Better than Perfect. Melissa Kantor

      

      

       Copyright

      First published in the USA by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2015

      HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

      HarperCollins Publishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

      The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Text copyright © Melissa Kantor 2015

      Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2015

      Melissa Kantor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780007580200

      Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007580217

      Version: 2015-01-06

      

For Jennifer Klonsky

      Tell me, what is it you plan to do

      with your one wild and precious life?

      —Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

       Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Dedication

       Epigraph

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Chapter 16

       Chapter 17

       Chapter 18

       Chapter 19

       Chapter 20

       Chapter 21

       Chapter 22

       Chapter 23

       Chapter 24

       Chapter 25

       Chapter 26

       Chapter 27

       Chapter 28

       Chapter 29

       Chapter 30

       Chapter 31

       Chapter 32

       Chapter 33

       Acknowledgments

       About the Publisher

      

      “I’m going to miss you.”

      Jason’s arms were around me so tightly I could barely breathe, but lack of oxygen wasn’t the reason I didn’t say anything. If I tried to talk I was definitely going to embarrass myself by bawling, so I just nodded.

      He kissed the top of my head. “Don’t think of it as being stuck at home. Think of it as a chance to study so you can kick my ass on the SATs.”

      “Sure, but will my perfect score come between us?” I asked, my cheek still pressed against his chest. Jason had scored a 2380 on his SATs, just shy of a perfect 2400. Those twenty points were a sore spot with him, and if I ever wanted to get him riled up, all I had to do was get a sad look on my face, sigh, and ask what it was like to have gotten so close to perfection.

      “I’m man enough to handle it,” he assured me.

      Neither of us said anything about why I’d gotten a crap score on my June SATs, which I’d taken a week after my father broke the news to my mother that he was leaving her, just like neither of us said anything about the reason I wasn’t going on a family vacation this year.

      Neither of us said anything about how it’s hard to go on a family vacation when you don’t have a family anymore.

      Since there was nothing to say, I stood on tiptoe and kissed him lightly on the lips.

      “I’m going to need way more than that to get me through the next two weeks,” he said. His hands on my hips were warmer than the August afternoon, and we kissed again, harder. Jason and I had been kissing since eighth grade, when he came up to me at Max Pinto’s spin-the-bottle party and asked me if I’d done the English homework.

      Which is how nerds fall in love.

      I heard the click of the front door, and then Jason’s mom called, “Okay, you two. Jason, it’s time.”

      Given how often it happened, I probably shouldn’t have gotten embarrassed whenever Jason’s parents caught us kissing, but I did. In some ways I was more daring than Jason—I was the one who’d tried to get him to sneak a bottle of wine from his parents’ wine fridge yesterday so we could drink it on our last night together—but when it came to PDA in front of his parents, he was the one who didn’t care. I slipped out of Jason’s arms and turned to face his mom, my cheeks flushed.

      “Sorry, Grace,” I said as Jason wrapped his arm around me and pulled