Renata Santos doesn't expect her heart to flutter when she catches a boy stealing flowers out of her backyard. But as she unravels his reputation, she realizes puppy-eyed delinquent Isaac Marshall may just be the sunshine she needs to turn her life...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
A D O N I S
[adonis aestivalis] ➳ patience.
NO ONE HAD EVER promised to change for me before.
Not even my parents. Two years ago, we'd fought over how often I was allowed to leave the house, and whether or not I had to tell them where I was going. The hour-long argument led nowhere for me, leaving my bruised ego with a tragic eight p.m. curfew and a text-every-time-you-move-addresses rule.
Technically, they wouldn't budge on the laws of the household. But I knew they wouldn't mind if I slipped through the door at eight-fifteen once in a while, or if I forgot to call them before leaving school to go to a friend's house across the street.
Over the years, I bent the rules enough to perforate them, and once I'd poked enough holes into their surfaces they lost their identities. Now my curfew was as long as it's a reasonable hour and I only texted them when I was going somewhere truly sketchy.
And that was how I survived — how I dealt with people and things. I scraped subtly away at their surfaces, testing my patience against theirs, the same way the ocean eroded stones along the shore. I had done it with Anthony all the times I waited out his temper tantrums with parted lips, doing my best to wordlessly convey that he was tearing me apart.
I was doing it now with Jackie every time I winced when she was nice to me, hoping she'd take a hint and sooner or later back off.
I had been hoping to do it with Isaac, but I expected my feelings to fizzle away before I got anywhere with him. He was reckless and impulsive, inattentive and inconsistent. I expected his flaws to eventually overpower my endurance.
I didn't think I liked him enough to withstand many more of his secrets.
But when I stepped into the cafeteria, he was waiting for me at the entryway. He grabbed my hand and pulled me towards our usual table on the edge of the room, throwing down his backpack at the same time he pulled his math textbook and a spiral-bound notebook out of it.
He tossed both books onto the table as I sat down across from him. He flipped through the pages, locating a specific math problem at the end of the chapter eight.
He spun the book around so I could read it. "How do you do this one?"
I snorted softly, taking a bite out of my sandwich as I studied the words on the page. "Are you serious?" I asked. "It's lunch."
Isaac beamed, clearly proud of himself for working so hard and for surprising me. "Yeah. I've been looking through the practice problems. I don't get this one, or number eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-nine..."
He rattled off a few more numbers before I held up a hand. "Okay, one at a time. You know this isn't due for two more weeks, right?"
"Yeah," he repeated, his voice slightly more dejected than before. "But I've been behind for so long. It's kinda nice to be ahead."
