Biggest Flirts (10 page)

“Correct.”

“That’s just selfish of you.”

“I agree.”

“You’re not a selfish person.”

“Apparently Will’s my downfall.”

“But . . .” Harper pondered this for a couple of blocks before finally asking, “Don’t you think it might be worth considering bending your no-boyfriend rule for Will? People at school are talking about you two a
lot
. It’s hard to believe this is just a passing hookup.”

“A past hookup,” I clarified. “I’m sure he wouldn’t even take me back now. He wants exactly what he has. Angelica is a tiny blond girl. I’m a gangly
puertorriqueña
.” We’d reached a row of shops where we had to get off the sidewalk and stick to a narrow bike lane. I shot ahead of Harper, trying to escape this discussion.

“Tia,” Harper called, “that’s just weird. If Will has a problem with you being part Puerto Rican, you don’t want him anyway.”

“I
don’t
want him anyway,” I threw over my shoulder.

“And you’re not gangly. You’re tall, which would be an asset on the modeling runway.”

“I am not on the modeling runway, however. I am riding a bike through suburban Tampa/St. Petersburg, and my knees are touching my ears.” As I pedaled, I bent my head to try to make this happen. I swerved dangerously toward the comic book store we were riding past and straightened just in time to avoid crashing through the window and shocking the nerds.

Harper was laughing her ass off behind me. “I promise you’re not gangly. To be considered gangly, you would have to walk funny. In that case, Kaye would have shown up at your house before now to conduct an intervention.”

We talked about Kaye then. Harper hadn’t seen her after school. I told Harper how happy Kaye had seemed at being elected Most Likely to Succeed along with Aidan—as if either of them needed to be reassured.

Harper asked me how closely I’d listened to the announcements. She said she was taking the Senior Superlatives photographs for the yearbook starting Monday morning, and Will and I should meet her in the courtyard right at the beginning of second period.

News to me. I wondered whether I should call Will to pass along the information. This would violate our new pact to cool it. Angelica would interpret
phone call
as
hot sex
and Will would hate me. No, I would not call him. I could go into the yearbook under the heading Biggest Flirt by myself.

As we approached the antiques store, Harper waved and said brightly, “Ta! See you Monday,” as though the coming photo session sounded like good times.

“Ta.” I didn’t want her to look back and see me watching her mournfully. I locked my bike in the rack and went into the shop.

When we’d first started riding our bikes together, and I’d been headed home instead of to work, I’d always begged Harper to come inside with me—if she would be very, very quiet and not wake my dad—or I would suggest we hang out at her mom’s bed and breakfast. She’d explained that I was an extrovert, and extroverts got their energy from being around other people. She was an introvert, and introverts got their energy from being by themselves. She needed to go home, be by herself, and work on her photography project of the moment so that the next time we saw each other, she would have more energy to give me. This scenario made me sound like an alien sucking her brains out through a straw, but it also kind of made sense. It explained why, now that my sisters had moved out and my dad was always at work or asleep, I felt so down at home. But that knowledge wouldn’t do anything to fix a long, lonely weekend.

Luckily I was super busy at work, dealing with customers while simultaneously finding things in inventory for Bob and trying to explain to Roger how computers worked. Three hours flew by. Then we closed, and I was out on the sidewalk again, unlocking my bike. I gazed down the street at the salon where Izzy worked. I could forgive her, I supposed, for what she’d said to me months ago about watching her kids. But Izzy could be harsh, and the idea of her saying something else snide was enough to keep me away. Besides, if she’d been at work to cut Will’s hair at seven this morning, she was long gone now.

I rode to my house, lifting my bike over the front lawn so I wouldn’t crash through the magnolia leaves and wake my dad. The house was deathly quiet, and I hated it. Much as my sisters had annoyed the crap out of me while they lived at home, I would have given anything to ignore Izzy’s orders as I walked in the door, and tease Sophia about the fantasy novel she was reading on the sofa, and yell at Violet because I caught her stealing a shirt out of my closet in the room we shared.

