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Want to see something?

I definitely do. Preferably not my parents’ faces. I text him in the affirmative.

Cool. Come out to the glif.

It takes me a second to figure out what he’s saying, since spelling is part of our communication barrier. The petroglyph is one of our little town’s dubious claims to fame, a wall of granite out by one of the streams that an ancient tribe of forever ago carved pictures on. There’s definitely a fish, a couple of concentric circles, and if you look hard you can make out little stick men. The historical society ran a fund-raiser when I was a kid to get a shelter of sorts built over it, and occasionally some stuffy types wander out there to do charcoal rubbings. But in general the glyph is relegated to school field trips, the painstaking effort of someone from thousands of years ago explained to little kids who try to spit in the dead center of the circles.

I head out to the glyph, leaving Mom and Dad behind me, Shanna tucked safely inside, ready to see Isaac. I can feel her quivering, her anticipation sending electric shocks into my fingers and toes. The parking lot is empty in the dying fall light, except for Isaac’s bike, which I park next to. Apparently we’ve got the glyph and the surrounding woods to ourselves, which can only bode well. I smile as I take the path down to the stream, ready for whatever he has in mind.

Which, it turns out, is a picnic.

“Hey, what’s . . .” I fade out, taking in the improbable image of Isaac Harver setting out food on a blanket. “Food” might be stretching it, since it looks like we’ll be dining on gas station subs and Pringles, plus a couple of cans of the cheapest beer in the world. But it’s nice. A weird kind of nice that makes my heart—her heart—stutter as we come closer.

“This is different,” I say, coming up behind him.

“Thought I’d try it.” He smiles at me and pops his can of beer. I sit down next to him, and he opens the other one before handing it to me. All the medical and social reasons not to drink beer leave my mind the second I drink it, leaving me with the most obvious drawback. It tastes awful.

“Cheap stuff, sorry,” Isaac says when he sees my face. “I had to choose between cheap beer and cheap wine, so I thought we’d go with the one that’ll make you piss before the one that makes you puke.”

“That’s lovely,” I tell him. It was supposed to be sarcastic, but it doesn’t come out that way, because the image of him standing in the gas station and trying to decide which crappy drink will cause me the least damage is oddly endearing.

“Do you have a fake ID or something?” I ask him, tearing the plastic wrap off my ham and cheese sub.

“Nope, my cousin was working.”

“Hmmm,” I say around a mouthful of food.

“So I don’t know, I thought . . .” He takes his own swig of beer, then another before finishing his sentence. “I know you had a bad day with the band thing, or whatever. And I thought, maybe this would help.”

It does help; I don’t even want to admit how much. Brooke encouraged me to fight for my spot back, Lilly laid low, and Heath . . . I can’t really remember what he did, other than say things that sounded like there was a teleprompter over my left shoulder. Isaac did something real, broke whatever this twisted routine between us is and took me on something resembling a date.

And I like it.

“I did have a bad day,” I tell him, popping open the Pringles can. “The weekend was, amazingly, even worse.”

He takes half the sleeve of chips from me. “Why’s that?”

“I told my mom about Shanna. I think she kind of . . . saw us.”

Isaac stops midchew. “You shitting me? What’d she say?”

“About you? Not much.” I shrug. “After I told her about Shanna, that kind of took precedence.”

“How’d that go?”

“Like a bull in a china shop,” I tell him, tossing back another swallow of beer.

“Whatever it don’t break, it shits on,” he says, somehow sounding wise.

I laugh. “That pretty much sums up my dad’s reaction.”

I tell him about throwing my dinner, how my parents were fighting when I left. “And my dad’s having an affair,” I add, which wasn’t supposed to come out. The beer might be cheap, but I’ve never been a drinker.

“Sucks,” Isaac says.

“Yeah,” I agree, finishing the last warm drops in the can. “He sucks.”

“My dad would never do that.”