Playing Cupid Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Teaser

  About the Author

  Find more reads you will love …

  Copyright

  Emily’s mom dropped us off at the side entrance of the mall. A little shiver went through me as I stepped out of the car. If they noticed, Emily and her mom would probably think the shiver was from the cold winter weather, but it was really a shiver of excitement. Not because I was at the mall. Malls aren’t that great. The shiver was because I was actually hanging out with a friend.

  “I’ll be back for you at five o’clock,” Emily’s mom reminded us.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Schmidt,” I called out.

  “You’re welcome, Clara,” she answered cheerfully.

  “Thanks, Mom.” Emily slid the door of the minivan shut. She waved to her mother through the front window, then we ran inside to get out of the snow.

  “What should we do first?” I asked, stamping my slushy shoes on the slatted floor of the entryway. “Freezies? Up the down escalator? Or the toy store?”

  Emily pushed the button for the sliding door, and our footsteps clicked against the shiny, slick tile floor as we entered the mall. “Let’s do that thing in the food court again. Remember? When you match up the couples?” Emily nodded her head enthusiastically and opened her eyes wide. “You’re, like, psychic or something!”

  I shrugged. It wasn’t that big of a deal. I was just good at people watching, and I noticed things that others didn’t. That was what happened when you were used to spending most of your time alone.

  “Freezies it is!” I said.

  Emily and I made our way to the food court as quickly as possible. Of course, first we stopped in the department store and pretended to be mannequins, then we rode the glass elevator up to the third floor, pointing and acting shocked at some imaginary thing in the distance (we got twelve people to look), and finally we ordered two blue raspberry Freezies and settled in at a corner booth.

  “Okay,” I said, scanning the food court, “that guy, over by the big plant.” I pointed to a teenager wearing earbuds, a knit cap, and a T-shirt that said Haters Gonna Hate. I pointed with my pinkie finger so it wouldn’t be too obvious.

  “I see him,” Emily whispered, nodding.

  I put my cup in front of my mouth to block my lips while I spoke. “He doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

  “How can you tell?” Emily asked. “Maybe she’s on vacation for winter break or something.”

  “No way.” I shook my head. “He’s checking out all the girls his age who walk by. But in a shy, hopeful way. Not like he’s a player. He’s looking for love.”

  Emily sighed like that was the most romantic thing she’d ever heard. I sighed too because I knew where looking for love was going to get him. Heartbreak. I’d seen it happen with my parents and a zillion other people. Somehow, though, most everyone seemed to think love and crushes and flirting and all that stuff were still worth it. I figured if they wanted to set themselves up for pain, who was I to stop them?

  “She’s the one,” I said, nodding my head toward a girl with curly black hair wearing a peasant skirt and big woolly boots.

  Emily smiled, then took a long sip of Freezy. “I can see it,” she said. “Now what?”

  I pressed my fingertips together and thought. “Okay,” I said. “Got it. Let’s go.”

  Emily and I walked over to the girl first. I wasn’t usually too shy about talking to strangers. I actually loved talking to all kinds of people, and that made being the one girl at my old school that nobody wanted to talk to just about the worst thing that could ever happen to me.

  “Excuse me,” I said. The girl had been sketching, and she flipped back the long curtain of curls that had been covering her face to look up at me. “My friend and I are doing a project for school. Extra credit,” I added when she squinted her eyes suspiciously. “Over winter break.”

  The corners of her eyes relaxed, so I continued. “We are trying to see how many things random strangers have in common. We just need to ask you three questions.”

  She put her pen down and said, “Okay, I’m game.”

  I looked at Emily and smiled. She beamed back at me.

  “Great,” I said. “Would you mind stepping over to another table?” I headed toward where Headphone Guy was sitting, and Emily and the curly girl followed me. When the guy noticed me standing there, he pulled out an earbud. I explained about our fake school project and introduced Curly Girl, and he couldn’t agree to participate fast enough. He pulled out the chair next to him for her to sit down.

  “Cats or dogs?” I asked them.

  “Dogs,” they both said at the same time, then they looked at each other and laughed. I turned to Emily and raised an eyebrow. She smiled and nodded.

  “What kind of music do you listen to?” Emily asked next.

  Curly Girl wrapped one of her curls around a finger. “I like a lot of different music,” she said. “Mostly old stuff—Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, Dylan.”

  “Hey!” The guy started laughing. He held the dangling earbud up to curly girl’s ear. She smiled and began bobbing her head. “I’m listening to ‘Three Little Birds’ right now,” he told us. “That’s Bob Marley.”

  I smiled, turned to Emily, and wagged my eyebrows. It was time for the clincher.

  “What’s your favorite movie?”

  “The Matrix,” the guy said. “Definitely.”

  “What?” Curly Girl looked at him, shocked. “I mean, The Matrix was good, but what about Blade Runner?”

  A movie argument? I mentally patted myself on the back: They were practically a couple already. I turned to Emily and whispered, “I think our work here is done.”

  The guy grinned at Curly Girl sheepishly. “I’ve never seen Blade Runner.”

