Shuffle, Repeat

Jillian Cade: (Fake) Paranormal Investigator

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2016 by Jen Klein

Cover and interior spot art copyright © 2016 by Sarah Coleman

Cover photo © Getty Images/PhotoAlto/Frederic Cirou

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children's Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Klein, Jen.

Shuffle, repeat / Jen Klein.—First edition.

pages cm

Summary: “When Oliver and June are forced to ride to school together each morning, no one is more surprised than this odd couple when a friendship—and then romance—develops”—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-553-50982-3 (trade)—ISBN 978-0-553-50984-7 (ebook)

[1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Love—Fiction. 3. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.1.K645Sh 2016 [Fic]—dc23 2015012725

ebook ISBN 9780553509847

Random House Children's Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

v4.1

ep

For Josh

The car jams to the curb and I hop out before the valet can reach my door. I'm in the biggest hurry of my life and I don't care who knows it.

I'm alone when I run up the front stairs, and I'm alone when I cross the vast empty lobby of the hotel and step into the glittering ballroom. Hung with twinkling strands of light and dotted with white-draped tables, it is crowded with people I have known for years. And that's the moment I feel the most alone of all: when I enter my senior prom.

It's my own fault, of course. Sure, it was a boy who broke my heart, but I am the one to blame. I am the one who broke a promise.

Still, I hold my head high, because I have a reason to be here. I have a grand romantic gesture to make, an epic speech to give, a heart full of regret to bleed out over the scuffed vinyl.

When I scan the dance floor, I see him standing on the edge, swaying back and forth in that way guys do when they don't want (or know how) to dance. He isn't looking for me, but that makes sense, since he's here with another girl. She's right beside him and their fingers are twined together.

Nothing about tonight is going to be easy.

Even though I'm clearly visible on my new front porch, my unwanted ride heralds his arrival with a sharp honk, loud enough to cut through the Damned, playing in my earbuds.

Oliver Flagg is the kind of guy who likes to make an entrance.

I wait until his gas-guzzling behemoth is completely stopped before I kill my music and trudge toward it. Whatever Oliver is listening to—I can hear drums and guitars—abruptly cuts off as I approach. Even though I'm a perfectly reasonably sized person at five and a half feet tall, I practically have to take a running leap to get into his vehicle, because it's so monstrously huge, but eventually I am strapped in with my backpack on my lap. Ready to get this ride—and senior year—over with.

“You're ten minutes early,” I tell Oliver. Just because our moms are BFFs doesn't mean we have to be.

“You were ready,” he says mildly. “Waiting outside and all dressed up for the first day of school.”

Since I'm in one of my standard outfits—jeans, Chucks, a black tank layered over a white one—I know he's being facetious. I also know he probably doesn't comprehend the word “facetious.”

“I was listening to music. I was embracing the
solitude.
”

“Now you can embrace hanging out.” He flashes his patented hot-popular-jock grin in my direction before reversing onto Callaway Lane. “Besides, you're
supposed
to show up early for the first day of school. These are the glory days, Rafferty.”

“Glory days.” The words come out of my mouth in a flat line. As far as I am concerned, high school is something to get through and get over. I don't need to roll around in the overblown tradition of it all.

But this is Oliver Flagg. He wallows in window dressing. He festers in frivolity. If there's the remotest chance that something will involve a sign-up sheet or a spirit banner or a dude dressed up as a bird (our school mascot is a robin), Oliver is in.

Simply put…he loves that shit.

And I hate it.

I
really
hate it.

We pull onto Plymouth and rumble west in stiff silence as pastures and maple trees and farmhouses slide past us on both sides. Crazy that this much rural country exists only twenty minutes outside the city.

I finger-comb my hair, which is not quite brown and not quite blond, not quite straight and not quite curly. Not quite anything…just like me.

