Chapter 1

Luke

My mom’s voice stopped me just as I reached the door. “Are you going out?”

What does it look like? I bit back the snarky response as I hovered in the doorway, one foot out in the world. This close to freedom. I needed to escape. My home had gone from strict to smothering this summer. Why the change?

My dad.

Or rather, my dad’s sudden interest in me and my future. But it wasn’t my mom’s fault that my dad was a jerk. Or maybe it was. She was the one who married him, thereby making him my father. But no use crying over spilt milk, right? I forced a smile. “I won’t be out late.”

Lie.

I likely would be out late. Late enough for my dad to be asleep, at least.

Her smile was sad but her voice was all forced and chipper. “I’m sure you and your friends want to celebrate your last weekend before senior year begins.”

I nodded. Yeah, sure. I mean, that was likely true for a lot of my friends. It was Labor Day weekend, after all, and this upcoming Wednesday marked the first day of school. I’d gotten a text from Joel, one of the football guys, letting me know that his parents were out of town so he was having some people over.

I knew who would be there. The same crowd as always. Joel’s buddies from the football team and girls. Lots of girls. Not to brag, but I’d already hooked up with every hot, available girl in our school—barring the ones who wanted a serious boyfriend, of course—so the prospects were limited at best. At worst, I was heading into a party fraught with drama. One or two of my more recent exes were drama queens and I had no doubt that with some alcohol added to the mix there was a good possibility for tears. In my defense, I never made promises I couldn’t keep. Not exactly a bid for knighthood, I know, but I liked to think I had my own moral code.

The party would be filled with the usual crew, minus my best friend. Jason wouldn’t show tonight. I’d already talked to him earlier today and he was on strict curfew. Not from his parents. He’d set it himself to make sure he was alert and ready to lead his team at football practice in the morning.

See, now that was why I’d never want to be team captain—not that the basketball coach or my teammates had ever mentioned nominating me. We all knew who the royal butt-kissers were on the team. I’d never be one of those guys who’d do all the extra team-building crap that the captains were forced to do. No, thanks.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” I said to my mom, leaning over to give her a peck on the cheek.

“Have fun tonight,” she called out.

I gave her a wave over my shoulder as I headed to my car. Here was the sad truth of the matter. I didn’t even feel like going out. I definitely wasn’t in the mood for a party. Not because I was so above it all. I wasn’t. I liked to party as much as the next guy—unless that next guy was Jason because I definitely enjoyed parties more than my uptight, morally superior best friend.

But I was tired from working at the ski lodge all day. During the summer the lodge stayed open for hikers and I’d been working there part-time for the past few years. On top of that, I’d finished up one of the summer reading assignments.

Sure, maybe I hadn’t done all the reading, but I’d been trying.

Sort of.

Not enough, according to my dad. So, on top of being tired from work and summer homework—an extra special form of torture for us Grover High students—my exhaustion was exacerbated a million times over by having to go yet another round with my father over dinner tonight.

The topic was the same one we’d been fighting over all summer. My future. Or, more precisely, the lack thereof.

You have no future, he’d shouted. It’s your own fault. You don’t try. You don’t work for anything. When’s the last time you applied yourself?

See now, here’s the thing. I really wasn’t that bad of a student. No matter how you looked at it, my grades were…well, they were average. Solid B’s and C’s across the board. Nothing to brag about, unlike my honor society sister who’d gone off to Yale three years ago, but it wasn’t like I was failing out either. And then there was basketball. Sure, I wasn’t a star player like my older brother had been back in his day, but I played for the varsity team and I’d never let the team down.

But none of that meant anything because compared to my siblings I was a failure.

There were tons of cars parked along Joel’s street when I pulled up but I still found a spot across from his house. I sat there in my car for a while, listening to the music that was blaring from his side of the street.

In case you couldn’t tell by all that whining, I was definitely not in the mood for a party. But give me a beer or two—or maybe four—and I’d snap out of it.

I opened my car door and headed toward the noise with a weary sigh. To be honest, I’d rather be sitting in my bedroom listening to music and playing MageLand. Was it a dorky online interactive video game? Why yes. Yes, it was.

But I wasn’t embarrassed. I mean, maybe I would have been if anyone knew. But they didn’t, and I didn’t go around announcing the fact that my preferred pastime these days involved sitting alone at home playing what was basically a more elaborate, tech-savvy version of Dungeons & Dragons.

