He took her gym bag and threw it in, then relieved her of her backpack as well. His trunk was remarkably clutter free, she noticed. Besides her stuff, there was only a set of neatly wound jumper cables tucked to one side and a case of CDs, which he traded out for his satchel.

She kept sneaking glances at him out of the corner of her eye while she waited for him to say something, but where it had been hard enough to read him without the sunglasses, with them on, it felt like trying to gauge a block of stone.

He reached into his satchel and retrieved the Tupperware container from lunch. He held it up. “Little bird told me.”

Gwen. Isobel found herself smiling at the thought of her newest, most unlikely friend as she climbed into the passenger side of Varen’s car.

He got into the driver’s seat, sweeping aside his wallet chains and turning the key in the ignition. The Cougar rumbled to life, and the portable CD player sitting between them began to spin. A racing beat surged through the car speakers, complete with electric guitars, crashing drums, and someone screaming a ragged plea to please save their soul.

Isobel picked up the Discman, eyeing the scraped casing and the patch of black duct tape holding it all together. “How do you still have one of these things, anyway?” she asked.

“Because I have car payments,” he said. “Seat belt.”

“Oh,” Isobel mouthed, and deciding to leave her inquiries there, she drew the old-fashioned seat belt across her lap and clicked it into place. He handed her the case of CDs, instructing her to put in “the one with the trees.” She flipped through the discs while he toggled the stick shift and put the car in reverse.

Conquering the urge to watch him drive (she’d never thought anyone could make the act of operating a car seem graceful), she finally found the album he wanted, one with a white background and the silhouette of twisted, bare-limbed trees. Isobel recognized the band’s emblem right away on the outer rim of the CD. The image was of the same upside-down dead bird on the back of the green jacket he always wore. She pressed the eject button, and for the moment it took her to exchange albums, the car went blessedly silent.

“You’re grounded,” he said before the new CD could start wailing out a soulful, darkly angelic ballad. “Why?”

Isobel recognized this as an opportune time to lie, or at least practice some good truth omitting. “Because of yelling outside last night,” she said. There. She hadn’t had to lie at all. She’d just leave out the part about her originally being grounded for returning home past curfew in a strange car the previous Friday— his car, to be exact.

She frowned suddenly. What was she going to tell her mom when they got to her house?

“Your parents pretty strict?” He asked this like he already knew the answer.

“I guess,” she admitted. “Why?”

She turned to watch him now, glad to have the excuse of conversation. The brakes squeaked as they slid to a gradual halt at a red light.

“I want to ask you something,” he said.

Isobel was startled by the abruptness of that statement. It didn’t help that his focus remained forward, either. It gave her that plummeting feeling inside, the one she always got when she knew she was in trouble for something even though she couldn’t think of what. The light turned green, he shifted, and they were moving again.

“Yeah?” she said. She tried to ignore the flood of internal questions that assaulted her, while at the same time, she racked her brain for anything she might have done or said.

“There’s this thing happening on Friday night,” he said, “something that happens every year, but not everybody knows about it.”

Isobel tensed. She turned her head to stare forward, trying her damnedest to keep from turning either ash pale or fire truck red. There was no way this could be happening. He could not possibly be asking her out. It had to be something else. Whatever it was, she knew without a doubt that there was absolutely no way on this earth he could be asking her—

“I want you to go,” he said.

Her mouth popped open. She shut it quickly, before he could see.

“With me,” he added.

There it was.

He shot her a quick glance before pulling past the fountain and into her subdivision, and it was only when she caught a glimpse of her own dumbstruck expression in his glasses that it occurred to her that he was waiting for an answer.

“I—we have a game on Friday,” she said, her mouth seeming to move on its own. The words just jumped out, as though her alter ego, the obsessive cheerleader, had taken upon herself to overthrow all motor skills. For a moment she almost regretted having rejoined the squad that afternoon. Almost.