It wasn’t going to happen. With a deep sigh that nobody heard but me, I nuked a frozen dinner, cleared off a space at the kitchen table, and drew my calculus book out of my backpack. This actually happened. I thought about Will, and what a good student he was, and what a good student old Angelica was, diligently ciphering in anticipation of that bright, shining day in spring when she could take the AP test. Maybe Will would like me better if I wasn’t so lame in school.

But I knew I shouldn’t do stuff just because Will would like me better for it. That was exactly why I didn’t want a boyfriend. There were other reasons to do my calculus homework, such as not flunking. I pulled out my notebook and turned to the page where I’d written down the assignment. This was more difficult than it sounded. Usually I wrote things down on whatever page I opened to rather than starting from the beginning and working through to the end like
some
academically obsessed drum captains. I took a bite of dinner, started the problem . . . and then lost myself in it. I had a hard time starting my homework because I dreaded it, but once I got into it, I forgot what I was doing and didn’t mind so much. Until—

HOOOOOOOOOOONK.

I scraped back my chair and ran outside without even looking to see who’d pulled into the driveway. The only important thing was to get the horn stopped before it woke my dad. I rushed blinking into the dusk. When I was halfway across the lawn, I saw Sawyer grinning at me from the cab of his truck.

I sliced my finger across my throat. “My dad’s asleep.”

Sawyer took his hand off the horn. “Sorry.” He wagged his eyebrows at me. “Does that mean I can come in?”

“No.” I didn’t have to think about that one. Except for Harper, my friends always assured me they could come inside my house and be quiet. They were wrong. They always forgot, somebody laughed really loudly, and my dad woke up.

“You’re afraid we’ll make some noise?” Sawyer asked.

“I know we will.” Bantering with him was easier than explaining that no, I was serious, my dad actually had to work tonight, and this was the last sleep he would get. Sawyer understood a lot about life—way more than he probably should have at seventeen—but he didn’t understand factories that ran all night, or trying to support a family on third shift.

“Why’d you give me such a hard time about Biggest Flirt today?” I griped. “And you called me your girl in front of Will. What was that about?”

“You need to stay away from that guy,” Sawyer said. “He’s a player.”

“He’s not,” I said. “
You
are.”

“But you
like
him,” Sawyer pointed out. “That makes him dangerous. I don’t matter. So come out with me.”

“Can’t,” I said. “Homework.”

“You?”
he asked, astonished. “Are doing your
homework
?”

Normally I wouldn’t have been offended by a comment like that, but what Will had said about me making so many mistakes—that must have gotten to me. “It’s been known to happen,” I said haughtily.

“I’m more fun than homework,” Sawyer said.

I was about to point out that cleaning the toilet was also more fun than homework, and I had no intention of doing that, either.

Then an airliner roared over us, bringing the last of the season’s tourists. Labor Day was coming up in two weeks, signaling the end of summer—for Yankees, anyway. I cringed at the noise, crossing my fingers that it wouldn’t wake my dad.

Yeah. Sawyer was better than homework. He was way better than another night of staying very quiet until my dad finally dragged himself up grumpily, refused to eat what I’d heated for him because he wasn’t hungry when he first woke, and left. It was like living by myself except for an outdoor cat we’d once had that passed through the house only to use the litter box.

“Come on,” Sawyer said. “My brother’s bartending tonight. Come sit on the back porch of the Crab Lab and get wasted with me.”

I said, “Just let me lock up.”

9

ONCE I’D GIVEN IN TO
Sawyer Friday night, it didn’t make sense to turn him down Saturday night or Sunday night. That’s why, when Will and I sat on a bench in the school courtyard Monday morning, waiting for Harper to finish photographing Mr. and Ms. Least Likely to Leave the Tampa/St. Petersburg Metropolitan Area, it was like he and I had traded personalities. I was a little hungover, so I wasn’t my usual laugh riot. And Will must have had a banner weekend with old Angelica. He was in a great mood, regaling me with all his ideas for the picture being taken in front of us.

