Chapter1
Ariana
My best friend, Jenna Roberts, hung upside down off my bed and jerked her head sideways to catch the popcorn kernel flying toward her open mouth. I laughed when the kernel bounced off her nose and joined the growing pile on my bedroom floor.
“That was your fault!” she yelled. “Try again.”
“Hold up! Hold up!” I struggled to get serious so I could take aim again. “This time for the win.”
“You better!” She lowered her head into position. I tossed. The kernel bounced. “You’re terrible!” she grumbled. “You need to practice your free throws, girl.”
I laughed again and shoved a handful of popcorn into my own mouth instead. “All right. I give up. Anyway, basketball was never my strong suit.”
She giggled, sat up, and smoothed her brown hair into place. “You almost had that last one.”
“Next time you can be the tosser, and I’ll be the basket.”
“You’re a tosser, all right,” she teased. “Doesn’t ‘tosser’ mean a loser in, like, English or something?”
I snorted. “We’re speaking English, you ditz, and ‘tosser’ in my vocabulary means ‘one who tosses.’”
“Then you should be able to calculate the target trajectory and get a piece of popcorn into my mouth. You’re the golden girl, future Miss Harvard. Can’t you come up with a mathematical equation for that?”
“I got into Harvard because I’m smart enough to know better than to hang upside down and try to catch food with my mouth,” I joked.
Jenna snatched a fistful of popcorn out of the bowl and flung it at my head. I howled with laughter and did my pathetic attempt to dodge her missiles, but, of course, I failed.
She giggled along with me until we collapsed in exhaustion. Her expression changed, and she got more serious than I’d seen her in a long time. She heaved a long sigh, and her lips pouted. Come to think of it, she’d been pouting like that ever since I told her I was going to Harvard next year.
I knew she was as excited for me as I was excited for me. She didn’t want to be stuck in boring old Providence, Rhode Island, while I went off to the big city without her.
“Ari,” she complained, “why do you have to go to Harvard anyway? I’m stuck going to stupid community college while you’re going to be making friends with people way richer than me. You’re going to forget all about me.”
She whirled away before I could answer and grabbed the remote. She switched on the TV to a reality show. Her parents were stricter than mine and wouldn’t let her watch TV at home, so she always watched it at my house.
I tried to comfort her. “I’ll come home every weekend. It’s only an hour away.”
“That’s what they all say, but then you’ll be off with your new fancy friends on private jets to Bali every weekend, and I’ll be left watching reruns of some telenovela with my abuela.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “Not going to happen. I’ll either be here with you or studying all weekend.”
“If you say…” The doorbell rang at that moment and interrupted her.
We looked at each other, and I frowned. “That’s weird. I wasn’t expecting anyone today, and my parents aren’t supposed to get home from Europe until Saturday. I wonder who it is.”
I trotted downstairs and squinted through the peephole. It was Mrs. Brown, our sweet, elderly neighbor. I opened the door. “Hi, Mrs. Brown.”
“Oh, Ariana! It’s so lovely to see you, dear! I brought you something.” She waved the local newspaper at me. “I know your parents don’t get the paper.”
“Wow, Mrs. Brown, thanks.” Was this some kind of passive-aggressive move to get my parents to promote the paper? She shouldn’t be landing on our doorstep at this time of day.
I took it and gave her as convincing a smile as I could. I started to shut the door with a friendly, “Bye!”
Then I looked down and saw the front page. My senior portrait gazed back at me under a big, bold heading:Local High School Genius, Ariana Anderson, Receives Perfect SAT Score and Full-Ride Scholarship to Harvard.
“Harvard!” Mrs. Brown squeaked. “Your parents didn’t tell me. That’s wonderful, dear.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Brown.” I tried to hand her back the paper.