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flinched. When she turned, Ethan smiled sheepishly behind her. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “I just wanted to know if you’re okay.”
    Emma reached out for Ethan’s hand, then pulled back. Her eyes swept furtively around the yard. A couple of drama kids were rehearsing a scene near the parking lot. There was a small line for coffee at the kiosk just inside the school doors. No one was looking at them, but she still felt paranoid. Ethan wasn’t part of Sutton’s clique, nor did he want to be.
    She sighed. “I’ve only been here for ten minutes and already it’s been a long day,” she moaned. “And from the way Madeline’s acting, something was definitely going on between Sutton and Thayer before he skipped town.”
    Ethan nodded. “Sounds like Sutton was playing Garrett, then.”
    “I guess,” Emma said. She didn’t want to assume her sister was cheating, but it was really looking like she had been.
    “So how are you going to find out more?” Ethan asked.
    Emma took a long sip of the coffee Charlotte had brought for her. “Continue eavesdropping on all the gossip, maybe?” she said with a shrug.
    Ethan looked like he was going to say something else, but he was cut off by the final bell. Both of them snapped to attention. “We’ll talk about this later, okay?”
    “Okay,” Ethan said. He stepped forward just as Emma did. They bumped feet and stepped back.
    “Sorry,” Emma murmured.
    “It’s cool,” Ethan said gruffly, shifting his backpack higher on his shoulder. Their eyes met for a moment, but then Ethan lowered his head again and scuttled toward the doors. “I’ll see you,” he mumbled.
    “Okay,” Emma said to his disappearing shape. She swung around and began to walk in the opposite direction.
    Suddenly, a rustling in the bushes made her stop short. Someone snickered behind a podium. Emma squinted, trying to make out who it was. Was someone watching her? Was it Laurel again, spying on her and Ethan? Before she could get a glimpse, whoever it was ducked into the school and darted up the stairs.

5
GAME, SET, OUTMATCHED
    After school that day, Emma walked off the tennis court at Wheeler High, Hollier’s main rival, shading her eyes from the bright glare and smiling bashfully at the smattering of applause. All of Hollier’s sports teams were playing Wheeler that week, and Emma had just finished a grueling match against a petite redhead. Well, it wasn’t supposed to be grueling—Coach Maggie had basically said that the girl was so subpar she could be beaten with an ankle strain and a badminton racket. Before Emma had arrived in Tucson, the most tennis she’d ever played was on a Ping-Pong table in a dingy basement with Stephan, her Russian foster brother. She did use some of the Russian curse words he had taught her when she wanted to swear during a match without getting in trouble, though.
    For me, it was yet another reminder of how different our childhoods had been.
    “Good game, Sutton,” several people Emma didn’t recognize said as she passed. She collapsed into a chair on the sidelines, kicked off the state-of-the-art tennis sneakers she’d found in Sutton’s closet—not that they helped her game any—and let out a groan.
    “Someone still out of shape?” a voice lilted.
    Emma looked up and saw Nisha Banerjee leaning against the fence, a smirk on her face. Nisha’s long, slender fingers rested on her trim waist, her überwhite tennis uniform gleamed—she probably bleached it after every match—and there wasn’t even a hint of sweat on the terrycloth band that circled her head of sleek, dark hair. She was Sutton’s tennis co-captain, and she never missed a chance to tell Emma how undeserving she was of the title. Emma bit her lip and tried to tell herself that Nisha was being mean because she was hurting inside—she’d lost her mother this past summer and was dealing with a lot of pain. In a parallel universe, maybe she and Emma would even bond over