I had a reputation to protect, after all, and it wasn’t exactly sexy to talk about video games when hitting on girls, and this particular game was hard to make sexy even to most gamer geeks. I’d only gotten into it last spring out of sheer boredom on those nights when there were no parties to attend and a house filled with fatherly censure to avoid.

Hiding out in my room tended to work pretty well when I was looking to stay off my dad’s radar. But I’d learned the hard way that after a fight like tonight’s my father would be more pissed than ever if he found me ‘wasting my life away on a game.’ His words, obviously.

I tended to play at the same time of day, mainly late at night, and I’d found that a lot of the same people showed up around then. Next thing you knew I had a crew. A tribe. One gamer in particular had even become a friend—Prince Z.

It was always way more fun to play when she was giving me hell. My father might not expect much from me but Prince Z definitely did. She was always our team leader because she was the best strategist, by far. The girl was scary in her knowledge of tactical warfare.

Scary and badass, and she had a wicked sense of humor once you got to know her. Our one-on-one chats had become the highlight of my summer, way more entertaining than tipsy small-talk at parties like this one. Pathetic as it might sound, right now I would’ve preferred to be talking smack with Prince Z online than chatting up the giggly drunk girls who were bound to be at Joel’s party.

But even if my father hadn’t driven me out of the house, Prince Z hadn’t been online all day, I’d checked. And yes, despite the name, Prince Z was definitely a girl. I’d found that out the hard way at the start of summer when we’d gone off on one of our never-ending online chats—MageLand had an instant messenger feature built in so we can talk battle strategies, but in our case, Prince Z and I tended to get sidetracked and talk about all kinds of random topics. On that particular day we’d been talking girls.

No, I’d been talking girls. After some awkward silences Prince Z finally informed me that he was in fact a she, and she had little experience with girls in that sense since she was not a lesbian.

Yeah. Not my finest hour. About two weeks later after I’d annoyed the crap out of her with my unceasing questions I finally got her to admit where the Prince Z moniker had come from—Princess Zelda. As in The Legend of Zelda. That girl was such a dork. Of course, then I’d had to admit where my handle had come from. Let’s just say explaining that Data was my favorite character from The Goonies had been a humbling moment. My love of The Goonies was hardly an everyday topic of conversation, and definitely not with girls. But then, Prince Z wasn’t like other girls, and it had led to an epically long and ever ongoing conversation about the beauty of old movies and TV shows.

Anyway, all of this was to say that my online bestie was a no-show today and even if she’d been around my father would have given me hell if he’d found me playing video games rather than reading or studying or whatever it was he seemed to think I should be doing during my last remaining days of freedom.

“Dude, you made it,” Joel shouted at me when I came out to his back patio where half the football team was hanging out with what looked to be the entire cheerleading squad.

“I made it,” I said. I took the beer his buddy Ryan tossed my way.

Joel held up his phone. “Trying to get your boy Jason to stop being a loser and get over here.”

The music from his speakers had him shouting. It had everyone shouting. “Tell him to get his lame butt over here,” I shouted back.

But as I took another step outside, I realized that it wasn’t Joel’s music that was causing all the noise. There was another party happening at the house next door.

“What’s going on over there?” I asked the group at large. Cara Snyder, AKA mean girl extraordinaire, was the one to answer me. Her sharply cut black bob swung around her misleadingly sweet features as she sneered. “Check it out. The losers are trying to party.”

I’ll admit it, I was intrigued. I headed over to the low fence that separated Joel’s house from his neighbor. “Who lives here?”

“Suzie Bryers,” Joel said. His voice was filled with laughter. “Her brother’s having a party and Suzie is freaking out.” He still had his phone in hand but wasn’t talking into it. I wondered if Jason was still hanging out on the other end. Probably not. He was probably off reading or sleeping. Lame.

I’d actually heard about her brother’s party. He was on my basketball team and I’d gotten a few texts about it. I wasn’t a big fan of Dale Bryers, though. He was the kind of jock who gave athletes a bad name. Kind of like Joel. They took all the clichés seriously and strove to live up to them.

Joel, Cara, and some of my other friends were no better but they were in my class and I’d known them forever so I could kind of put up with their less-than-stellar personalities. Dale was younger than us, in a different grade, and he moved in different circles. Teammate or not, he was definitely not a friend.

I leaned against the railing of Joel’s patio as I took in the scene before me on the other side of the hedge.

Holy crap.