  The girl grabbed his arm and said, “You. Have. To. See. Blade. Runner.”

  I leaned forward over their table to get their attention. “Well, that’s it. Thanks for your help, you guys.”

  Emily and I raced back to our table and sunk down in our seats to watch the love story unfold. Just as I expected, Curly Girl didn’t go back to her spot.

  “You are amazing,” Emily said to me. “Look at how she keeps touching his arm as she talks.”

  “Ooh! They’re exchanging phone numbers!” I high-fived Emily as the guy and girl both got out their phones and began tapping away.

  Fixing up random strangers in the mall didn’t always work. One time, the two people actually got into a food fight, but today my instincts were sharp.

  “Who’s next?” Emily asked, bouncing up and down in her seat. “Can I try to pick someone?”

  “Sure,” I said, my eyes sliding over the food court anyway. “Wait. Isn’t that Alivia?” I pointed to a tall girl with long, pin-straight black hair standing over by the frozen yogurt stand. She was waiting for an even taller girl who resembled her.

  “Where?” Emily squinted as she looked back and forth. “Oh yeah,” she said. “It is! She’s with her sister.”<
br />
  Alivia and Emily were both part of the same friend group. They’d been friends since preschool.

  “Should we say hi, or ask her if she wants to hang with us?” I asked. I’d been eating lunch with them for a few months now, but I was still more Emily’s friend than Alivia’s. I wanted to become closer friends with the whole group, though, and Alivia was their leader.

  “Sure, if you want,” Emily said.

  “Alivia!” I waved across the food court and shouted her name again. “Alivia!”

  That time she saw us. She said something to her sister, then headed over to us.

  “I’m so glad you’re here, you guys,” Alivia said, sitting down at our table and taking a sip of Emily’s Freezy. “My mom made me come to the mall with Miss Perfect. She, like, needs the world to believe the Hawkins sisters are best friends or something.”

  “You don’t like your sister?” I asked. I used to fantasize that my babysitters were really my older sisters. I was an only child with a dad who worked all the time, so having a sibling sounded pretty good to me. The closest I had was a next-door neighbor who came over a lot.

  “She’s the worst!” Alivia said. “Like anything you ever want to wear, she already owns it and it looks amazing on her, and any activity you want to do, she’s already done it, perfectly.”

  “That would be annoying,” I agreed, taking a sip of my Freezy.

  “So, what are you guys doing?” Alivia asked.

  “We were playing Cupid,” I said.

  Alivia’s eyes sparkled. “For who? Are Logan and Mateo and all those guys here?” Now it was her turn to search the food court. She turned back to me and lowered her voice. “I have a feeling one of them is going to ask me out when we get back to school.”

  “Who?” I asked, leaning forward. Alivia was actually sharing a secret with me. That was a good sign.

  Alivia bit her bottom lip. “I can’t tell you. I don’t want to jinx it.”

  “Clara is really good at fixing people up,” Emily told Alivia. “She can pick two random strangers and make them a couple in, like, five seconds.”

  “Cool. So, the guys aren’t here?” Alivia asked. Emily shook her head, and Alivia huffed a breath. “Maybe they’re by the sports store. Let’s go shop.”

  “But I think you’d really like playing Cupid,” Emily told her. “It’s so fun.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m good with shopping.”

  “Great,” Alivia said.

  “Oh. Okay. I just have to go to the bathroom.” Emily stood up. “I’ll be right back,” she said. Alivia took Emily’s drink and pulled it to her side of the table as Emily walked off.

  She leaned forward. “I’m not trying to say anything mean,” Alivia told me in a low voice, “but lately, I feel like Emily doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of my friends, you know?”

  I swallowed. I didn’t know. “Really?” I asked.

  “I mean, we used to be best friends, but lately it seems like we don’t have anything in common.” Alivia tossed some of her hair back over her shoulder. “We just, like, have different standards.”

  I ran my hand over my wavy dark hair, hoping it met Alivia’s standards.

  “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not sure I see us staying friends forever.” She raised her eyebrows and pointed her chin to where Emily was walking back toward us. “We’re just so different. See what I mean?”

  I studied Emily, trying to figure it out. She wore stretchy black leggings and a zipper hoodie. It was practically the same outfit Alivia was wearing, except Alivia was tall and thin and Emily was short and round, so it looked sort of different. But they both looked great to me.

  “I’m back,” Emily said when she reached our table. “Are you guys ready?”

  “Totally.” Alivia stood up. “We should look for outfits for my party next weekend. My mom said I could invite the guys’ group.”

  “I’ll probably just wear what I always wear,” Emily said, “but I’m happy to help you look.”

  Emily bounded off ahead of us, and Alivia bumped shoulders with me. “You’ll look for outfits with me, right?”

  I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Nope, I was really and truly shopping with friends. “Absolutely,” I said. “I love getting dressed up.”

  The logs in the fire crackled, and I shifted so that I could lean against the arm of the couch. Normally I loved watching the fireplace with Papi on a cold wintery Sunday afternoon, but today it wasn’t so fun. Papi held my report card in both hands. It had arrived in the mail two weeks ago, but I guessed we still weren’t finished discussing it.

