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not going to be the one left behind,” Mei said. “I guess I can take the SAT next semester. It’s not like it’s going anywhere.”
    “Yay! I can’t wait,” Piper said. “I promise this is going to be the best thing we’ve ever done.”

Chapter 3
Izzy
    Izzy slinked out of her room, hoping to escape to freedom unnoticed by any of the family members she’d rather avoid. Which, typically, was all of them.
    She paused outside the bedroom of her younger brother, Shane. She could hear him in there pounding away on his keyboard. Oh, she couldn’t hear the music he was playing, of course—he had the headphones hooked up—but she could hear his fingers flying across the keys. She used to love listening to him play, back when he’d merely been very good, back before he was a prodigy. Before her mother had decided to sculpt him into a virtuoso. The better Shane had gotten, the crazier their mother had become, channeling more and more of her energy into her youngest son. No one else in the family seemed to think it was absurd for a teenage boy to spend eight hours a day practicing Liszt, but Izzy sure did.
    She skipped down the stairs before she could contemplate breaking Shane out of jail.
    The sounds of a football game roared from the den, along with a wash of football-fueled aggression. Her older brother, Linc, and half the football team were in there watching the tapes of their opponent for next week. Probably her father, too, since he was the high school football coach. There weren’t enough Jane Austen adaptations in the world to counteract that much testosterone.
    Ducking down the hall toward the back of the house, she sniffed the air and caught a whiff of scorched poultry. Five years as a stay-at-home mom and her mother still burned to a crisp anything that passed within six inches of her gourmet cooktop. The woman should have stuck to litigation. Unfortunately, there weren’t many job opportunities for high-powered attorneys in Paris, something her father hadn’t considered when he resigned from his position as assistant coach for the University of Texas football team, picked up the whole family, and moved them from Austin to the desolate boondocks of northeast Texas. He’d been fostering John Wayne–like delusions of ranching. Her mother had been thrilled to devote herself full-time to Shane-the-musical-wunderkind, so really, Izzy was the only one who hadn’t benefited from the move.
    Izzy bypassed the kitchen and ducked out through the side door. Once free, she dropped down on the steps outside the sunroom. For a moment, she felt a pang of something in her chest. Regret maybe. She fought against the stupid urge to go back inside to talk to her mother. To tell her everything that had happened with River the other night at the party. Mothers were supposed to be good at this sort of thing, right? True, hers probably wouldn’t be, but it was worth a try.
    She considered it for about ten seconds. Then the smoke alarm went off in the kitchen. With a sigh, Izzy sent a text message to her mom explaining that she’d be at Piper’s for the night. Her mom probably wouldn’t check the message for hours. There were moments, like this one, when Izzy didn’t quite mind being invisible.
    Slipping her cell into her back pocket, she headed for her car but stopped when she saw the overflowing garbage can by the garage. Taking it out was Linc’s job, and he’d once again thrown the recycling in with the trash. The jerk.
    “It’s two feet away,” she grumbled as she transferred the aluminum cans into the recycle bin. “Would it kill him to walk the extra few steps?”
    Her irritation with Linc made her clumsy, and one of her mother’sDiet Coke cans bounced off the edge and rolled down the driveway, coming to a rest somewhere under Izzy’s flaky and unreliable Kia, Brittney.
    Dropping to her hands and knees, she peered under the vehicle, then scooched on her belly and started wiggling. She’d just grabbed the can