“Chain them to the palm trees,” he said. “Build a box and pour concrete around their feet.”

“Have them get married at seventeen,” I suggested. “Find the guy a factory job with lots of overtime and give them so many kids that he keeps the factory job and takes all the overtime he’s offered so he can feed everybody.”

Will frowned at me. “Who are you talking about?”

“My dad.” I pressed my fingertips to my throbbing temple.

“Did something happen? What’s wrong?” His brow furrowed, and he took a closer look at me, his gaze lingering on my mouth. Which made me look at
his
mouth. Which made me mad.

“Yes, something happened,” I snapped. “You broke up with me Friday. You can’t decide to be friends with me again today. Go over there.” I pointed to a bench on the opposite end of the courtyard. I’d spoken loudly enough that Harper looked up from her camera and raised her eyebrows. I shook my head at her.

I thought Will would be offended all over again. Maybe I
wanted
him to be offended. It was kind of a letdown that he gamely crossed the courtyard and sat where I pointed. Then he called through his cupped hands, “Do we have to stay in the courtyard? We could take them to the beach and bury them up to their necks in sand.”

He grinned at me, but his smile faded as I glared at him. Harper was dismissing Mr. and Ms. Loser. They disappeared back inside the school as Will and I continued to watch each other. I didn’t know what he was thinking.
I
was thinking that he was the hottest guy I’d ever known, slouched on the bench with one ankle crossed on the other knee, his arms folded defensively, and his pirate earring winking in the sun. I wished he would go back to the frozen tundra and leave me alone.

He called, “You ruined the curve, didn’t you?”

He was talking about the test in our AP calculus class. I shifted uncomfortably. The concrete was awfully hard all of a sudden. “That is an ugly thing to accuse me of.”

Harper looked up from flipping through the images on her camera. “What curve?”

“Tia was the only one who didn’t have her calculus homework this morning,” Will explained. “Ms. Reynolds chewed her out and said she’d heard about Tia from other teachers and she was
not
going to have a repeat performance of that in
her
class.”

“Oh my God!” Harper gaped sympathetically at me.

“Then we had a test on what the homework had covered,” Will said. “Ms. Reynolds graded the papers while we were getting a head start on tonight’s homework. In the middle of it she announced, ‘You can all thank a very surprising person for making one hundred on this test and ruining the curve for you.’ She sounded pissed. And at the end of class, when she passed the tests back, Tia shoved hers in her purse before anybody could see it.”

Protectively I tucked my purse closer to my hip on the bench.

“Tia, damn it,” Harper cried. “Was the curve just for your class or for all of them?” She told Will, “We’re used to her ruining the curve in math, but doing it on the second day of school is pretty obnoxious, even for her.”

“Aren’t you in Angelica’s class?” I asked Harper. “Even if I didn’t ruin your curve, Angelica will.” I was making this up. Math wasn’t Angelica’s thing. She was more of a prim-and-proper-English kind of girl whom incorrectly corrected people’s grammar.

Harper gave me a quizzical look over her glasses, knowing I was only trying to get Will’s goat. “Well, hooray. It’s your turn for a yearbook photo.” She held out a hand toward Will and a hand toward me, her fancy camera hanging around her neck. I wanted to tell her that Sawyer had already tried to get Will and me to hold hands, with lackluster results. Instead, I stopped a few feet away from her outstretched hand and eyed Will.

“Look,” Harper said, “I know this title has caused you two some pain, but I have a job to do here. The yearbook is counting on me. I have to take a flirtatious picture of you both. You didn’t win Most Awkward.” She turned to Will. “Since you’re so great at coming up with photo ideas, what’s your brainchild for this one?”

He glanced uncomfortably around the courtyard, into the tops of the palm trees, up at the sky, the same deep color as his eyes. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

“That’s what I suspected,” Harper said in a tone that made it sound like she had suspected the opposite. Her retro glasses were adorable, but when her art was at stake and she got in this no-nonsense mood, the glasses made her look like a stern 1960s librarian. “I’ll give you a hint,” she said. “For this photo, you need to flirt.”