  “Mija, I don’t understand. I know you can do better than this.” My father rubbed his hand against his forehead.

  “I know, Papi, I’ll do better this semester, I promise.”

  “It’s important to do well in school.” He started his familiar refrain, and I shifted in my seat again. I knew his lecture by heart I’d heard it so many times. “If you don’t get good grades, you won’t go to college. I know you are only in seventh grade, but it’s not too young to work hard.”

  “I know, Papi, I will.”

  “Your mother didn’t go to college after high school,” he told me for the millionth time. “If she had gone to college before we got married, maybe she could have been happy. She could have known what she wanted to do. Education is the most important thing.”

  I never knew what to say to my father when he started on this speech. It’s not that I didn’t agree with him. I knew good grades were important, but if my mother had gone to college first, I never would have been born, and sometimes it seemed like my father thought that might be a good thing.

  “Papi, trust me, por favor. I’ll do better, okay?”

  I shifted again and glanced out the window. Joey, our next-door neighbor, was climbing out of the back of a green minivan. He wore a puffy black coat, a black ski cap, and thick black gloves. Before I could stop and think about what I was doing, I jumped up and ran to the door. “I’ll be right back,” I called to Papi, opening the door and stepping out into the freezing cold.

  I slid across the front porch in the new green ballet flats I’d bought with Alivia. I should have put on my boots. My toes were probably going to go numb. I went carefully down the stairs and skated across my front walkway to meet Joey in the middle of the driveway we shared.

  “Hey, stranger,” I said. I hadn’t seen him for all of winter break. His family had driven down to Florida. “You’re back.”

  “Hey,” Joey said, looking at my shoes. “I’m not sure if you noticed,” he said, “but it’s winter outside.”

  “Ha-ha.” I wrapped my arms tightly around my body to control my shivers. “It’s not that cold.”

  Joey laughed. “Right,” he said, drawing the word out slowly. “It’s not cold at all.” He reached down, grabbed a big handful of snow, and patted it into a snowball. “You look like you feel warm and toasty. You and all your new friends are so cool, I bet winter feels like a heat wave.”

  “Don’t be that way. They’re nice. You just have to get to know them.” I reached down and grabbed my own handful of snow, to prove he was wrong about the cold. And everything else. Instantly my fingers started to sting.

  “No thanks,” he said. “I have no interest in getting to know them.”

  “They can’t help it if other people are jealous of them.”

  Joey raised his eyebrows at me, and it made his glasses tilt crookedly across his chocolaty brown eyes. He shrugged one shoulder. “I’m definitely not jealous of them.” He dropped his snowball on the ground, then shook the excess snow off his gloves. “I’m freezing. I better get inside.”

  I’m not sure why, but I felt disappointed, even though part of me wanted to go inside too. My ears practically had frostbite, and I could smell the cozy fire from my chimney. I guess I didn’t want to go back to my dad’s lecture.

  I grinned, cocking back my snowball arm. “What’s the matter? You chi
cken? Guess the older brother I never wanted can’t take the heat or the cold.”

  I expected Joey to grin back at me. Maybe even joke that I was the little sister he’d never wanted. I expected him to lunge at me and knock the snowball out of my hand. But instead he shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat. “Brother? I don’t think so.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Okay, fine, cousin, neighbor, whatever.”

  Joey pursed his lips at me. “Neighbor,” he said. “Let’s stick with neighbor.”

  “Neighbor and longtime snowball-fight nemesis!” I shouted, letting my snowball fly right at his head. He easily ducked out of the way. The snowball hit the pavement behind him and splattered.

  “Nice try,” he said, laughing. “But you’ll never ambush me. I know what you’re thinking before you do.”

  “Oh, really?” I arched an eyebrow at him. “So what am I thinking right now?”

  Joey’s smile spread slowly across his face. “Easy. You’re thinking I’ll never be able to guess what you’re thinking.”

  “That’s so not fair!” I started to shout, but then I heard a knock at the window behind me, and I jumped. It was Papi.

  “Shoot! I told my father I’d come right back inside.” I wondered how long I’d have to listen to the “don’t turn out like your mother” speech. The funny thing was, Papi thought the way to keep me safe was to make sure I went to college and figured out what I wanted to do, but I knew something he didn’t know. I’d never turn out like my mother because I was never going to fall in love. If she’d been practical instead of romantic, she’d have saved all of us a whole bunch of trouble. But she was still that way: Every summer when I went to visit her, she was either just beginning a new love or just getting over another broken heart.

  “I guess I’ll see you later, then.” Joey took a step toward his house, giving me a small half wave.

  I took a step after him. “Did you want to come in?” I asked. “To my house?”

  He wrinkled his eyebrows and tilted his head. “You want me to come over?”

  “Why are you acting so surprised? You come over all the time.”

  He shook his head. “Not lately. Not since you started going to Austen. You’d think we’d see each other more often since we’re at the same school.”