Bailey Morgan [2] Fate by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

where µ is a friction coefficient,
m
is mass, andáis the force of gravity.”
    I couldn't believe it! Somebody had actually cometo my rescue, and Annabelle wasn't even in this class. Though if she'd been here, she wouldn't have spoken out of turn anyway. At most, she would have metaphorically looked the other way while I probed her mind for a silent hint.
    “Thank you, Mr. Talbot-Olsen, but I was asking Bailey.”
    I could feel “Mr. Talbot-Olsen” (whose name did not seem to fit his voice at all) shrugging beside me, but I didn't look at him until the teacher turned her attention elsewhere.
    “How is the equation for friction modified if you have an object moving along an incline?”
    Nobody volunteered the answer, and the teacher focused in on another of my unsuspecting and borderline-unconscious classmates. As the chosen pupil sputtered out an answer that made mine look somewhat articulate, I tuned out again. Class went on, and after a few minutes, I finally dared a peek at my knight in shining physics armor.
    Mussy hair.
    Too pale to be classically good-looking.
    A little on the skinny side.
    Dark brown eyes that might have been soulful.
    It was the boy from study hall. When Delia said that geeks were an untapped subset of the male population, she wasn't kidding. They were, apparently, as close to invisible as you could possibly get without being actually transparent, because even though I lived in the middle of the social stratosphere and nowhere near the top, I couldn't remember ever seeing him before today.
    I don't know if it was because Delia's “enlightenment” was contagious, if it was because he'd risked physics-teacher wrath to come to my rescue, or even if it all went back to the fact that there was something distinctly mysterious about the way he'd read my symbol, but no matter the reason, I couldn't look away from this boy.
    His hair was definitely the “adorably tousled” kind of mussy.
    No,
I told myself.
Bad Bailey.
His hair wasn't the point. The point was that something weird was going on here. And besides which, I wasn't looking for a boy. Been there, tried that, had the broken heart to prove it. All I wanted was to spend as much time with my friends as I could before they left for good.
    For once, I was glad that physics was one class I didn't have with any of the others. For the next fifteen minutes, I could mope as much as I wanted, and nobody could tickle me out of it.
    I stole another glance at the mussy hair, and the boy smiled at me. It is a testament to the fact that I might be pathetic (and that even I wasn't immune to the power of Delia's trendsetting C cup) that holding the memory of that smile in my mind, I couldn't even muster up a good mope.

After the final bell rang, I avoided stopping by my locker on the way to my car. Delia's locker was right next to mine, and when it came to crushes, pseudo-crushes, and not-quite crushes, she was pretty much as psychic as I was. She'd take one look at me, go “You have crush-face!” and insist on hearing every last detail, even if it made her late for cheerleading practice. I loved her to death, but this time I wanted to figure out what I was feeling, or what I wasn't, before she did.
    To be fair, Delia had a lot more experience recognizing the symptoms of crushdom than I did. It had been so long since I'd been in a maybe-yes-maybe-no state of mind that I wasn't any surer of Cryptic Boy than I was of what was in store for me with the other Sidhe tonight. In my entire life, I'd had exactlytwo crushes, one of whom became, somewhat briefly, the only legitimate boyfriend I'd ever come close to having.
    Kane and I had dated on and off my sophomore year. We hung out (and made out) just enough that I was sure that something was going on, but not enough that I knew whether or not he actually considered me his girlfriend. I was too afraid that the answer would be no to ask. Junior year, he'd started “hanging out” with other girls at the same time,