Drew folded his arms and stared right back.
This went on for a few seconds. Finally Mr. Rush said, “Try to foil me, Morrow. Cross me, and I’ll cross you.” Drew and I watched him walk to the junior bus.
I turned and looked up at Drew. “What was that? Some secret guy code?”
“Yeah,” Drew said without meeting my eyes. “I’d better get my uniform.”
I climbed onto the freshman bus and announced that everyone on the left side had to move up one seat. This was the equivalent of throwing a hurricane onto the bus, but it seemed more fair than telling the people in the backseat that they had to move to the front. People fought for the backseat like it was a backstage pass to a Maroon 5 concert.
The couple in the back didn’t appreciate my kindness at all. They wouldn’t budge. I tried to explain the situation in terms they could understand: Mr. Rush was crazy.
Drew climbed onto the bus and walked down the aisle behind me, towering over the freshmen. He said to the couple, “Move.” They scrambled into the next seat. He dropped his uniform bag on the floor and slid next to the window.
Drew was the real drum major, and I was someone to be ignored. But standing there in the aisle with my hands on my hips didn’t do any good. The bus was starting. A nd Drew couldn’t even see me being mad, with his head leaned back on the seat and his eyes closed.
The bus lurched forward. I had to sit down next to him before I fell. “What’s your problem?” I asked. “Did you get guff from the Evil Twin because you’re not riding to the game with her?”
He opened his eyes and looked at me uneasily. “Could you hear her yelling all the way in here?”
I shook my head.
He closed his eyes again, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly through his nose. “It’s kind of a relief not to have to deal with that for three hours.”
Was he saying he’d rather be around me than the twin? Knowing the twin, this wasn’t saying much. But he was dating her. He was saying I was better than his girlfriend. Right?
Seems like he did care what I thought of him, at least. He opened his eyes, sat up, and asked, “A re you mad at me?”
I batted my eyelashes at him. “Why in the world would I be mad at you, Drewkins?”
He pursed his lips to keep from laughing, an expression I was growing very fond of, unfortunately. “The way you were looking at me outside the bus before Mr. Rush came down.”
“I was looking at you that way because your girlfriend was shooting daggers at me through her own eyeballs.”
“She’s not real into you. She thinks I like you.”
Oh, interesting. “Why would she think that?”
“Because we’re getting along now. A nd because of the dip. A nd sitting in the backseat of the bus together isn’t going to help.”
I wanted to ask, “Well, do you like me?” But of course I didn’t. This was actually sort of somewhat halfway serious drum major business, for the good of the band and getting along and all that. I said, “It’s your job to keep her off me. If you can’t keep your girlfriend from talking ugly about me behind my back, you’re not keeping up your end of the bargain for us to be friends.”
“But that would be if we were real friends. I thought we were fake friends.”
Maybe he was just making fun of me for what I’d told him about my nose stud last Tuesday. While I was still trying to work this out in my head, he asked, “Have you been talking to the band about what happened at the game on Friday?”
I wondered if he was angry that I’d run the public relations campaign behind his back. “Some,” I said cautiously. “Why?”
“Because people have apologized to me for things they said to me last Friday night.”
“See?” I grinned. “A ren’t you glad you have me on your side?”
“If it weren’t for you, there wouldn’t be a problem.” A lmost as soon as the words left his lips, he followed quickly with, “I’m sorry, Virginia. It slipped out. I’m still a little touchy about the whole thing, okay? Virginia.” He put a hand on my shoulder.
But I’d turned my back on him. If he was going to be an ass, I didn’t care how long his eyelashes were.
He took his hand off my shoulder.
The foothills of the A ppalachians around our town flattened into farmland on the hour’s drive southwest to Montgomery. I knew from trips to the beach with my parents that from there, cotton fields, soybean fields, peanut fields, and cow pastures stretched all the way to the ocean.
Of course, we weren’t getting anywhere near the ocean this time. The game was in the middle of nowhere. A s if our own town hadn’t been nowhere enough already.
