When I went to meet West at my Jeep after school, he wasn’t there. Since he liked to be everywhere early, I figured he must have stayed after class to talk to someone. No big deal. It was a sunny fifty degrees, and being outside after being trapped in classrooms all day felt good. I leaned against my bumper, pulled out my phone, clicked on the Kindle app, and lost myself in a story about shape-shifting dragons.

People shuffled past me, and cars pulled out of the lot. Haze from the gravel dust drifted through the air and landed on my screen. I wiped my phone with my shirt. A thread poked out from the end of my sleeve. I wrapped it around my index finger twice and then tugged, breaking it off.

“Why did you do that?” West asked.

I glanced up. He approached with a frown on his face. “Why did I do what?”

“Pull out the thread on your sleeve.” He grabbed my hand and turned it palm up, pointing at the shirt cuff, which looked off kilter. “You pulled the thread and now it’s uneven.”

West held my hand in a familiar way and didn’t seem to think anything about it. I’d hugged him once before, but this skin-to-skin contact caused butterflies to flit around in my stomach.

“I guess you’re right,” I said. “But stray threads make me crazy.”

“It would be a shame to ruin this,” he narrowed his eyes at my shirt. “Are those snitches on your shirt?”

“Yes. Snitches and brooms. But you only notice if you stare; otherwise, it looks like a pattern.”

“You’re one of those people who dreams about going to Hogwarts, aren’t you?”

“Do you mean the real Hogwarts or the amusement park, because the answer to both is yes.”

“I’m sure your owl was blown off course in a storm.” He released my hand. “Do you mind if we run an errand on the way home? My dad wants me to pick something up from the hardware store.”

“If I said it wasn’t okay, would you change your plans?” I asked, just to be contrary.

“Do you have somewhere you need to be?” he asked.

“No. People say, ‘If that’s okay with you’ all the time. Rarely does anyone say, ‘No, that’s not okay.’ So I was just messing with you because I wanted to see how you’d react. You know, testing the balance of the universe and all that.”

West shook his head, but he was smiling while he did it. A smile that made my heart rate kick up a notch.

“Get in the Jeep, Luna,” he said.

***