Page 1 of Wild Card 13

PROLOGUE

LUCY - THEN

“Ihate this,” Ty Burns groaned across the library table like he had been sentenced to hard labor instead of asked to study for biology.

I looked up slowly from my flash cards. “Coach is not going to let you play Thursday if you fail tomorrow’s test.”

“I’ll pass.” The smirk stretching across his face did absolutely nothing for my confidence in him.

Around us, the Northbend High library hummed with midterm panic. Chairs scraped against old tile floors. Someone whispered too loudly near the nonfiction shelves. A printer jammed somewhere behind the circulation desk while Mrs. Jensen muttered the kind of threats only librarians and kindergarten teachers ever perfected.

Outside, snow drifted lazily past the tall windows in soft white streaks beneath the parking lot lights. Minnesota winter had settled fully over Northbend weeks ago, coating everything in frozen quiet and dirty roadside snowbanks taller than some freshmen.

Ty sprawled farther back in his chair, hockey hoodie half-zipped, one long leg stretched beneath the table while he tapped his pencil against the edge of my notebook with the steady rhythm of someone born incapable of sitting still.

“You’re distracting yourself on purpose,” I informed him.

“I’m multitasking.” He grinned.

Unfortunately, that grin had become a problem recently. A small,annoying, persistent problem that had started somewhere between our fourth tutoring session and the afternoon he’d stolen my mechanical pencil, tucked it behind his ear, and spent twenty minutes pretending not to know where it went while I threatened violence across the cafeteria.

There was no reason for either of us to tolerate the other.

Ty Burns was loud. Reckless. Chronically late. One of those hockey boys who somehow traveled in packs through the hallways like migrating geese wearing varsity jackets.

I liked libraries and sketchbooks and quiet coffee shops downtown where nobody bothered me while I read. Ty liked slap-shotting empty soda cans into garbage bins and chirping at every living person within a ten-mile radius. And yet somehow, over the last two months, he had slowly crawled his way under my skin anyway. Which was deeply irritating.

“Come on,” he sighed dramatically, letting his head fall backward toward the ceiling. “It’s too nice out to be stuck in this dusty old place.”

I blinked at him. “Too nice?”

He gestured vaguely toward the windows. “Snowing.”

“That is not how weather works.”

“For Minnesota? Yeah it is.”

I tried to suppress my smile and failed instantly.

His eyes narrowed. “There it is.”

“What?”

“That thing you do.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You smile like you’re trying not to.”

Heat crept straight into my cheeks. I looked back down at the flash cards before he could notice. “Define cellular respiration,” I said firmly.

“Absolutely not.”

“You need this grade.”

“And you need to relax before your eye starts twitching again.”

“My eye does not twitch.”