Scarlett White by Chloe Smith

really remember the details all that clearly—so he knew that she lived with her mother. He only hoped that her mother was a heavy sleeper and didn't wake up at twelve in the morning to find some random boy on her doorsteps. That would be completely awkward, and Tristan didn't even want to think about what he would have to come up with to lie about to Scarlett's mother.
     
    But to his great relief, her mother didn't open the door. And to his great disappointment, Scarlett didn't open the door either. Nobody opened the door. Maybe they couldn't hear him. Tristan looked for a doorbell to ring, but couldn't find one. Well, maybe that would be a pretty damn stupid idea anyway. Maybe ringing the doorbell at twelve a.m. was one of the dumbest things to do when he was trying to have a civil conversation with a girl. Then again, maybe trying to have a civilized tête-à-tête with a girl at midnight wasn't the brightest crayon in the box either. But, as he had thought earlier, he had spent too much time here to back down and leave without trying to get through to Scarlett and defend his case—though Tristan really didn't know what he was defending. He had never done anything mean towards Scarlett, so he didn't know why she hated him. But that was why he was here. He wanted to find out. Well, actually there were two things that he wanted to find out: A: he wanted to know why Scarlett despised him so much; what he had apparently done to her in the past, and B: what she had been hiding from him on Friday.
     
    Their first, short conversation popped back in his head again for about the fifteenth time:
     
    " No, sorry, I have to go...somewhere this weekend," she had said.
     
    " Where?" he had asked.
     
    " Somewhere. Now, I have to go..."
     
    Where had she been going that she had stood up the most popular, most sought after guy at school? Her rejection only made him want to talk to her more.
     
    Finally Tristan gave up on entering through the front door. He circled back around to the front of the house in the yard. He looked up and saw the television on in one of the windows on the second story of the house. He only hoped that this wasn't Scarlett's mother's room. Well, he had to take his chances.
     
    He looked around the not-so-perfectly manicured lawn and found just what he needed: a small, little, unkempt garden that had a few flowers and a lot of weeds growing out of it. But that wasn't what he was interested in. He saw a bunch of small pebbles lying scattered around the dirt of the garden. Perfect. He smiled to himself as he walked over to the garden and picked up a few of the pebbles. These would make a perfect object to tap at the window and get the attention of whoever was up there. Scarlett or her mother.
     
    It was just a good thing that he was perfect at aim. Thank God for being a quarterback on the varsity football team. He looked at the small, round rock in his hand and then back up the window. He brought his arm back with the rock firmly in his fingers and then swung, releasing the rock just at the right time and height to hit the window square in the middle of the pane of glass. Yes! He had made the perfect shot. It was loud and hard, but not hard enough to actually break the glass. He didn't want to end up paying for a new window. That would cut into his money for college.
     
    He waited a few minutes, hoping that someone would open the window and let him inside. It was beginning to get really cold out here. And the wind wasn't helping all that much with the lack of a jacket. Man, he wished that he had on his leather jacket. He never got cold in that thing. When no one opened the window, he threw another rock at the window and waited for a full five minutes before he began throwing rock after rock, just hoping that someone would eventually wake up and let him inside.
     
    And then after about the sixth rock that he had perfectly aimed at the window had flown up there and made contact with its target, the window