I apply lip gloss. I squirm in my seat and accidentally send the dozen empty plastic water bottles at my feet rattling against each other. Finally, I'm not able to take it anymore and I blurt out what we're both thinking. “Look, I get it. It's not like our moms consulted us when they came up with this little plan.” Oliver glances at me but doesn't say anything, so I keep going. “It's cool. You've got better things to do.” His eyebrows squinch together in the middle. “Drive me a couple more times so they won't get all pissy, and then we'll come up with an excuse. We'll tell them you have practice and I'll take the bus.”

This time, Oliver's eyebrows jolt upward. “Practice?”

“Throwing or kicking or dribbling or whatever you do. Seriously, it's fine.”

Oliver's lips twitch into a half smile. “My, uh, dribbling practice is after school. It's no big deal to drive you in the mornings.”

“It's no big deal to take the bus.”

“Except that the ride is an hour and a half long. The bus goes all the way out before coming back to school.”

He's right, but I hate being his charity case. “I know you have amassed a certain amount of nice-guy cred, but you don't really have to pick me up. It's egregious. It's excessive.” Belatedly, I remember that Oliver might not follow my advanced vocabulary, and I dial it back so he'll understand. “It's too much.”

“I don't mind.”

I shift again in my seat to observe his profile. There are girls in our class who would trade places with me in a hot heartbeat. Those girls place a lot of weight on tan skin and tight muscles and chocolate-brown eyes (I've heard Zoe Smith refer to them as “bedroom eyes”), but none of that does anything for me. I'm a brains girl, all the way. “Of course you mind. Who would want to be responsible for getting someone else to school every single day?”

Oliver lets out a tiny puff of laughter. “You and your mom moved five minutes from my house and I literally pass right by you”—I feel a stab of gratitude for his correct usage of the word “literally”—“so chill, Rafferty. It's no big deal to swing by and pick you up.”

It's a nice thing to say, which I do appreciate despite evidence to the contrary, but it doesn't stop me from being…
me.
“It's a little weird, don't you think?”

“Not until you said that.” Again with the laughter as we cruise through a green light and merge onto the highway heading toward Ann Arbor. “Tell you what, let's just do what people do.”

I have (literally) no idea what he's talking about, so I wait.

“Okay, I'll go first,” says Oliver. “Who do you have for homeroom?”

Ohhhh, now I get it. Conversation. Fine. I can make an attempt. “Vinton. Who's yours?”

“Webb. I had her sophomore year. She's pretty cool.”

I run through other topics in my head, finally coming back to the only thing Oliver and I have in common: school. “What electives are you taking?”

“Photography and family sciences.”

I'm amused in spite of myself. “By ‘family sciences,' do you mean ‘home ec'?”

Oliver shrugs. “It's a cooking class, but if you want to use an outdated term, sure.”

“I'm just surprised.” Meatheads like Oliver usually take electives like grunting. Or lifting heavy objects. Or freshmen-intimidation techniques.

“And I am equally surprised by your misogyny,” he says.

“Whereas I am now surprised that you know the word ‘misogyny.' ”

Oliver winks one of those brown bedroom eyes at me. “Isn't life a series of grand eye-opening revelations?”

Huh.
A jock with a vocabulary.

A jockabulary, if you will.

“To be honest, I'm only taking the class because of this dumb thing with Theo,” Oliver tells me. “We had a bet. I lost. Now I'm taking family sciences.”

“What kind of bet?”

“Just a stupid guy thing.”

I settle back in the leather seat. In all fairness, even though I've technically known Oliver from birth, it's not like I really
know
him. We haven't spent any time together since kindergarten, when we got married under the monkey bars in a ceremony officiated by Shaun Banerjee. Our relationship was consummated with a sticky kiss and then annulled a couple hours later when we got into an argument during art class. It culminated in our sitting in the principal's office, dripping in blue paint, waiting for our moms to bring us clean clothes.

Who knew that since then, Oliver had graduated from one-syllable words?

“How's Itch?” Oliver asks.

I'm a little thrown by the question. It didn't occur to me that Oliver would even know about Itch. Also, I don't know how to answer him.

“Fine,” I finally say, because it might be true.

Probably.

Hopefully.

