As If on Cue

Chapter One CHAPTER ONE
It is six a.m. and I am debating the opposite of frozen with Reid Callahan.

"It's 'melted,'?" I mumble into my pillow, salty, because how dare he wake me up before the sun on a Monday? In my current state of bleary-eyed rage, I throw a pillow vaguely in the direction of my doorframe, where Reid is standing.

"No way. The opposite of frozen is definitely boiled. I'm serious. 'Boiled' is the only valid title if you're going for parody. 'Melted' is fundamentally flawed."

"You're fundamentally flawed."

He snorts, and I hear the clink of metal against ceramic. A spoon swirling in cereal. By now, I'm used to Reid in my house in the early hours of the morning, mastering complex arpeggios on the clarinet under the instruction of my father. Reid is pretty much the only person in the entire universe who matches Dad's intensity for a musical instrument. Which means he's always here.

It's kind of unbearable.

"Why are you here?" I ask.

"It's Monday," Reid says slowly, as if I don't know the days of the week. Monday morning lessons have been a thing since school started two weeks ago-and will continue to be a thing that makes Monday even more Monday for the duration of my junior year.

"I mean here, Reid. Why are you in my bedroom?"

"To pay up," he says.

He nods toward my desk, where a large iced chai from Kiskadee sits on top of an elephant coaster. Of course, he decides six a.m. is the perfect time to deliver my Wow, you actually wrote a play chai. Winning a bet against Reid Callahan is still always losing, in a way.

"Your timing is impeccable."

I fall back onto my mattress and roll over, facing the wall and closing my eyes in an attempt to return to my dreamscape. Before Reid woke me up with three staccato knocks, I was sitting at a table read for my big-budget Broadway play featuring the Chrises. We were staging a fight scene between Pine and Evans. Hemsworth leaned over to whisper in my ear, You're

Marisa Kanter is a young adult author, amateur baker, and reality television enthusiast. She is the author of What I Like About You and As If on Cue. Born and raised in the suburbs of Boston, her obsession with books led her to New York City, where she worked in the publishing industry to help books find their perfect readers. She currently lives in Los Angeles, writing love stories by day and searching for the perfect slice of pizza by night. Follow her at MarisaKanter.com.