All Chapters of Texted The Wrong Brother: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

She had been coming from the arts wing, arms full, carrying the crystal mobile she'd spent three weeks building for her physics project. Forty-seven hand-cut crystals threaded on wire, each one calibrated to catch light at a specific angle. She'd stayed late to photograph it against the window. She was walking fast because the last bus left at 6:15 pm.She heard the motorbike before she saw it.It came around the corner of the east corridor at a speed that had no business being inside a building, and she had exactly enough time to think before it was on top of her. She dived sideways. The mobile hit the floor. Forty-seven crystals scattered across twenty feet of polished hallway floor, catching the overhead lights as they went, throwing tiny rainbows against the walls in every direction.For a moment, it was actually beautiful; then Lena looked at what was left of three weeks of hard work and felt the back of her throat go tight. The motorbike stopped. The engine cut. She heard boots

She shouldn't have been in the boys' locker room. She knew that. She'd known it when she snuck in through the side door, and she'd known it while she was moving quietly past the wooden benches toward the row of lockers at the back, and she very definitely knew it when she heard the showers cut off.The plan had been simple: find Adrian Hale's phone, which she knew was kept in his locker, and delete the bikini photo herself before he decided eventually had arrived and she can eventually get out of this ridiculous deal. She'd been thinking about the photo for three days. She'd been thinking about the way he'd said I'll do it for you with that smile that meant he was in absolutely no hurry.She needed to be in control of at least one thing. His locker was number twelve. She found it, tried the handle—unlocked, because of course it was—and reached in for the phone just as the shower room door opened.She had two seconds. She shoved herself inside the locker, pulled the door mostly shut an

The croissant showed up before the explanation.She opened the door at nine-something on a Wednesday, and Adrian Hale was on her step with a paper bag and the particular expression he wore when he'd made a decision he wasn't going to justify. She looked at him. She looked at the bag."No," she said."You didn't eat last night.""I'm eating now. Without you.""I know where the bakery is, and you don't." He held up the bag. "Chocolate croissant. You want it."She took the bag.She stepped back from the door, which was not an invitation, except that he came in anyway, and she let him, which made it an invitation whether she'd intended it or not.Her kitchen was a mess in the specific way of a Thursday-morning kind of mess — her mother's coffee cup still on the counter, physics notes spread across the table, the crystal mobile she'd been rebuilding hanging half-finished above the window. She watched Adrian clock all of it in about four seconds as he dropped into the chair across from her

The day of her supposed date with Julian, Lena woke up with two things she hadn't gone to bed with: a first edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude with a coffee ring on the dust jacket, which was not her copy and which she had apparently taken home in her bag by accident from school, and a text from an unknown number.You chose the wrong brother to be with.She stared at it for a long time.Then: Don't worry. He'll figure it out, too.She blocked the number. Then she unblocked it because not knowing was worse. Then she blocked it again.Adrian Hale was waiting at the hedge when she left for school.He was not waiting, exactly. He was sitting on the low stone wall, eating an apple and looking at the sky, which was the closest thing to casual she'd ever seen him manage, which is to way to say it looked completely manufactured."You are going," he said."I told you I was going.""I told you I didn't want you to.""You don't make my decisions." She adjusted her bag strap. "Is this the pa

Five chairs.Lena counted them when she walked in, which was the kind of thing she did when her heart was running too fast to be useful in other ways. Five chairs, a table that seated fourteen, and four people who had already claimed their spots: Julian at the head, Adrian across from where she would sit, Harper at the far end, and at the opposite end of the table a small woman in a grey cardigan who looked up at her when she came through the door.She had prepared for something different.The stories about Lilly Hale that circulated at Durman Academy were the kind you half-believed because they were too specific to be invented: business rivals who had gone to other countries. Rooms that had gone quiet. Eyes that had closed deals without words. Lena had braced for something the size of the stories.Lilly Hale was five foot three. The cardigan had a small pearl button at the collar. She was somebody's grandmother — the kind who kept biscuits in a tin and knew the names of all the birds