“Can’t,” I said. “I’m beat and we have a Physics test on Monday. Kinda hoping for something better than a B on this one.” More accurately I needed an A to make up for the F Maddy scored me last week.

Josh shrugged, the slight bit of hope I’d seen in his eyes fading away. “Sent my application in this morning. You finish yours?”

“Yup. I submitted it before I left. Now we wait.”

Josh laughed. We had planned this since the middle of freshman year. We’d submit our applications on the same day, to the same schools, then start obsessing about it four weeks out. When the e-mails finally came, we’d meet up and compare them. We’d go together or not at all. If one of us didn’t get in, then, as far as we were concerned, neither of us did.

“Yeah, now we wait.” He held the door open for me, and we walked in. It took a minute, but once I got used to the smell, it wasn’t so bad. The house wasn’t overly crowded, but that didn’t make it any easier to get around. Nobody got out of our way, and we had to weave around people, furniture, and the occasional nasty glare to make our way through the living room.

“No Kim?” I asked, smirking. She’d been clingy lately, complaining that he spent too much time with me and not enough with her. I didn’t see the problem; neither did Josh, but then again I wasn’t the one dating a sophomore.

“Nope, seniors only, according to Alex,” he said, and I gathered from his tone that Kim’s absence wasn’t bothering him. He’d spent the entire day with her while I was holed up in my room finishing the sketches for my RISD application. Knowing him, he was probably looking forward to some time without her.

I made my way through the house, irked when I saw some kid point in my direction and scowl. I could look and act exactly like my sister if I wanted to, had done it for years. But here, when I was being myself, I was a nothing.

“She was in the kitchen last time I saw her,” Josh said as he pointed to the far side of the house. “But that was a while ago.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Why didn’t you offer to bring her home?”

“She never asked,” he said, and I heard the inference in his voice. He would gladly have given Maddy a ride home … had she asked.

I couldn’t help but look around as we made our way through the house. My sister had been dating Alex since freshman year, and I’d never once set foot in here. I’d picked her up at the end of the driveway plenty of times, had made it as far as the front door to ring the bell. But not once, before tonight, had I been invited in.

I scanned the room, wondering what made this kid so special. If it was there, I didn’t see it. His house may have been bigger than ours, but the furniture looked no more expensive. The iPod docking station on the table looked to be a few years old. Mine was better.

I spotted the shadow of a girl curled up on the couch. She looked vaguely familiar, like someone I would’ve recognized instantly had the lights in the room not been so dim.

She sniffled and ran her sleeve across her nose. I followed her gaze to the far wall, wondering what had her so entranced. The wall was blank except for the giant flat screen mounted halfway up, and that was off.

“She okay?” I asked Josh.

“Who? Molly?” he asked. “I guess so. I talked to her earlier, asked her if she wanted a ride home or something. She said she was fine and wanted to be left alone.”

I thought about confirming that for myself. As soon as I found Maddy, I was leaving anyway. I could drop her off. I made a mental note to check and see if she was still there before I left, then headed into the next room.

The kitchen was at the far end of the house and doubled as beer central. There was a keg on the floor, tucked into a brown trash barrel that I presumed was filled with ice. Two coolers stood by the sliding door and what was left of several pizzas littered the counter. There were people everywhere—jammed into the small corner between the refrigerator and the pantry, sitting on the counters, leaning against walls. They’d dragged the dining room chairs in so that they could fit twelve people around the table that housed a bunch of plastic cups and what looked like a Ping-Pong ball.

I scanned the room twice looking for Maddy, listening for the sound of her voice. Placing my hands on Josh’s shoulders, I hoisted myself up so I could see, and still no sign of my sister.

“She’s not here,” I said as I glanced at my watch. So much for my back-in-bed-in-less-than-a-half-hour plan.

Josh looked around the room himself before moving toward a kid by the door. “You seen Maddy Lawton around?”

The kid looked at us, then opened the cooler. He dug around in the slush before pulling out a hard lemonade. His eyes met mine and he smirked, no doubt too drunk to figure out that I was not my sister. I remembered him from Maddy’s Spanish class. Keith something or other. He sat next to her and had asked if “she” wouldn’t mind sharing the answers to the oral exam I’d taken. I batted my eyes, and in my best Maddy voice said, “Absolutely, darling. Anything for you,” then wrote the wrong answers down and slid them toward the edge of my desk. He winked and quickly memorized them, never once questioning who I was. Idiot.

Josh caught Keith’s look and clarified. “This is Ella,” he said. “We’re trying to find Maddy.”

“Ha! Well, that explains why she looks like crap,” Keith said as he walked away, not offering to help.

I glanced down at myself, thought maybe I was wearing mismatched shoes or had a big pizza stain on my sweatshirt. I had on an old pair of jeans, a plain gray hoodie, and an equally dull jacket, and nothing was grossly wrong with any of them. Sneakers matched, too, so maybe it was my hair. I’d quickly tossed it into a ponytail before I left, then tucked it up under my hat. Perhaps I should have actually brushed it.

Josh caught my hand as I went to smooth my hair. “You look fine. He’s just being a jerk.”

Not wanting Josh to know how much the drunk kid’s comments hurt, I tried for a smile. I doubted I had pulled it off.

“I wasn’t lying, you look fine,” Josh said again. “You always do.”

I shook my head and watched as Keith stopped a few feet away and bent down to whisper something into a girl’s ear. She turned around, her gaze raking over me. Crap, Jenna.

She walked over, a beer in one hand and the drunk kid’s hand locked in the other. The disgusted scowl she reserved for me was firmly in place. “What are you doing here?” Jenna asked. “I strongly doubt you are on the guest list.”

“Where’s Maddy?” I asked, ignoring her comment.

“She’s gonna flip when she finds out you’re here. God, it is bad enough she has to deal with you at school, but here…” She shook her head and trailed off, unable to find the exact words to describe her hatred of me.

“Whatever. Where’s Maddy?”

I followed Jenna’s eyes to the ceiling and groaned. It would be exactly like my sister to call me in a tizzy, then suck down two more beers and forget about everything. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Jenna giggled, her hand playing with the blond hair at the back of the drunk kid’s neck. She was amazing, could go from mean girl to flirt at a staggeringly impressive speed. Yeah … me, I didn’t find it amusing.

“You want to check upstairs?” Josh asked, motioning toward the stairs.

“Uh … no,” I said, remembering the one time I walked into Maddy’s room unannounced to retrieve the calculator she’d “borrowed” from me. Mom was out at book club and Dad still wasn’t home from work, otherwise I doubt Alex would’ve even set foot in Maddy’s room. Dad made sure both Alex and Maddy knew the rule—no boys upstairs if my parents weren’t home and even when they were, the door had to stay open. Wide open. That night the door was closed, and I got more of a view of Alex than I ever wanted.