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thetime she gets to the lesson, my head is spinning. How did everything get so mixed up? I’m back in school. Trip is gone. And I’m defending Hannah George to Blake.
    He frustrates me so much sometimes—like saying no one in this town has ever given him a chance. Okay, he may be right about that. Blake has been the center of small-town scandal since before he was born, because his mom, Phoebe, ran away with the high school drama teacher the night of graduation. When she came back, nearly two years later, she was a drug addict and pregnant with Blake. She left him with his grandma, but every few years her maternal instincts kick in and she reappears in his life long enough to mess it up again.
    One of her motherly episodes earned Blake a criminal record when she swept him away to live with her and her new husband in Reno. Blake was there for about eighteen months—six months longer than his mother’s marriage. He got arrested for breaking and entering, and spent some time in juvie before his grandma brought him home. By the time he got back, my life had changed so much that we didn’t fit together anymore.
    I wish I could blame his mom for what happened between me and Blake. But it was my fault.
    With his hood pulled up gangsta-style and his flagrant disregard for Ms. Flores’s demonstration of pastels, Blake isn’t doing much to change his reputation.
    But I remember a different Blake. Expert kite flyer. Always making grand plans. Excited over caves and rocks and seashells. And the summer I turned fifteen—awkward for both of us. My family had spent a few weeks in Pacific Cliffs every summer for as long as I can remember, but when I was twelve, Dad wasposted to Germany and we went with him. It was three summers before I saw Blake again. I knew how much my body had changed in that time. Worse, I knew Blake saw it, too. Andrew was sick most of that summer—getting over a scary bout with pneumonia—so it was just me and Blake.
    Then there was the thing with Trip, the kitten, and the crab cage. After Trip left, Blake was fuming. He was so sure that Trip had trapped Sasha on purpose to get my attention. When I defended Trip, Blake sounded almost jealous. He stomped back to his house and left me standing in my doorway with a wet kitten wrapped in Trip’s T-shirt.
    I didn’t see Blake again until the day we left. He showed up at my door and asked if I wanted to go to the beach.
    For that afternoon, it was like no time had passed. We flew a kite and played in the waves—talked and laughed the way we had when we were little kids. Then we went to the cave that had been our hiding place for so many summers. The awkwardness crept back in when I sat on the ledge in the back and he scooted close to me. He put his arm over my shoulders. “Texas again, huh?”
    “Yep.” I tugged the front of my shirt up higher, but I didn’t move away.
    “How long?”
    “I’m not sure.” I could feel him watching me, but I couldn’t look at him. I jerked a thread off the bottom of my cutoff shorts and rolled it between my fingers. “Dad only has a couple of years until he retires.”
    “And then what?”
    I kept rolling the thread between my fingers. “Here, I guess.He promised Mom we’d live here when he got out of the Army.” I looked up and caught Blake staring at me, hard, intense. And I couldn’t look away.
    “You guys here all the time would be cool.”
    “Yeah. It would be.”
    Then he kissed me. My first. Probably his, too, but it didn’t show—somewhere between a movie kiss and a quick peck. It was beautiful and amazing and perfect.
    After we went to Texas, I waited for a phone call, or an e-mail, something. When I didn’t hear from Blake, I thought the kiss didn’t mean as much to him as it did to me. I didn’t know his mom had dragged him off to Reno until we came back the next summer.
    Then Trip came along and I didn’t think I needed Blake anymore.
    Big mistake.
    If anyone at this school has a right to hate