I could see why Joel and his buddies were amused. Despite the never-ending supply of beer and girls, our crowd of friends had fallen into a rut when it came to parties. That was half the reason I hadn’t wanted to show. It was the same group of people talking about the same boring topics. It had gotten old, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. I mean, Jason didn’t even bother going to these things anymore. But this…

I stared in fascination as Suzie Bryers—cute, shy little Suzie—turned beet red with rage as she screamed at her brother. I couldn’t hear what she was saying over the music but she was clearly yelling and her red curls were flying around her like some sort of warrior banner on a battlefield as she chased after him.

“So pathetic,” one of the cheerleaders said from beside me. That was when I realized I wasn’t the only one who was watching this show.

Pathetic? I watched little, unassuming Suzie stomp across her patio in bare feet and a drenched T-shirt. More like adorable.

I found myself grinning, unable to tear my eyes away from her. Who would have known that the girl we’d all thought was meek and shy had a temper?

The same cheerleader kept talking. “Does she really think anyone wants to see her half naked like that?”

I snapped my head to the side to look at her. What?

One of the guys chimed in. “I’m not complaining.” This hilarious comeback led to some guy laughter that made me cringe. That was when I noticed Margo. The queen bee of the band geeks was chasing after Suzie in an itty-bitty black bikini that left absolutely nothing to the imagination.

As hot as she might look in the bikini, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Suzie for long. Especially not with what came next.

“No way,” one of the football players behind me said in a low drawl.

The reaction was pretty much unanimous. Even my jaw hung open at the sight of Suzie Bryers doing a kegstand.

The moment ended quickly enough but the commentary went on way too long. I heard the jeers, the taunts, the laughter. I heard it but I ignored it—especially Joel who was finding this way too funny.

I mean, yeah, sure. It had been a little amusing, and shocking for sure, but it was also more than a little concerning. I stood there and watched a dazed-looking Suzie as Margo came up to her and then hurried her into the house.

I kept watching the door where they’d disappeared, not like a creeper or anything but because worry nagged at me. My sister was a lightweight and I’d never forget the call from the hospital when she was taken to the ER to have her stomach pumped after she’d partied too hard.

That had been the beginning and the end of my perfect sister’s rebellious phase.

So yeah, I always got a little concerned when people drank too much—particularly girls. And especially petite, skinny little things like Suzie Bryers.

The party next door went on as normal. Dale and his friends didn’t seem to care that his sister had disappeared inside. Her friends were in there with her so I shouldn’t care either.

I headed back to my own party but I kept stealing glances at the neighbor’s house. No sign of her. After a few minutes, I gave up pretending. What would it hurt to check up on her?

I didn’t feel weird about heading over to their side of the fence. I mean, I had been invited. I even got a wave and a head nod from Dale when he saw me cross the patio toward his place. He didn’t try to stop me and I let myself right into the house.

Okay, at that point I felt a little weird. The party was all taking place outside and the inside of their house seemed weirdly quiet after all the noise going on by the pool. I looked around the pristine white living room and told myself I was being ridiculous. Suzie had her friends. She didn’t need me checking up on her.

But my feet were already taking me toward the hallway that looked like it led to the bedrooms. I heard voices.

I should go back.

I moved forward instead. I’d just make sure they didn’t need a ride to the hospital or something. I’d barely even had a sip of beer yet and they might need a designated driver or something.

That’s when I heard someone throwing up.

Oh crap, that couldn’t be good.

I took a step into the bedroom where the noise was coming from. It was a girl’s room, that much was clear by the pink, girlie walls, but the pink was the only giveaway. Everything else in the room was far from girlie.

There was a closed door to my left and from behind it I heard hushed voices and another round of retching. I winced on her behalf, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I was too shocked by the posters that graced Suzie’s walls.

This had to be Suzie’s room, right? I mean, the walls were pink. Dale Bryers definitely didn’t strike me as a dude who had pink walls.

I walked up to one of the several posters for MageLand, which was next to a poster of Final Fantasy, which was next to a poster of The Legend of Zelda.

As far as I knew, Suzie and Dale were the only kids in this house, which meant….

No way.

There was no way. I’m not proud to admit it, but I walked further into the room. And no, I’ve never considered myself a creeper before. This was officially a first for me. I wasn’t proud of myself, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk away either.

What could I say? I was intrigued.

I headed toward the desk. There was a copy of Catcher in the Rye next to her laptop. Yup, definitely Suzie’s room—it looked like she was in my same English class again this year because that was part of our required reading. I picked it up to look at it and then tossed it back down. The book grazed one of the laptop keys when it landed and the computer lit up, coming to life.

Way to be smooth and incognito, dude.

Suzie or Margo could come out of that bathroom at any moment; I had to get out of there. I started to turn away from the desk but the image now glowing on the laptop held me hostage. I stood there frozen at the familiar sight of MageLand’s homepage.

