FREE SAMPLE (Ch.1)

I laughed when she said she was Catholic.

It was outlandish. In a world where being even a casual Christian was social suicide, going the extra mile and being Catholic felt flamboyant.

But even funnier was the way she said it, like she was crying “Leprosy! Unclean!” in the marketplace. She hadn’t even offered her name; as soon as she saw me approach, she turned around and threw up that verbal stop sign, palms forward. It was like she was giving me every possible reason to reject her before I even asked her to prom.

I guess the way I sidled up her table at lunch made my intent clear.

I grinned and sat down across from her, slinging one leg over the bench. “Yeah? Well, I’m Pentecostal, which if you ask the Baptists is just as bad.”

She returned my smile and lowered her hands. “Sorry, I just… don’t like to lead people on.”

I doubted she had ever done anything of the sort, but I knew what she meant. I was three rejections into my search for a prom date, and of the three, I thought two of them were Christian.

Apparently they weren’t Christian enough to want to be seen with me. Word had gotten out about the marks I’d gotten on my file for praying for people in the hallway, and it was making it royally hard to find a prom date.

Perhaps an ardent Catholic would be daring enough to give me a chance.

I offered her my hand. “Well, now that we got that out of the way… I’m Thomas.”

It was her turn to laugh as she accepted the shake. “Abigail.”

I held her hand for an extra half-beat to preface my offer. “Can I take you to prom, Abigail?”

She didn’t hesitate. “No.”

I was surprised at the amount of rejection that steamrolled through my body. After all, she hadn’t been my first choice for a date. But as my palms began to sweat and all the other uncomfortable symptoms of puberty radiated through me, I realized how much I was hoping she’d say yes.

I tried to play it cool. “Why not? Did you get a better offer?”

She snorted. “No.”

“Aha! Then that means I’m the best offer.”

She whipped her head around, as surprised as I was by my forwardness.

There was a beat, long enough that I wondered if I’d shot myself in the foot—and then she relaxed and put her chin in her hand. “Maybe you are.”

My pride might have imagined it, but I could have sworn she gave me a once-over with her eyes. I wasn’t chiseled; I cared too much about my grades for that. But I was lean, and just tall enough, and I’d bothered to put gel in my dark hair this morning. Apparently that, combined with my crisp button-up, was doing it for her.

The flattery gave me my courage back. I propped my elbow on the table and leaned towards her. “Well, since I’m currently the highest bidder, is there anything I can do to tempt you to change your mind? Flowers?”

She arched one eyebrow.

“Chocolate?”

Both eyebrows went up.

“Convert to Catholicism?”

She stopped, leaned back, and opened her mouth. I could tell I was about to seal the deal—before a whiny voice interrupted us.

“Hey, who’s this guy?”

Abigail audibly rolled her eyes as a wiry nerd of a middle schooler joined us at the table. I could barely see his face under his mess of unkempt dark hair, but I vaguely recognized him as someone from a few grades below us.

Abigail patronized him with a sigh. “He’s fine, Bart. I said he could sit here.” She hadn’t actually said that—because I hadn’t asked—but I took the compliment.

“Bart, eh?” I said, trying to be a gentleman. “Is that short for something?” I offered my hand.

He stared at it like it was a dead fish. “For you, it’s short for Tower.”

It was a lame comeback, made even lamer by the squeak hormones put in his voice, but I wasn’t about to let a twelve-year-old friendzone me. “Tower? What’s that, your streamer name?”

“Obviously.”

Abigail flicked her hand like he was a fly she could shoo away. “He plays this dumb game with a goat. It doesn’t even have a storyline.”

He tched and tossed his hair, which flopped around like a wet mop. “That’s because it’s a physics simulator, and I have twenty thousand subscribers now. Unlike ‘Blue Fire,’ who has, like, ten.” He jerked his thumb at Abigail.

I arched an eyebrow at her. “‘Blue Fire’?”

“Never mind, I don’t even play.” She coughed to clear the flush from her cheeks, then turned her frown on Bart. “Don’t you have a remedial language class after lunch?”

It was his turn to blush, which made his eyes look even more sunken. “Mom wasn’t supposed to tell you…”

“She told me so that I could make sure you did it. Now go.”

He threw another sour glance at me, as if I was the cause of his misery, and sulked off.

“Sorry, little brothers.” Abigail turned back to me with a shrug.

“Occupational hazard.” I grinned, not that I had any idea what it was like to have siblings. My only brother had died in the war in Asia before I was old enough to appreciate him, but I wasn’t going to burden her with my sob story. “You were telling me when mass was.”

Her eyebrows returned to their locked and upright position. “You were serious about that?”

“Depends on how serious you are about not going to prom with me.”

She weighed me with a sharp gaze, then reached into her backpack and fished out her phone. “What’s your number?”

I was so stunned that I forgot what my digits were. After leaving her hanging for an awkward moment, I pulled myself together and took my phone out of my pocket. I held it out to her so she could tap the back and get a download of my file.

She fidgeted with a strand of her long hair. “Ahh, that feature doesn’t work on mine. It’s… old.”

I could clearly tell that her device wasn’t old, which meant the only other explanation was that it was unregistered.

“Well, aren’t you full of surprises,” I said with a grin. Some cities still allowed adults to have unregistered devices, but the government had long since made it mandatory for students.

She shrugged. “I keep it offline.”

“But why?” Not that I wasn’t in favor of sticking it to the government, but the punishment for possessing an unregistered device on school grounds was suspension. That was a hefty price tag to pay for an offline device.

She scrolled nervously. “I just don’t like them knowing what I’m reading all the time.”

Reading?

I slapped my hand on the table. “It’s you.”

She flinched and cast a glance around the cafeteria, but as usual the cool kids had given us a wide berth.

I dropped my voice and leaned in. “You’re the one who keeps uploading Bibles to the school’s cloud.” The Bible had been banned from the school library because it wasn’t inclusive, but someone kept uploading copies to the database. It was driving the principal insane.

“Me and a couple friends, yeah.” Abigail searched my eyes for a reaction.

“Rebel,” I smirked. Maybe I wasn’t the only one in school with a marked file.

I gave her my number verbally. She smiled shyly as she typed it in. “And what’s the last name, Thomas…?”

“Smyrna,” I answered. “Thomas Smyrna.”