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Nolan dragged his exhausted body back to the motel room and collapsed face-first onto the bed.
A few seconds later, the door swung open.
"I told you," he said, rolling over and sitting up. "You have to knock."
Katherine had her hair in a ponytail. Compared with the loose hair she had worn the day before, the style made her look much more like a high school student, all clean lines and bright youth.
Her face worked with any hairstyle. Her body worked with any clothes. In short, she looked good no matter what she did.
"Do I need to knock before coming in?" Katherine asked, as if the answer should have been obvious.
In her mind, Nolan would always be the little boy who never quite grew up.
"Classic severe S.O.C.D.," Nolan said with a helpless sigh.
No edition of the DSM used by American psychologists in 1994 contained such a diagnosis.
Nolan had invented it himself.
The full name was Sisterly Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
Her full name was Katherine Walker. Her hair was brown, unlike the Callahan family’s blond, and she was his father’s goddaughter. She had come to live with them when Nolan was five. The original Nolan had asked why more than once, but his father, his mother, and Katherine herself had all avoided the question.
From the first day she arrived, when she met him at the dinner table and smiled at him with two front teeth missing, she had displayed every symptom of S.O.C.D.
She believed she had both the duty and the right to protect him, guide him, and control every part of his life, from schoolwork to daily habits. She pushed, pressured, and arranged things until the world bent into the shape she wanted.
Of course, that was mostly Nolan’s counterattack against her big-sister tyranny. She was not really that extreme.
Growing up, though, even if he spoke to a girl for two minutes longer than usual, Katherine would interrogate him without mercy. She cooked for him, bought him clothes, helped him with homework, and once demanded that he spend whole weekends playing with her for no reason except that she said so.
Some decisions she made for him outright.
Signing him up for football, for example.
As they got older, her urge to manage him had eased a great deal. The habit of walking into his room without knocking, however, had survived intact.
Katherine sat beside him and pinched his thigh hard.
"Ow." Nolan sucked in a breath.
"Do not call me S.O.C.D. again. Got it?"
’One more summer,’ Nolan told himself. ’The last one.’
After that, Katherine would go to college, and he would be completely free.
"You came back late," she said. "So the tryout went well."
"Guess who drove me home. BHHS’s starting quarterback."
After practice, Adam had given him a ride in his new import.
"I know him. Adam Newman." Katherine nodded, but did not say much.
"You’re in the same grade," Nolan said. "Is he popular?"
Adam would leave BHHS soon. Before long, Nolan might be sitting in the starting quarterback’s seat himself.
"Try not to get too close to him," Katherine said suddenly. "I don’t need extra trouble."
"Don’t tell me he likes you."
Nolan remembered Adam asking about his family by name, then connected it with the rumors around him.
Actually, that was very possible.
Katherine had always been the kind of girl other parents used as a weapon. Straight A’s, volleyball starter, model height, movie-star face, good at everything that made adults nod approvingly. Since ninth grade, plenty of boys had chased her. A few had even followed her home, where the original Nolan had beaten them back with his fists.
For all that, Nolan had never heard of her dating anyone.
"How much does he like you?" he asked as an idea formed.
"Enough to stammer when he talks to me." Katherine shrugged.
"Even better. After our closed practice tomorrow, wait for me outside Nickoll Field. We’ll head home together."
"I thought you hated walking home with me."
She glanced at him, mouth tilted.
"Just this once. I want him to understand our relationship."
Nolan laid out the plan.
"That is cruel," Katherine said, tapping the bridge of his nose. "Using someone’s innocent crush for your own benefit."
Then a faintly wicked smile appeared on her face, the kind a Hollywood villainess might wear before ruining someone’s life.
"But I like it."
"By the way," Nolan said, "the teacher assigned a response paper on A Tale of Two Cities. Teach me how to write it?"
Katherine agreed at once, delighted that he had finally shown interest in studying.
It took her very little time to realize the truth.
Nolan had only found an excuse for her to help him write the assignment.
That was all.
...
"...this is not merely a deconstruction of history," Nolan said the next day, lowering the paper in his hands. "A Tale of Two Cities asks us to reconsider morality, sacrifice, and the meaning of class through the lives people choose to save or destroy."
For a moment, his classmates actually applauded.
Katherine’s late-night work had paid off.
"Thank you, Nolan," the teacher said. "That was... very strong work."
"I’ll keep working hard," Nolan replied with a smile.
With luck, the teacher’s impression of him would improve enough to help his final grade.
After class, Nolan headed to his locker. Inside were a few clothes, books, and random supplies. A mirror and the semester’s schedule hung on the inside of the door. Above the mirror, someone had written a sentence in marker.
"Ask Sarah Michelle Gellar out: 0/1."
The zero meant it had not happened yet.
Even at BHHS, where celebrity kids clustered like loose change, Sarah Michelle Gellar stood out. She was already famous. Everyone on campus knew her.
She had started doing television movies at six, reached the big screen at eleven, and had not stopped getting work since. The year before, she had even left school for a while to shoot a television project.
When she came back and appeared at a football game as a cheerleader, attendance jumped. Plenty of boys went just to see her.
Nolan knew the name too. In the life he remembered, she would become the star of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, then a familiar blonde face in horror movies, the kind of girl audiences remembered screaming right before everything went wrong.
Later, she had faded from the center of public attention, and not everyone remembered her.
He had not expected her to be the original Nolan’s dream girl.
No wonder Katherine had brought up the name before.
Nolan was about to close the locker when a voice came from beside him.
"Wait."
A girl stepped into view.
"You’re Nolan Callahan, right? The new Normans recruit?"
She was young, but dressed in a way that made the word young work hard. Heavy red-framed glasses. Braces. Long black hair left loose and messy. A black floral dress with a vest over it. She looked like she borrowed clothes from Nolan’s Spanish teacher, who was close to retirement.
"I’m Rachel Burt, an editor and reporter for Highlights. I need to do a short interview with you."
BHHS had more than sports clubs. It had student journalism, school radio, and even a campus television station. KBEV Channel 6’s Norman News was one of the longest-running high school news programs in the country and had once interviewed President Reagan. The school also had its own radio programming. Highlights was the campus newspaper.
"How do you know I made the football team?" Nolan asked.
Rachel grinned.
"Don’t ask that. Every professional reporter protects her sources."
Highlights had interviewed every football player. New recruits were no exception.
Nolan had no reason to turn down free visibility, so he agreed.
Rachel produced a palm-sized tape recorder with exaggerated seriousness and began asking questions.
"Last question," she said. "Do you have a girlfriend?"
Then she noticed the sentence on his locker door and smiled with sharp little mischief.
"Looks like unrequited love. Are you a Sarah chaser too?"
The black market at BHHS did not officially exist, but if it had, four items would have topped the price list: prescription slips from Dr. Lila Presley at the school clinic, tickets to Jennifer Love Hewitt’s live performances, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s class schedule, and Katherine Walker’s homework.
All four names were widely known around campus.
Nolan shut the locker.
"The previous owner wrote it."
Rachel nodded. Whether she believed him was another matter.
The interview had just ended when Nolan saw someone pass through the crowd beside them.
She was tall, with long dark hair. Her cropped T-shirt stretched across her chest, and she wore high-waisted denim that flashed a narrow strip of pale waist when she moved.
"Liv Tyler?" Nolan said before he could stop himself.
The girl walked on as if she had not heard him at all.
"Her name isn’t Liv Tyler," Rachel said. "It’s Liv Rundgren. She transferred from New York."
"Maybe I mistook her for someone else."
Nolan shook his head.
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