“Okay,” he said, batting the weird orange cloth off us. “You’re not totally to blame for what happened yesterday. You started to kiss me, and I kissed you back. And I agree we were both at fault for getting elected Biggest Flirts. But you are ruining my life. You won’t go out with me, but you’ve made sure nobody else will want to go out with me either.”
I looked into his eyes. He seemed to be admitting again that he was still attracted to me—which meant asking Angelica or anybody else out was just an exercise.
“Why is it so important to you to date right now?” I asked. “You’ve been here a week, and you keep saying you’re booking it to Minnesota the first chance you get. So the drive to find a girlfriend, any girlfriend, in Florida doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.” I felt like the lowest of the low as I said this. I really wanted to know, but Harper’s words from Friday echoed in my head, pointing out that I was selfish when it came to Will.
His nostrils flared a little, like when I’d tried to hand him his phone on the football field, as though he found the thought of Minnesota distasteful. “I did want to go to Minnesota. That was my original plan, and it took me a few days to get used to the idea that it was gone. I don’t want to go back. My girlfriend is screwing my best friend now.”
I nodded sympathetically, thinking of that beautiful girl getting kissed by that blond boy. “You wish you’d never moved.”
“No, not even that,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to go back to the way things were before I moved, now that I know she’s the kind of person who would cheat on me the second I left town. Even if I’d never given her that opportunity, she was still that kind of person.”
“What?” I asked, puzzling this out. “She was a latent cheater? A cheater waiting to happen?”
“Exactly,” he said. “So now, my life here sucks, and I have the knowledge that my life there sucked too. I just didn’t know it at the time. My life would suck anywhere. It’s completely fucking tragic.”
“That’s not true,” I said, a little alarmed. “You’re in a bad spot, Will. Moving is stressful, and you’re only one week out. Your girlfriend cheating on you was awful. You feel bad about that. There would be something wrong with you if you didn’t.”
He gave his head a dismissive shake, telling me I had no idea what he meant. “That’s not all.” He reached down for a flag and rolled the neat hem between his fingers. “I was supposed to be drum major back home.”
“You were?” I could see him as drum major.
“Yes. And student council president.”
I could not see him as student council president. He’d never glad-handed a stranger like Aidan did. “You?”
“Yes,” Will said bitterly. “Thanks.”
“Sorry. I’m so sorry.” I put one hand on his knee so he wouldn’t pull away from me completely. “It’s just that in my experience, that job requires skills you don’t seem to possess, such as talking.”
He nodded. “Right.”
“What do you mean, you were supposed to be?” I asked. “You were going to run for these positions in Minnesota this year?”
“No, I’d already been elected.”
“Oh my God!” My voice echoed against the concrete walls. “Why did your parents make you move, then? Couldn’t they wait another year until you graduated?”
Will sighed. “My dad’s office closed down. If he didn’t transfer to manage the branch office here, he would have been laid off. So, no.”
“Oh.”
“And my mom said since I’d done that stuff at my old school, I could do it at my new school. I believed her. Nothing I’d ever been through told me otherwise. It was only when I got here . . .”
“We already had a drum major and a student council president,” I finished for him.
“Even if DeMarcus hadn’t snagged one office and Aidan the other, I wouldn’t have gotten them. I’m not the man my parents thought I was, or I thought I was. I’m . . . I think I’m . . .”
I held my breath, my mind spinning at what he might say.
“Shy,” he sighed.
I burst into laughter. “Well, you’ve got that one right.”
“It’s not funny,” he said.
I considered him beside me, looming over me, really, when he was sitting so close, his muscular body making the room seem smaller. He had a big personality, too, one that didn’t seem aptly described by the word “shy.” “You’re introverted,” I corrected him.
He shrugged.
“You get your energy from being by yourself,” I guessed. This was Harper’s description of the strange phenomenon I did not understand. “Having to talk to a bunch of people at once, especially people you don’t know, makes you feel drained.”
“Exactly!” he exclaimed, surprised that I had any insight. “I guess I never noticed at home. Here, where I have to start over, it’s debilitating. I fell asleep as myself one night and woke up the next morning as a loser. This is coming at a really bad time for me. My parents are telling me that I can’t follow in my dad’s footsteps. If I’m a terrific manager, all that will get me is threatened with a layoff and transferred across the country. I have to be better than my dad. I have to be perfect at everything. So my parents are like, if you can’t be drum major, be the next best thing. Be drum captain. I thought I’d done that. And then—”
Before he could say, A disorganized mess of a girl took that away from me too. IS THERE NO JUSTICE? I broke in with, “I’m sorry.” Again.
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “You won fair and square. I was afraid you would. I practiced for hours beforehand, but I still missed a beat when we played the cadence during the challenge, and you didn’t. End of story.”
I thought about him in his room late last night, lying on his bed with his eyes closed, beating out the cadence on a practice pad propped up on his knees—that’s how I practiced, anyway, when I practiced—over and over until he thought his head would explode. I hadn’t practiced at all, since I hadn’t wanted to win. But I had a three-year head start on him, having played this cadence countless times throughout high school. He’d been no match for an experienced drummer so scatterbrained that she forgot herself and won.