“What does that mean?” I asked uneasily.

She shrugged. “You’re the flirts. You should do what you were doing to get voted Biggest Flirts in the first place. I never actually witnessed it.”

“We were just standing next to each other on the football field,” Will said. “That’s all.”

“Oh, come on, Will. That’s not
all
we were doing,” I said just to bother him.

It worked. He cut his eyes at me, and his cheeks turned pink. He wasn’t smiling.

“Sorry,” Harper said, “but you can’t just stand next to each other. Not in
my
yearbook photo. We need some action.”

It was strange, but my headache was going away now that Will seemed hot and bothered. His discomfort was some sort of elixir for me. I bounced a little and clapped. “What kind of action?”

“He could drag you into the bushes,” Harper said. “That’s been done in a lot of yearbooks.”

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “Drag me into the bushes!”

“I’m not dragging you into the bushes,” Will said. “The bushes are prickly.”

“So are you.” I snapped my fingers. “There’s an idea. I’ll drag
you
into the bushes.”

He folded his arms on his chest and looked down his nose at me. “You will not.”

That sounded like a challenge. “Get your camera ready,” I told Harper. I slipped both hands around his upper arm, just where it disappeared under the sleeve of his T-shirt.

Then I paused. I’d known all too well that he was built, but I was surprised at how solid his arm was. I wouldn’t be able to move him. But I’d threatened to, and it obviously bugged the shit out of him, so I had to go through with it. I pulled on him and said, “Drag.” I gave his arm a couple more cursory jerks. “Drag, drag.”

Harper had her camera to her glasses, still clicking away, but she said, “Not enough action. It’s less flirtatious and more mournful and hopeless.”

I laughed, because it was true. That’s exactly how I’d felt about Will all weekend, and it was gratifying that Harper was able to see that through the camera lens. Even Will laughed a little.

In fact, he looked so carefree in that moment, like the Will I’d had fun with in band practice last week, the one I’d lost when we got elected to this stupid title, that I couldn’t resist. With one hand still bracing myself against his rock-hard arm, I stood on my tiptoes and moved in to give him a quick kiss on the corner of his mouth, just where his smile turned up. Harper would get the shot, and Will could sigh with relief and go back to his beloved schoolwork. At least until he had to stand beside me again in band.

Just as my lips were about to reach him, he seemed to realize what I was doing and turned his head slightly. Instead of my lips touching the corner of his mouth, his lips met mine.

I was so confused about whether he’d made the move on purpose or not, and so surprised at the zap of electricity racing through me, that I stood paralyzed for a second. Which I shouldn’t have done. We weren’t even kissing, really. Our lips only pressed together. If I’d stepped away from him and acted embarrassed, we could have laughed off the whole thing like it had been a mistake.

Instead, his lips parted, and so did mine. We were kissing for real. Neither of us had tripped into this one. I wore a sleeveless minidress, so I shouldn’t have gotten overheated, but my skin felt like it was on fire.

As quickly as it had begun, it was over. Will unceremoniously took a step back from me.

He turned to Harper and commanded her, “Delete those pictures. You can’t let Angelica see them.”

A hoot of laughter drifted to us. It didn’t sound loud, but it must have made quite a noise inside the building for us to hear it through the closed windows. I glanced around at the windows and saw boys’ faces pressed against the glass. They’d been watching us the whole time.

“Great,” Will exclaimed. “Now Angelica will find out for sure. Those assholes will run right back and tell her. Angelica may even be
in
that class.” He glared at me, then turned and stalked toward the door. Actually, I don’t think he stalked. Stalking was uncool and self-righteous, and Will didn’t move that way. He sauntered toward the door and threw it open like a rock star.

And I stared after him with my mouth open, desperately grasping for something funny to say to lighten his mood. He would stop, turn on the step, and give me a grudging grin. I would know that, even if I’d messed up things between him and old Angelica, at least he didn’t hate me, and we’d be back to normal soon. But without a joke, I was lost.

