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Does she think I’m like a clown who picks and chooses his moods based on his environment?
    Being charming is easy—nobody looks too hard at charming. Nobody expects you to be anything other than flirty and a little funny. Figures that this sour little critter would be repulsed by that.
    “How’s your face?” I ask, changing the subject.
    “Fine.”
    I narrow my eyes and study her. Her tone is flippant, and although she really does seem to be fine—there’s no red mark to signal an impending bruise—I get the feeling that she’d say she was fine even if she wasn’t. As though she doesn’t think anyone would care one way or the other.
    “Sorry about … in there,” I say, breaking yet another awkward silence.
    “You mean where you got all handsy?” she asks in that unperturbed voice of hers.
    “I didn’t get handsy ,” I snap. “I was just making sure I didn’t knock your teeth out.”
    Stephanie gives me this big, shit-eating grin as though to say, See? All teeth accounted for , and I roll my eyes.
    But I’m smiling a little bit all the same. She’s so damned different from anyone I’ve ever met before, and oddly, I find my mood improving.
    “How’d you get dragged into this shit?” I say, gesturing toward the thumping house, where the back window reveals someone doing a keg stand.
    “What, you mean you don’t think I belong?” she asks, her eyes wide in mock surprise.
    I pat the wall next to me and give her an inviting smile. “Come closer. I can barely hear you.”
    “Don’t start that BS again,” she says with a withering glance. “I meant it when I said I didn’t like the charming pretty-boy version.”
    But she comes and sits by me anyway, and once again I feel that annoying hit of awareness.
    I meet her eyes. “What if that’s who I am? The charming pretty-boy version, I mean?”
    “Well, then God help your future Stepford wife, because you two will bore the crap out of each other long before your first anniversary. But it’s not my problem. It’s not like I’mauditioning for the role of BFF. Just keep your schmoozing to a minimum when we have to meet for the film project, and hopefully I won’t have to scare you away with my dead bird collection.”
    We’re back to where we started now on that first day, exchanging clichéd insults, and I kind of like it. Not as much as I liked her pressed against me, but her company’s the most enjoyable I’ve had in weeks.
    “You never answered how you ended up here,” I say, staring down at her pale profile.
    She stares straight ahead, fiddling again with her earrings. “I’m tagging along with a friend. Jordan Crawford. She’s one of you people.”
    “One of us?”
    “You know. Pretty. Popular. Perfect.”
    “You’re pretty,” I hear myself say.
    She turns her head then, blue eyes so bored they could freeze my balls off. “What did I just say about the charming thing? Turn it off .”
    “Why do you do that?” I ask, genuinely curious.
    “What, you’re wondering why I don’t swoon?” she asks, lifting a leg to tuck a heel under her on the wall and turning to face me slightly. “You’re not my type.”
    “Is it the lack of tattoos?” I deadpan. “Do you want me to show you my penis piercing?”
    “It’s the lack of substance,” she snaps.
    I recoil a little bit at the accusation. I don’t know why her opinion even matters. She’s a friendless outcast, and I could have this entire party eating out of my hand if I wanted. I don’t care what she thinks of me. Or at least I shouldn’t.
    But her blatant dismissal of me hits a raw spot. Does she think I’m not aware that I’m a little too glib sometimes? This girl doesn’t know me. She can’t possibly understand that the charm comes on without me intending it to, even when inside I feel anything but charming.
    Does she really think I don’t look at my life—at the cushy apartment I don’t pay for, the classes that come a little easier than they should, the CEO