Chapter 1
S
o bored I think I might be dead. Jason wrote the imaginary
status update in his head as Ms. Rowen droned on about
the properties of iron. He thought about sneaking his phone
from his pocket and posting it to Facebook, but Ms. Rowen
had hawkish eyes and no patience for rule breakers. Broadcasting
the monotony of chemistry to all 248 of his friends wasn’t
worth the risk of getting the phone confiscated for the week.
Two hundred forty-eight friends. Two hundred forty-nine if
you included the request from his aunt Sally that he’d been
ignoring. The list was like a tour through his utterly pathetic
middle and high school career. There was Rachel Keller, the
curly-haired saxophone player he had slow danced with at
Jacob Cooper’s bar mitzvah. Sadly, that was pretty much the
most action he’d had in the past four years. Alex McCoy, a
bespectacled kid he’d bunked with at summer camp, flooded
his newsfeed with creepy photos of frogs and other unwitting
specimens. Sometimes someone like Suzy Garz popped up,
though the charismatic captain of the field hockey team hadn’t
exchanged actual words with Jason since the fourth grade. Not
that he was so unhappy about that — he was pretty sure the
inspirational quotes she was posting were from a ’90s edition of
Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. Either there or the back of a
cereal box at Whole Foods.
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Jason’s eyes wandered around the room. To his surprise, his
best friend Rakesh’s face was frozen in rapt concentration. It
took Jason a minute to realize it was a phone cradled carefully
in his hands that had captured his attention. Rakesh could
afford to get his iPhone confiscated — he kept a spare one in
his locker for just such an occasion. One of the perks of being
among the most popular students at Roosevelt High was that
girls (and boys and maintenance staff and teachers) were happy
to help Rakesh out on the rare occasion he couldn’t charm his
way out of a punishment. He had 892 friends last Jason had
checked. His wide smile and princely cheekbones populated
almost as many photos. Jason knew because he was featured in
many of them, but he’d untagged any where you could see light
reflecting off his glasses or his hair looked floppy. Which was
pretty much all of them.
Jason forced himself to concentrate on Ms. Rowen as she
explained the process of oxidization. He couldn’t afford to get
anything less than a B on the approaching midterm. One of
the few advantages to leading the world’s quietest social life was
that his mother allowed him to do pretty much whatever he
pleased so long as he made good grades, but if she had even the
slightest inkling he was lying to her, it was only a matter of
time before she’d take his car — or worse, his laptop — away.
He wasn’t intentionally deceiving her. He’d sit down at his
computer intending to focus on schoolwork, but when Lacey
was online everything else had a tendency to fade into the
background.
Lacey. His stomach flipped just thinking about her. She had
changed everything with two words. “Hey” and “Jason” were
things he heard almost every day, but they weren’t usually
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