I spent the trip talking to A riel James, a shy freshman who wanted to try out for drum major when I graduated. She was teaching herself to write music for band, but she played saxophone and needed help with the drum parts. I tapped rhythms for her with my drumsticks on the metal back of her seat.
This probably annoyed everyone else on the bus. I know it annoyed Barry’s little sister, Juliet, who shared the seat with A riel, because she kept telling me so.
I’d hoped it would annoy Drew. But the few times I stole a glance at him, he seemed absorbed in studying a book of SA T words. Which was strange. I’d never noticed Drew studying anything before. A nd I always noticed Drew.
A s soon as the buses parked, he edged around me in the seat and left the bus without another word. I knew he had to help the boys unload the U-Haul of instruments. A fter he disappeared down the stairs, I dove for his uniform bag and pulled out his band shoes. A riel and Juliet watched me. I put my finger to my lips.
“Virginia,” A llison called from outside the bus, right on schedule.
I dropped Drew’s shoes through the window to her, then leaned out. “Thanks,” I said.
“No prob.” She tucked the shoes into the back waistband of the sweatsuit she wore with her majorette boots and tiara, as if nobody would notice the large growth on her butt. “So, you really rode all the way down here in the make-out seat with Drew Morrow?”
“He talked my ear off the whole time. A nd the perv wouldn’t keep his paws off me. I had to beat him away with my drumsticks. Be sure to tell his girlfriend the serial killer.” I laughed at my own jokes. “A nd how was your trip? Did you suddenly bond with everyone on the bus and decide you want to spend the rest of your life in your hometown?”
“No, but it does look pretty good compared to this place.” She nodded into the sunset at a barbed wire fence that ran along the back of the football stadium. Behind the fence was a herd of … I think llamas.
I was about to tell her about the Miss Homecoming/Miss Victory trouble that Mr. Rush had stirred up, when I heard a scuffle and a scream behind me on the bus. Time to break up a fight over an iPod, which was strictly prohibited on band trips. The iPod and the fight.
It quickly turned into trumpets versus tubas. I tried to talk them down soothingly. When that didn’t work, I threatened them with laps around the football field during band practice on Monday. I couldn’t tell them I’d tattle on them to Mr. Rush, because that would undermine my own authority.
Drew climbed back up the stairs. Just what I needed—Drew to save the day. His T-shirt stuck to his chest with sweat, and beads spilled from his hairline down his cheeks as he walked down the aisle. “Sit down,” he said in passing.
Instantly the fight broke up, and everyone sat down in silence. The whole bus turned to watch Drew make his way over uniform bags and around coolers in the aisle to our seat in the back.
I stood in the aisle, looking like an idiot. It didn’t seem possible that a fight so big was over so quickly. There ought to be something left for me to take care of.
But Drew was in charge.
It was all I could do to keep from giving him a piece of my mind. But I didn’t want to get fired. A s I walked slowly toward him down the aisle, I recited to myself, Pizza Hut, Pizza Hut.
The silence shifted and then lifted around us as
everyone unzipped their uniform bags and started to change clothes. Without looking at Drew, I sat beside him and pulled my T-shirt halfway off over my head.
Nobody wanted to sit in their band uniform on the bus for three hours. It felt uncomfortable and looked dorky. But there wasn’t anywhere to change except the bus. The trick was to wear something skimpy but decent under your clothes, like a bathing suit or a sports bra, so you could change on the bus while boys watched.
I hadn’t really cared when I chose my tank top with a built-in bra, because I had thought I would be stuck alone on the freshman bus. Now I suddenly cared very much what I looked like changing while a boy watched.
When I tugged the T-shirt the rest of the way off my face, Drew was sitting with his back to the bus windows, staring at me. Hard.
“Do you mind!” I asked.
“I just wanted to see what you got.”
My heart stopped.
His dark eyes widened. “Your uniform! I wanted to see the uniform you got.”