Itch—otherwise known as Adam Markovich—is my boyfriend…maybe. Before heading to Florida for the summer, he said it would be crazy for us to sit around and wait for each other, and that we should be free to date other people. I agreed with him—because what else could I do?—and assumed it was the beginning of the end. Then Itch called or texted nearly every single day, so I guessed he probably wasn't dating anyone else. Of course, I didn't exactly broadcast it when I kissed Ethan Erickson on the Fourth of July, so it's possible Itch cheated, too.

Since none of this is a matter of public record, I'm not sure why Oliver is asking. I angle my body toward him. “How do you even know who I date?”

“It's not like I live under a rock.”

“Just under a helmet.”

“You and Itch hold hands at school.”

Double
huh.
I'm shocked that anyone outside my limited social circle has any idea what I do with my hands.

“It doesn't seem like something you'd notice.”

Oliver shakes his head. “You know who my girlfriend is, right?”

Well, duh.

“Ainsley Powell.” The smug face he pulls makes me want to defend myself. “But everyone knows that.”

“Dude, it's our senior year. By now, everyone knows who everyone is.”

I shift in my seat again, trying to get comfortable. The car is so huge I can barely see out the windows. “Right, senior year.”

We take the exit and cruise onto Main Street, which has scattered gas stations and mattress warehouses and peeling billboards about mortgage rates at this end of it. I feel rather than see Oliver's glance. “Aren't you even a little bit excited?” he asks me.

“No.”

“This is our last year. This is
it.
”

Ugh.

“Not to burst your bubble, but this is nothing,” I say. “It's not real life.”

“It's
better
than real life,” Oliver informs me. “High school sets the stage for real life.”

This time, I'm the one who laughs. “Please. Nothing we do right now matters.”

Oliver's mouth drops open. “Are you kidding me?”

“I'm totally not. Think about it.” I turn to face him more fully. “In the real world, in the grand scheme of
life,
this year is going to count for exactly nothing. These are the friendships that don't last and the choices that don't count. All those things we all freak out about now, like who's going to be class president and are we going to win the game this weekend—there's going to be a time when we can't even
remember
caring about them. In exactly three hundred and sixty-five days from right now, wearing your letter jacket or class ring will make you look like the lamest of losers.”

Oliver blinks. “Man, you are bleak.”

“I'm not bleak. I'm realistic.” I mean it, too. I don't hate my life and I'm not unhappy. It's just that I understand the way the world works. I don't need to pretend.

We go in silence for a few more minutes, until, as we pass the sign welcoming us to downtown Ann Arbor, I decide I should smooth things over. After all, even though I might not be voluntarily hanging out with Oliver Flagg, it looks like we're going to have these early mornings together five times a week for the foreseeable future. “I'm not trying to be a dick,” I tell him. “You can have fun in high school. I just don't think we should pretend it means more than it does.”

Oliver doesn't say anything. He keeps driving as brick houses appear and then hunch closer and closer together. A half mile past the sign, it starts to actually look like a downtown, with restaurants and banks and four-story buildings and shops with awnings. That lasts only a handful of blocks and then we're crossing Madison and driving through the university area, where houses are bigger, lawns are greener, and cars are shinier. Oliver remains quiet as we pass the stadium and a golf course. It's not until we drive through Robin High's main gate and enter the senior parking lot that Oliver speaks again: “For the record, I don't think you're a dick.”

“Thanks.” I don't really care what the King of Everything thinks of me, but Mom raised me to know it's polite to say something in return.

Oliver maneuvers his gigantic beast into a spot between two older sedans before killing the engine and turning to face me. “But I do feel sorry for you.”

“Feeling sorry for me is pretentious,” I inform him.

“Calling me pretentious is pretentious!” Oliver says it with a grin, but I think he means it. “Look, June…”

Ah, my first name. He must really want me to pay attention.

“In the world of schools, ours is pretty cool. But instead of appreciating it, all you want is to get out. All this stuff you're pretending is stupid—it matters. Everything we do
matters.
”