Chapter 1

My stepsister, Ella, was ruining my life. She was blonde, petite, beautiful, talented, and popular, and worst of all, she was nice.

My dad married Ella’s mom, Rose, when we were both two. It was the year after my mother left me. After Ella’s mom divorced my dad, Ella still came and lived with us every summer and every other Christmas.

We never went to the same school until Ella’s mom died from breast cancer at the end of our sophomore year. Ella moved in immediately. Nobody knew where her biological dad was; he’d bailed before Ella was even born. She belonged with us.

At first I was glad to have her. It was fun having a stepsister. Or it was fun up until the beginning of our junior year. Over that summer Ella had changed everything. Her hairstyle, her makeup, and her clothes. She exercised every day. Ate carrots and crap like that. She got unbelievably gorgeous. (And it probably didn’t hurt that her mom had been an actual Swedish Bikini Team model.)

And she was new. The boys went crazy.

That was the first thing on my List of Grievances where Ella was concerned.

My List of Grievances was something I started right after the end of junior year. It was a catalog of all the ways Ella had wronged me. And as I just mentioned:

Wrong the First: Guys fell all over themselves for her. There was nothing worse than just standing there pretending like it didn’t bother me while guys drooled all over her and didn’t even say hi to me. And the whole time, I secretly wanted to scream, “Hey, see me? I’m a girl too!” Even my best friend since junior high, Trent, seemed to be falling under Ella’s spell.

Wrong the Second: Ella made Angelina Jolie look selfish. Ella lived to volunteer. While everyone else was easing into the school year, Ella was already planning a masquerade ball for some save the orphans/whales/environment cause. She supported so many charities I honestly couldn’t keep track. There was no competing with someone who spent most of her free time thinking about other people.

Wrong the Third: Her name. Ella Christensen. So pretty. Roll-right-off-your-tongue beautiful. My name? Mattie Lowe. Actually, it’s worse than that. My real name? Matilda. I blamed my mother (and sometimes my dad, for not running any interference when my mother picked out the name). During one of our forced online chats, she said she named me after some old queen, that Matilda’s a strong name and means “mighty in battle.” I was pretty sure it meant “my mom hates me.” Fortunately, when I was little, my dad called me Tilly. That worked fine until the first day of kindergarten. Even at the tender age of five I understood that I couldn’t be Silly Tilly for the rest of my life. I came home and demanded my dad change my name. He refused. Instead he came up with a new nickname for me, and I started going by Mattie at school, Tilly at home. Ella’s just Ella. She didn’t have to have a dozen nicknames just to get through her day.

Wrong the Fourth: She spent hours cleaning up around the house. Bathrooms, her bedroom, the living room—you name it and Ella had probably cleaned it recently. The other day I caught her in the kitchen actually scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees! Every time my father stumbled across her cleaning something, it made him ask me why I was so lazy. He assigned me chores that I had to pretend to do until he forgot and I could go back to doing nothing. As far as I was concerned, she was putting our housekeeper’s job in jeopardy, which I refused to do, because I was not selfish like that.

Wrong the Fifth: Ella had this ability to make everything look amazing. Dance floors, people’s faces, clothes—anything she touched magically looked better. She even liked to sew her own stuff like she was getting ready to try out for Project Runway or something. I’d acknowledged my lack of fashion sense many years before and had stuck to basic black ever since. I was only adventurous with my hair color, which was a sort of fuchsia-y shade at the beginning of senior year. But not so adventurous that I’d ever used a permanent hair dye. Just semipermanent or temporary. (And I should probably mention that Ella was a natural blonde. Yes, it made me want to puke too.)

Wrong the Sixth: Ella was a cheerleader. Enough said.

Wrong the Worst: Ella was dating her perfect counterpart—he was handsome, athletic, funny, nice, and tall. (He was so tall it made me crazy—at six foot two he was one of the tallest guys at school. Being five eleven made me sort of a tall guy connoisseur, and it always aggravated me to see all that height being wasted on teeny-tiny girls like Ella.) He even drove a sports car. His name was Jake Kingston.

And I was completely, totally, head over heels in love with him.