“My mom keeps saying if I act the way I acted in Minnesota, I’ll have what I had in Minnesota. If I stay the same person, I’ll have the same great friends. Well, now it turns out my friends there weren’t so great. And no one here cares who I used to be back home. Nobody would believe me anyway.”
“I believe you,” I piped up.
“You actually know me,” he said. “You’ve been forced to stand next to me. I can’t go around the school making people stand next to me for forty hours just so they’ll see what I’m made of. People believe the rumors, believe what the Senior Superlatives title says about me, believe what Sawyer tells them.”
I snorted. “I doubt anybody in their right mind believes anything Sawyer tells them, ever.”
“Well, I’m even less credible than he is, because I’m just the Fucking New Guy. Right?”
I had heard Sawyer refer to Will as the Fucking New Guy. I would have to talk to him about that, because, although the consensus in the school was that Sawyer was full of shit, his nicknames for people did catch on. “Sawyer has a chip on his shoulder,” I explained. “He hasn’t been here very long himself. He used to live with his mom up in Georgia. He only moved here a couple of years ago when his dad got out of jail.”
“That sounds about right,” Will grumbled.
“Now, wait a minute,” I said. “You’re judging him the same way that you don’t want to be judged.”
“Good,” Will said. Normally he backtracked when I pointed out that he was being a hypocrite, but I’d noticed he had a tendency to shut down when Sawyer was mentioned. “Anyway, he’s not the only one talking smack about me. Back home I was just me, Will. Everybody had known me
forever. They knew that I try to stay in shape all year so I don’t get killed in hockey, not to show off. I would never take off my shirt unless I thought I was going to pass out from heatstroke, and I would never, ever cheat on my girlfriend. Here I’m a completely different person, and my whole life is changing to match it—all because of this label that I got saddled with.”
“Will, it’s not that bad,” I lied. It was pretty bad.
“Everybody hates me,” he said.
“They do not!” Hate was too personal.
He gave me a stern look. “I’ve overheard you trying to convince your friends that I’m not the stuck-up shit they thought I was.”
He certainly had. “I don’t see why you care so much,” I said. “You have to sit out one year of high school, not doing some of the stuff you thought you were going to do. It’ll be over in another nine months. You’ll go to college and get on with your life and forget all about us.”
“No, that’s exactly it. The person I thought I was—that was the fake. I was successful because everybody had known me since we all started kindergarten. But pluck me out of there and set me down in a new school, and I’m completely unrecognizable. I don’t have Aidan’s charisma or Sawyer’s . . . whatever Sawyer has.”
“Penchant for catastrophe.”
“Yes, that. If the senior class had voted for the Superlatives titles and I’d gotten nothing at all, I would feel better. Nobody had time to notice me. But what do I get voted? Biggest Flirt. With you. Why? Because I want to be around you all the time. You’re the only person here who makes me feel like I’m at home.”
I waved away his compliment, if indeed that’s what it was. “People always tell me I could have a conversation with a rock.”
“Exactly. What am I going to do when I start college? Or I start a new job, where my dad thinks I have to be the star performer on day one or else? There’s not always going to be someone like you there, following me around, giving me someone to joke with, and talking other people out of hating me.”
I resented this. I hadn’t thought of myself as following him around. And giving him someone to joke with sounded like I was his e-reader.
But I wasn’t going to get in a fight with him when he was already upset about not getting along with everyone else. I said, “I don’t think this is a permanent condition, Will. Yeah, you may have a harder time making friends than you thought. But in the week you’ve lived in Florida, you’ve also been angry. You’re mad at your parents for moving. You’re mad at your dad’s company, and now you don’t want to work for The Man. You resent everyone here who holds the positions that were yours in Minnesota. All that anger changes what you are, reserved”—I opened my hands—“and turns it into dour.” I cupped my hands together in a ball to show Will how he’d closed down. Then I put one hand on his knee again.
“You don’t get it,” he said. “You’re saying everybody is looking at me differently in Florida from how they saw me in Minnesota. I’m saying I’m looking at me differently too. I really am not the person I thought I was. When you kissed me for the photo yesterday—”
“Hello, you kissed me!”
He put his hands up in the air like he did when Ms. Nakamoto scolded him through the microphone. “Whatever happened, that wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m not like that. That wasn’t me. I really didn’t want it to be me, because if I cheated on Angelica, I was doing to her exactly what Beverly did to me when I left Minnesota. That was never my intention. I mean, if I’m going to do that to Angelica, I can’t really be angry with Beverly, can I? And I would like to be angry at her for a while longer.”
“Okay,” I said, laughing. I knew he was serious, but I enjoyed hearing him admit to being base and petty every once in a while. It helped to know he wasn’t as superhuman as he looked.
