Free Watch Over Me by Christa Parrish

it,” she said. “He likes you.”
    I like pie. That doesn’t mean it should help me with my math homework.
    “Like you’d ever need help. Seriously. You know how shy he is. Come on. Just do it for me.”
    That had been early October. By December, Skye had broken up with Jared. Matthew knew none of the details, except that Jared was clearly heartbroken, and Skye hadn’t seemed too happy about it, either. He asked Jared if he’d feel more comfortable with another tutor. “Only if you would,” he said.
    So Matthew had spent every Tuesday and Saturday afternoon writing out equations and diagrams, and word problems asking for the width of a river if the length of line segment AC and angle ACB are known. Jared muddled through with C-pluses and made it into college—first in his family—for his mother.
    “She’s convinced the land killed my pops,” Jared had said. “I think I’ll find my way back to a farm, though. I’m not the desk-sitting type.” Matthew had agreed; winter wheat filled Jared’s veins, and that wouldn’t disappear after a couple of years of lecture halls and frat houses.
    Jared now picked up his food and tried one last time to make eye contact with Skye. She buried her head deeper into the magazine. “Well,” he said, “I’ll see you around. Tell your cousin I said hey.”
    Matthew returned to the table. Skye was leafing through his notebook. He held out his hand.
    “Nope. Not until you tell me about this.” She tapped the heart he’d doodled on the inside front cover, the one with the E inside it. “Who is she?”
    Matthew flared his nostrils, snapped, pointed to the pad. She tore out a page, gave it to him.
    I could just buy a new one.
    “Yeah, but you want to tell me.”
    He grinned at her, wrote, Ellie Holt.
    “Are you serious? She’s a brain.”
    I know.
    “She’s not that pretty.”
    Yes she is.
    “She’s not. She has a mustache.”
    He rolled his eyes, blew a long puff of air through his lips, felt them vibrate with sound.
    “She does. All the kids call her Stache.”
    You’re worse than Jaylyn.
    “How can you even say that?” She slung the pad at him. “You are a retard.”
    He shouldn’t have, did it only to be hurtful because she made fun of Ellie. He knew she hated being compared to her sister and, really, they couldn’t have been less alike.
    Jaylyn was tall and beautiful and thin with youth, though Matthew could imagine her looking like her mother in another decade, with an extra twenty pounds of life clinging to her hips. But now, today, that didn’t matter. Jaylyn strutted through the dusty streets of Beck County, expecting all eyes on her, and they were.
    In another place, a place where not everyone lived paycheck to paycheck or harvest to harvest, Jaylyn might not have been considered much more than pretty white trash. But there was no preppy, rich in-crowd in Beck County, not like in those teen movies Sienna begged Jaylyn to bring home from the grocery; everyone smelled like sweat and farm, wore clothes from JCPenney or Wal-Mart, or hand-me-downs. So popularity depended less on money and more on beauty. And Jaylyn had that in abundance.
    Skye could never keep up. She was her father’s daughter, heavy all over, from hands to hair to gait. She could have been pretty, but she worked to be the anti-Jaylyn, letting her hair obscure her face and her dark, oversized clothes hide the rest of her.
    Sorry, he wrote.
    “Whatever.”
    Really.
    “Well, I shouldn’t have insulted your girlfriend.”
    She’s not my girlfriend. He dragged the cap of his pen through a blob of hot fudge he had spilled on the table, swirling the dark goo. You see Jared come in?
    “Hard to miss.”
    He liked you. Still does.
    “Old news. I’m so over it.”
    You won’t tell me what happened with you guys?
    “Nothing happened. I was just done. Learned from the best, right?”
    He looked at the clock on the wall, the second hand jerking up a second, then twitching back a half, up and