, his golden brow furrowed as he tried to figure out who Elaine Harrison was. When he glanced up and saw me staring at him, I raised my own slip and mouthed, “Lucky you.”

  He didn’t react the way I’d have expected a jock who’d been assigned to do a project with the too-tall new girl would. Instead of sniggering or even just nodding, he turned a deep, dark shade of umber. It was kind of interesting to watch, really.

  Then Mr. Morton gave us each our poem. Ours was Beowulf.

  My heart sank when I saw it. I hate Beowulf almost as much as I hate Jeopardy!

  “Right, everyone,” Mr. Morton said, in his clipped British accent. “Find your partner and discuss how you’d like to approach your topic. I’d like your outlines on my desk by Friday.”

  I got up and went back to where Lance was sitting, since it didn’t seem likely he was going to come up to me. He was pretending that he didn’t see me coming, messing around with his books and everything, when I slid into the empty desk in front of his.

  “Hi,” I said, in a phony voice, like on a commercial. “I’m Ellie, and I’ll be your project partner this semester.”

  He messed up, though. He’d been trying to pretend like he didn’t know who I was. But somehow, “I know,” slipped from between his lips, and he turned an even darker shade of red.

  This was pretty interesting. I couldn’t remember ever having made a guy blush before. I wondered what Lance had heard about me, to make him react that way.

  “I…I saw you that day,” he stammered, by way of explanation. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who stammered often. “That day in the park.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, like I had only just remembered the incident myself. “Right.”

  “Will had dinner at your house last night,” Lance said. Carefully. Too carefully, I thought. Like he was fishing for information.

  “Yeah,” I said. I wondered if he, like Jennifer, was going to ask if Will had talked about him.

  But he didn’t.

  “So,” Lance said. “Beowulf, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I hate Beowulf.”

  Lance looked kind of surprised. “You’ve already read it?”

  I realized what kind of dweeb I must have sounded like. I mean, it was bad enough I was even taking World Literature. It’s an elective, open to anyone in any grade who’s interested—or who needs an extra humanities credit, as Lance evidently did. It was even worse that I’d already read most of the books on the syllabus. On my own. Because they’re all the same books that have been sitting on my parents’ bookshelves forever, and it’s not like I ever had much of a social life, so…

  Not wanting to admit this, however, I just said hastily, “Well, yeah. My parents are professors. Medieval studies. Beowulf is kind of their thing.”

  It was as I was saying this that I noticed a skinny-necked kid in glasses, sitting one desk over, looking at us very intently. When he saw me glance his way, he went, “Sorry but…did I hear you say you guys have Beowulf?”

  “Yeah,” I said, glancing over at Lance, who was staring at the kid with narrowed eyes. I recognized the look. It was the kind of look the popular give to the unpopular—like Lance couldn’t believe Skinny Neck had had the nerve to speak to him. “So what?”

  Skinny Neck glanced nervously at his partner, an equally nerdy-looking kid.

  “We love Beowulf,” he said, his voice going up a few octaves on the last syllable.

  “Yeah,” his partner agreed. “Grendel rules.”

  I supposed Grendel would rule to a couple of guys who, back in the Middle Ages, probably wouldn’t have made it past the age of five on account of inhalers not having been invented yet, or whatever.

  “What’d you get?” I asked Skinny Neck, referring to his assigned poem.

  “Tennyson,” Skinny Neck said, making no effort to hide his dissatisfaction.

  I recoiled.

  “Not The Lady of Shalott,” I said, in horror.

  “Yeah,” Skinny Neck said. Seeing my expression, he added, “It’s way shorter than Beowulf.”

  “Sorry,” I said, seeing all too clearly where this was headed. “No can do.”

  “Wait a minute.” Lance butted in. “What’s wrong with the shallot lady? If it’s short—”

  “My mom’s writing a book on her,” I interrupted, not mentioning the part about having been named for the main character in the poem.

  “Then the paper’ll be a cinch,” Lance said, brightening. “Just ask your mom what to say!”

  I stared at him. I couldn’t believe this was happening. And yet, at the same time, I sort of could. Which seemed to be how my life was going at Avalon High. Weird and yet strangely not weird.

  “Contrary to how you might do your homework,” I said, in a desperate effort to save myself from what I saw barreling down on me, knowing full well there was no escape, “I do my homework myself, without my parents’ help.”

  “This one’s shorter,” Lance said, taking the piece of paper from Skinny Neck’s fingers. “We’re doing it.”

  It was obvious there wasn’t going to be any discussion, much less arguing, over the issue. Lance had spoken. And what Lance says—it was perfectly clear, even to the new kid, namely me—goes.

  I’ll admit it. I was peeved. I’m sick of the Lady of Shalott. Her and her stupid robes of snowy white, loosely flying left and right.

  “Fine,” I said, snatching the topic paper out of his hands. “I’ll write it. But you have to stand up in front of the class and read it.”

  The smug expression vanished from Lance’s face. “But—”

  “You’re doing it,” I said, matching the tone he’d used with me exactly. “Or we can just flunk, for all I care.”