“So I’m sorry for the way I acted after the picture yesterday. You didn’t know what’s going on with me. I came down a lot harder on you than you deserved. And I understand why you challenged me. I drove you to it. I wouldn’t want to stand next to me either.” He looked down at my hand on his knee. Then he glanced over at the door like he hoped Harper would relent and open it. I wished he would put his hand on mine, some sign that we were cool again, but he seemed only to want to be alone.
“I consider you a friend,” I said quietly. “I think we’re having such a hard time getting along because, the first night we met, we read each other completely wrong. We went a lot farther than you were expecting, and I was surprised at how you reacted.”
He held my gaze and said grimly, “That’s not why.”
As I watched his eyes, looking dark now rather than blue in his shadowed face, I felt warmth spread across my chest and up my neck. I was more confused and more turned on than I’d been yesterday morning when we kissed, because his words were weightier than his lips on mine. We both understood we had a connection. I’d told him, over and over, that I didn’t want a boyfriend. He’d made progress toward getting a different girlfriend. And whatever we said we wanted, we kept ending up close to each other, touching.
That scared the hell out of me. I took my hand off his knee.
He glanced toward the door again, nodding like he accepted what I was telling him: that we would never be together. Not the way he wanted. And he was ready for Harper to come along and let him go.
He’d confessed his feelings to me, and his motivations. I was glad Harper had made us talk. But when he walked out that door, he would still be lost in Florida. The school would still view him as the dog who couldn’t stick with one girlfriend—even worse than Sawyer, who at least was up front about his inability to commit. And Will would still be second chair on snare.
“Will you challenge me?” I asked him. “Tell Ms. Nakamoto during band this afternoon, and we’ll have another tryout tomorrow.”
“No,” he said firmly. “You won. I lost. If we went through it again tomorrow and you lost, I’d know you threw it. So would everybody else. You’ve already undercut any authority I might have had with the drums.”
“That’s not true. You get your authority from being a great drum captain. I don’t want to be in charge. You’ll see in practice this afternoon. If we’re so unfortunate that Ms. Nakamoto tells us to have a sectional, Jimmy and Travis will laugh me out of the parking lot.”
His brows knitted, deepening the worry line between them. “Can I ask you something personal?”
“More personal than ‘Do you like it when I put my mouth on your nipple?’ ”
A blush shot through his face. He pursed his lips, trying hard not to laugh. I noticed that goose bumps broke out on his skin too—possibly the only time in the last week that he’d felt a chill, unless he’d been taking cold showers. I wondered if he realized he was rubbing his arms with his hands to warm himself as he said, “I’ll take that as a yes. The question is, what were you in charge of that you screwed up?”
I shrugged. “Nothing. I’ve never been in charge of anything.”
“Then why are you so scared?”
“I will screw it up,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Everybody tells me I will. Everybody says, ‘Oh, you’d better not put Tia in charge of anything—watch out.’ ”
“Who says that?”
“My sisters. Everybody at school. You heard the drum line, and DeMarcus. They were so freaking relieved that anybody was drum captain besides me.”
Will squinted at me. “Don’t you think that’s because you go around saying, ‘You’d better not put me in charge of anything’? It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
What he was telling me seemed to glimmer in front of me. “No,” I said. “You wouldn’t think that if you’d known me for more than a week. The people around here have known me forever.”
“I just got here,” Will said, “and that’s exactly why I can see you so clearly.”
; Suddenly I was the one who was cold. I crossed my arms but tried to disguise the move by putting my chin in one hand.
“Girls look up to you.”
“Ha!” I crowed. “That is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” I felt my smile dropping away as he watched me silently without laughing along. I asked, “Are you serious?”
“Yes. The girls in the drum line, especially. They watch your every move. They practice the twirls you do with your sticks when you’re thinking about something else.”
I suspected he was making this up. “I never noticed.”
“They wait until you’re walking away.”
“Well, God help them,” I said. “If I can do one positive thing for them between now and when I graduate, it will be to give up drum captain and never be put in charge of anything again.”
“That’s not a goal,” he said. “It’s an anti-goal. It’s an aggressive stance against any sort of goal, like that’s going to help you.”
I let out a frustrated sigh. He was starting to sound like Kaye. Besides, I wasn’t the one who needed help. He was the one who feared the school would show up at his house with pitchforks and torches. And I could use that to my advantage. “Listen, would you challenge me for drum captain if I did you a favor?”
He grinned at me. “What kind of favor?”
He looked so adorable when he smiled. I wished I was suggesting that kind of favor. “I’ll explain the situation to Angelica,” I said. “I’ll tell her the picture yesterday was my fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he murmured. “Not totally. We agreed on that.”
“Still, I’ll try with her. I’ll convince her to give you another chance. You can go out with her again. You and I will keep our hands off each other. Then all your problems will be solved.”
His fingers tapped a beat on one knee. “Knock yourself out.”
“And you’ll challenge me?”
“Yep.” He was looking at the bare bulb in the ceiling. He didn’t seem very invested in this conversation. I would show him, though. Getting out of drum captain was at stake here.