Holy crap. Suzie played too?

I shook my head. Of course she did. It was probably weirder that I played. I mean, it was a nerdy game, and if Suzie was into games, which she clearly was, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that she’d be into this one.

But it did. I was officially shocked. Because MageLand wasn’t your average, run-of-the-mill game. It had been created by an indie company and wasn’t marketed all over the place the way the bigger games were. It had a cult following online but it wasn’t one that everyone knew about and certainly not one that everyone played.

I couldn’t help myself. A voice in my head was shouting at me to walk away but I just had to peek. I leaned in closer and saw it, the flashing cursor next to the personalized log-in. Ready to play again, Prince Z?

I don’t know how long I stood there gaping. Too long. My brain was racing to make sense of this, to try and reconcile the quiet, shy, meek girl who’d been all but invisible in our classes over the years with the snarky, pushy ball-buster I knew online.

The sound of a guy’s voice calling out Margo and Suzie’s names finally snapped me out of my fog. I recognized the voice. Matt Cartwright, another one of our classmates and Suzie’s other best friend.

A surge of adrenaline had me racing out into the hallway and back out the way I’d come. It was ridiculous, really. The flood of fear over potentially being seen coming out of Suzie’s room was on par with being caught robbing a bank. I was just checking up on a classmate. No big deal.

Nope, not a big deal at all. That didn’t stop my heart from pounding in my chest as I narrowly avoided a run-in with Matt who’d just come in from another entrance.

Once outside I stopped by the pool. “You need a beer, man?” Dale asked. He didn’t seem to notice or care that I’d just come from inside his house.

I shook my head. “Nah, thanks.”

Years of experience were the only reason I was able to play it cool as I headed back toward my party. What else was I supposed to do? I couldn’t go home. My dad wasn’t asleep yet. And Suzie…I glanced back over my shoulder. Well, there was still a chance that she might need me.

Probably not, but there was a chance.

Or maybe she’d come back outside and join the party after she got the beer out of her system.

Yeah, I didn’t really believe that one either.

Either way, I stuck around and waited on the off chance that I’d get a glimpse of her again. Suzie.

Prince Z.

I shook my head, still unable to get it through my head that they were one and the same. I sipped a beer and half-listened to the conversations going on around me as I watched Suzie’s house in case she reappeared. What was I supposed to do with this information?

Should I tell her? I mean, Prince Z was my friend, right?

But Suzie…well, I couldn’t actually remember the last time we’d talked. We had to have had some interactions. Our school wasn’t that big and we’d been in the same class since kindergarten. Surely we’d had conversations… I just couldn’t think of any off the top of my head.

I guess I couldn’t really say that Suzie and I were friends. And even if we were, what would I say? Oh, by the way, I was creeping around in your room the other night and guess what I found out?

No. I didn’t think so.

The more I thought this through the worse it seemed, because here was the thing—I didn’t want to lose my friendship with Prince Z. Sure it was only an online friendship but these days I had more in common with my online gamer friend than I did with most of my real-life friends.

Hell, even Jason seemed to be on a different wavelength these days. He and everyone else I knew was all focused on their futures. Suddenly senior year hit and all anyone could talk about was their plans for college. Even Joel was obsessed with impressing college scouts. The closer we got to graduation the more single-minded everyone else became. They all seemed to have it figured out—where they wanted to go to school, what they wanted to study. Everybody around me was fixated on the future.

As for me? I was pretty sure my dad was right. I didn’t have one.

Prince Z was the only friend I had who didn’t seem to know that. We rarely talked about the future because when I talked to her it was all about the now. Even when talk of the future did come up, she seemed to take it for granted that I’d be okay, even when I’d spelled it out for her that I didn’t have anything figured out. She’d pointed out that I didn’t have to have it all figured out yet, that I just had to focus on the things that made me happy, the stuff that made me feel alive. What that was, I didn’t know, but she seemed to think that I’d figure it out.

Prince Z was the bright spot in an otherwise bleak home life. Our chats were what I looked forward to all day when I was at work. She was the one person who pushed me, who I could always count on, who made me laugh…

And all this time that girl had been Suzie Bryers?

Nope. Still didn’t compute.

I couldn’t see the Prince Z in Suzie…or the Suzie in Prince Z?

By the time I left Joel’s party, safe in the knowledge that my parents and their lectures would be fast asleep, I had my answer.

There was only one thing for it. I needed to get to know Suzie.

The real Suzie.