I turned to Harper. “Think of a joke.”

Harper gaped at Will too. Without taking her eyes off him, she said, “I’ve got nothing. And I don’t think a joke would fix this.”

The door slammed shut. Will was gone.

“Of course a joke would have fixed it!” I squeaked. “Normally you’re hilarious. What kind of friend are you if you can’t think up jokes on cue?”

She looked at me somberly through her glasses. “I’m the kind of friend who will support you during what comes next. If you two Biggest Flirts keep claiming you’re not going to flirt anymore, you’re going to blow each other’s lives wide open.”

***

Angelica did indeed find out about her brand-spanking-new boyfriend kissing the girl he’d sworn off. And then everybody else found out from Angelica. During the break after history, I heard her before I saw her in the crowded hall outside my English class, looking small and dead serious as she pointed her finger in Will’s face and raised her voice at him. I gave them a wide berth and ducked into class without either of them seeing me, I thought—which didn’t change the fact that everybody in the room stared at me as I walked toward the back and plopped down, four rows away from where I’d sat behind Will on Friday.

Will walked in on the bell, mouth set in a grim line, a pink flush crawling up his neck. I wondered if he’d gotten so angry with Angelica that he’d given her the “That’s enough!” line I kept getting from him when I pushed him past his breaking point. He didn’t look angry, though. He looked mortified. Apparently he got angry at a girl giving him heat only when he didn’t deserve it.

Band that afternoon was exactly as awful as I’d suspected. Unlike in the other classes I shared with Will, I couldn’t avoid him. I was stuck right next to him for the whole hour. And he didn’t say a word to me unless he was barking orders to the section. He’d brought two bottles of water for himself so he wouldn’t run out, and he must have spread sunscreen on the back of his neck already. He sat on the grass by himself instead of sharing my towel. It was the first practice we’d had in which Ms. Nakamoto didn’t have to tell him to get off me.

As we rehearsed the halftime show over and over, the hour flew by. But the heat was terrible, even to me, and Sawyer’s antics in the pelican costume weren’t funny. I tried to lose myself in the music and just enjoy it, forgetting Will was there. This was difficult when I was often sliding one stick sideways to play on his drum while Jimmy played on mine. Then we reversed direction, with me playing on Jimmy’s drum and Will’s stick in my personal space.

I fantasized about switching places with Jimmy, so that I stood between him and Travis. Just moving one person down in the drum line would make all the difference. I wouldn’t feel Will beside me constantly, his arm brushing against mine and suddenly pumping my body full of adrenaline. I wouldn’t smell the spicy scent of him that dragged me back, against my wishes, to our hopeless night together. With him finally out of my life, I could spend my spare time floating in the waves at the beach rather than trying to party thoughts of him away.

All it would take was one person in the snare drum line to challenge somebody else. Then we’d all have to try out, and I could carefully throw the competition so that I came in third. Problem was, except for Will, our snare drum line wasn’t very ambitious. I hadn’t convinced them to challenge me after begging them all summer. I wouldn’t convince them to challenge Will now.

I could, however, challenge Will myself.

That fantasy turned into an idea. The idea turned into a plan, because I had plenty of peace to think it through without the pesky drum captain teasing and distracting me. By the time DeMarcus started reading the end-of-day announcements, I’d made up my mind. Without a word to Will or Jimmy, I hefted my drum onto my shoulders, marched across the field, and climbed the stadium steps, making a beeline for Ms. Nakamoto. I whispered in her ear.

When DeMarcus finished his monotone of the day, Ms. Nakamoto held out her hand for the microphone. “One last announcement,” she said. “Snare drums, report to the band room before school tomorrow. Ms. Cruz is challenging Mr. Matthews for drum captain.”

“Oh, man!” was the first cry to come out of the snare drums, followed by some lower-key cursing—likely because they didn’t want to come to school early, not because they were worried about keeping their positions in the section. Then came a swell of “oooooh” as the rest of the band realized I must be trying to make Will’s life as miserable as possible.