Rats.
I shrugged my uniform coat on over my tank top. I fastened my miniskirt over my shorts, then pulled my shorts out from underneath. I was wearing matching briefs like cheerleaders wore so the crowd wouldn’t get an eyeful if my skirt flipped up. But I wasn’t sure whether the briefs qualified as decent, like bathing suit bottoms, or indecent, like underwear. I figured I’d better not expose them to the freshmen and, uh …
Despite myself, I glanced at Drew. He was still staring at me, all right. A nd not at my face, either. Then his eyes slowly traveled up to meet mine.
I turned away to zip up my knee-high boots. Finally I leaned back in the seat and crossed my ankles on an ice chest in the aisle, as if I were cool. Which, I assure you, I was not. “Well?” I asked.
“Well,” he said. A nd he pulled off his sweaty T-shirt.
My mouth dropped open. A s he rummaged in his bag, I tried to find a good time to repeat snippily, “I just wanted to see what you got.” But my brain wasn’t working.
I’d expected him to be thin, with a farmer’s tan ending just above his elbows. Instead, he had the strong, tanned body of a farm boy used to baling hay, or swinging scythes, or whatever it was farm boys did in modern times, with his shirt off.
Suddenly the seat was too small for the two of us. The entire bus was too small for Drew with his shirt off. In the seat across the aisle from us, Juliet pressed both hands to her mouth, and even A riel gaped. Then a high, feminine “ooooooh, aaaaaah” broke out.
Drew looked around the bus confusedly, like, Who, me? He went back to his uniform bag, pulled on a clean T-shirt and his jacket, and continued to rummage. “Have you seen my shoes?”
“Don’t tell me you lost them again.”
He stopped. I could tell he was reviewing packing his bag. He was wondering whether he’d lost his mind.
“Just wear your Vans again,” I said. “They’re black all over, and they look like band shoes from a distance. I don’t think Mr. Rush noticed you were wearing them last Friday.”
“My dad noticed. My dad will kill me.”
“Surely your dad isn’t coming to the game. Even my sickeningly supportive parents didn’t come. It’s too far”
He stared down at his Vans. This was really tearing him up. I wondered if he could hear his dad in his head, using the I-word.
He shook his head like he was shaking his dad out of his hair with the sweat. “You ready?” he asked. I nodded and stood up. He followed close behind me down the aisle with his hand on my back, like we were a couple. He even pointed threateningly at a few boys who whistled when they saw me.
Mr. Rush was laughing up at Ms. Martineaux, who stood in the doorway of the senior bus. When we walked over, she disappeared back inside the bus, and Mr. Rush turned to us. A nd turned to me. A nd raised his eyebrows.
“Is this uniform okay?” I asked.
“Tell her, Morrow.”
Drew told me, “You look hot.”
“What?” Mr. Rush whacked Drew on the chest. “That’s not what I was going to say!”
Drew colored. “Then why couldn’t you tell her yourself?”
“Uh-uh,” said Mr. Rush. “No way. You’re not pinning this on me. You got yourself into this one. A nd you already have girlfriends.” He walked away cackling.
I should have known something was wrong with Drew when he didn’t pay attention to the football game. He usually was one of those people who actually watched the game. I relied on him to signal me when our team had scored and we needed to play the fight song. Football couldn’t hold my interest. I waved to my friends on the cheerleading squad or watched the llamas try to paw through the barbed wire fence at the edge of the end zone.
A bove us in the stands the band yelled, “Drum major! We need a drum major!”
Our team had made a touchdown. Drew started like he’d been asleep, and we jumped up to direct the fight song.
The first time this happened, Mr. Rush didn’t seem to notice because he was busy talking to Ms. Martineaux. The second time, he gave Drew and me the stare.
I did know something was wrong with Drew at the beginning of the halftime show, but by then I couldn’t do anything about it.
We’d never done the dip for our salute at a game before, but we’d done it plenty of times in the past week in front of the band. Since we’d stopped falling down, we’d been pretty consistent. He put his hand there and his leg there and leaned me back until my head almost touched the grass.
The trick was to hold the position for a few seconds, face to face, without cracking each other up. With his hands on me, his dark eyes close to mine, and my heart pounding, it was hard for me not to break into an embarrassed giggle fit. But I managed.
This time was different. He put his hand there and his leg there, leaned me back, and held me there while the crowd screamed. Our lips almost brushed.
He blinked twice, and I felt myself falling. He’d lost his balance. He was about to faint. We were going to fall together on the fifty-yard line in front of the entire population of Llama Town.
Then he pulled me up and set me on my feet like nothing had happened.
It took me until halfway through the opening song to recover from the scare. But after that, the show went great. The band sounded awesome. The drums didn’t trip themselves up. Drew and I watched each other carefully.
A t the end of the show we got a standing ovation. We were the most exciting thing these people had seen since the tractor pull at the county fair.
Our last job was to turn the band to the right and march them off the field. Because some of them wouldn’t be able to hear the command over the crowd noise, we’d told them before the show that they would turn to the right.
During the show we took turns. One of us directed the band from the podium while the other directed down on the field. I was on the field now, and Drew was on the podium. He shouted, “Band! Left face!”
Half the band turned to the left because Drew told them to. Half the band turned to the right because they knew they were supposed to.
If he called, “Band, about face,” the ones facing left would turn right, but the ones facing right would turn left. I hesitated a split second as I processed this, knowing Drew was thinking the same thing.
Drew swayed a little on the podium.
A s casually as possible in knee-high boots and a miniskirt, I ran from my place on the field into the mass of the band. Walking slowly between the lines, I touched each person on the sleeve, saying, “You stay put. You turn around. You stay put. You turn around.”
This would take forever. Finally I got wise and called, “Toward the llamas! Everyone turn toward the llamas!”
It worked. The drum cadence started, and the few people who hadn’t figured it out yet turned around and followed everyone else out of the stadium. I emerged from the crowd and brought up the rear with Drew.
I didn’t say anything to him while we were in the stadium, because we were supposed to be at attention.
But as soon as we passed through the fence around the field, I turned to him, angry all over again for the times he’d made me feel like a second-class drum major. “I’m not saying I’ll never make a mistake. But I know my left from my right. You’re going to get us both fired.”
I had some more choice words for him, but by then, Mr. Rush had pushed through the crowd to us. “Morrow,” he began. I can’t repeat everything he said next. I actually didn’t hear all of it over the noise of the Llama Town band playing on the field. But it went something like,
“Cussword cussword cussword marching band cussword cussword cussword Pizza Hut cussword cussword cussword Clayton Porridge cuss cuss cuss!”
He blustered away soon enough, and I was about to take another turn at Drew. But his dazed look stopped me. I asked him, “A re you okay?”
“I think I’m coming down with something.”
I pulled off my uniform glove, then reached up and pressed my bare hand to his forehead. This was weird. Other than the dip, I’d never touched him on purpose before.
A nd then I fought the instinct to jerk my hand away in alarm. He was hotter than a human should be.
Temperature. He was hot in temperature. Hot had nothing to do with his dark eyes clouded by fever, or the black curls plastered to his neck with sweat like he’d just enjoyed a long make-out session.
With some lucky flute.
Ugh!
I pulled off the other glove and pressed both my hands on his cheeks to make sure.
He watched me warily like he thought I was about to slap him.
I took my hands away. “Is your throat killing you? It came on all of a sudden? But your head isn’t plugged up like a cold?”
He nodded.
“It’s probably strep throat. It’s been going around. You might even have caught it from me.”
“You—” His voice came out a whisper. He cleared his throat and started again. “You haven’t been sick.”
“I felt it coming on last Sunday. My dad took me to his office and gave me a strep test and antibiotics. You definitely need to go to your doctor tomorrow. If you don’t, it could develop into scarlet fever.”