My skin burned underneath Sawyer’s cheek, and my face felt flushed everywhere his soft hair brushed against it. I wondered if this truce signaled that we’d reached a different level of our relationship. I wondered if I wanted it to. I took a long breath through my nose, easily enough that he might not notice, and exhaled, trying to relax. I wanted to enjoy the sensation of him cuddling against me. I might not get it again.
I’d thought he’d fallen asleep, but he finally spoke. “You think being a vegan is stupid.”
“I don’t,” I said. “I think you’re not doing it right. Starvation, dry cereal, and alcohol do not equal a diet of any kind. My God, at least have some hummus.”
He chuckled—a sound I loved.
“What made you decide to sober up?” I asked. “Being in the hospital?”
“Being in the hospital made me realize that nobody has my back.” He sat up and leaned against the pillow again. We weren’t touching each other anymore, for the first time since he’d come out of the locker room. He looked alone, the only boy in a van full of girls, his blond hair lit by the streetlights behind him like an ironic halo, his features dark and inscrutable.
“My dad was up in Panama City,” he said. “Anybody else’s dad or mom would have rushed home if their kid was hospitalized with heat exhaustion. Not mine. The nurse—DeMarcus’s mom, actually—made me give her my dad’s cell phone number. I told her it wouldn’t do any good. She called him anyway, then came back in the room outraged that he wasn’t coming home. Outraged at me.”
“She wasn’t outraged at you,” I said.
“That’s how it felt. Like, What kind of family are you from? ” He took a long breath, still needing to calm himself down when he talked about this, even though it had happened a month ago. “My brother was in town, but he wouldn’t take time off work to check me out of the hospital when they said I could go home. He needed the hours.”
I nodded. Needing the hours was a foreign concept to me. My parents wanted Barrett and me to concentrate on school instead of getting jobs. Both of them had worked professionally since college. They hadn’t been paid hourly in decades. My understanding of hourly work came solely from Tia talking about her dad. He’d worked at a factory until recently, needing the hours and missing her marching band performances. But he would never have stayed at work if she’d been hospitalized. Neither would her sisters, even though she didn’t always get along with them.
The closer I got to Sawyer, the more isolated he seemed.
“Yeah,” he said, “I realized while I was in the hospital that I had a short-term goal, to be a really good school mascot in ninety-degree heat, and I couldn’t meet that goal without making some changes. But I also came to this new understanding of what could happen to me later. The biggest stoner in school is Jason Price, right?”
“I hope.” Actually, I hadn’t seen a lot of Jason lately. He’d gradually dropped out of the advanced-level classes. The last I’d heard, he was trolling business math and remedial English.
“Jason’s parents are both doctors. If he ever gets arrested, they’ll hire lawyers to have him released. Hell, they’ll probably sue the police department for taking their baby in. If I get arrested, my family will leave me there to rot. Nothing will make you clean up your act like your parents abandoning you completely.”
I didn’t realize I’d tilted my head and lowered my shoulders in disbelief until Sawyer imitated me.
“Come on,” I said. “Do you really think that?”
“You would hope my dad learned something during fifteen years of hard time,” Sawyer said. “But he treats me like his family treated him. I try to understand where he’s coming from. He didn’t exactly have every advantage when he was growing up. But not everybody raised in adverse circumstances decides to make a better life for themselves and their kids, like your mom did. A lot of them are hell-bound to repeat the process for the next generation. Somebody has to put their foot down and say, ‘I’m not playing that game.’ That somebody is me.
“I’ve known that for a long time. I felt like an outsider up in Georgia, when my mom was dragging my brother and me around to mooch off one relative and then another. If you’re on the outside looking in, it’s easy to judge and to feel superior. It wasn’t until I was lying in the hospital that I realized what I’d done. Instead of getting away from my relatives, I was becoming them. And if I got arrested at age twenty like my dad, my family would give me exactly as much help as his family gave him. I remember the exact moment it hit me.”
I went very still, hoping that moment hadn’t been some cruelty I’d paid him, one of those casual insults I’d lobbed at him before I knew the truth.
“You and everybody from school hadn’t gotten to the hospital yet,” Sawyer said. “It was just Will and me in the room. You know, he rode in the ambulance with me.”
I nodded. Sawyer had passed out on the football field. Will had hefted him over one shoulder and carried him all the way up the stadium stairs, into the parking lot to meet the ambulance. I’d just stood there among the other cheerleaders with my hands pressed to my mouth, impressed and terrified. I hadn’t known Will had this he-man superhero side. And up to that point, I’d never seen Sawyer vulnerable. Ever.
“I don’t remember passing out,” Sawyer said, “or throwing up in the parking lot, or being in the ambulance, even though Will says I was conscious for the whole ride. The first thing I remember is, Will’s in the chair next to my hospital bed, making small talk. Whether the Buccaneers will suck less this year, what the Rays’ chances are for a pennant, whether we can sneak past security to watch the Lightning practice. And I’m thinking what a shit I’ve been to this guy, and how little sense it makes for me to treat him that way. I mean, I want to be this guy. He has everything I want.”
“Tia?” I breathed.
“No! A future.” Sawyer frowned at me, only now understanding my question about Tia. His face softened.
“And then you walked into the hospital room,” he said. “You looked beautiful in red.”
“Ha,” I said. “I came straight from cheerleading practice. I was wearing a Pelicans T-shirt.”
“Yes, you were.” He laid his arm along the back of the seat and put his hand in my hair.
I smiled at the sweet feel of his fingertips rubbing my nape. “You might have sworn off mind-altering substances that day, but it’s not like you’ve changed personalities. You’re still really mean to Kennedy,” I pointed out.
His nostrils flared. “I strongly dislike Kennedy.”
“And Aidan.”
His hand stopped in midair, pulling one of my curls. “I hate Aidan.” He let my curl go. It sprang back into place.
“You haven’t changed as much as you think,” I said. “You’re incredibly smart and responsible about some things, like quitting drinking. On other things, like your diet, and getting along with certain people, you act like you’re from another planet.”
“Oh,” he said, lifting his chin defiantly, “and you’re not like that?”
“I’ll bite,” I said. “What am I smart about?”
“Almost everything,” Sawyer declared. “Though, as you pointed out, you don’t believe it. Is there anything you honestly think you’re good at?”
“Being a cheerleader.” I smoothed my hands over my short skirt, then lowered my voice to a whisper. “Not the part where I babysit Grace and Cathy and Ellen.” In a normal tone I said, “The part where I actually cheer and dance. I love dancing. And of course this would be what I really enjoy, because my mother makes a comment every time I leave the house for practice. ‘That’s really going to help get you a job as a professional cheerleader.’ ”
“It could be a backup career if your corporate takeover falls through,” Sawyer said.
“You laugh,” I said. “But lately, every time I’m on the field during a game, I’m thinking, ‘I don’t want high school to end.’ It’s partly because I don’t want to leave my friends. But I also don’t look
forward to spending the rest of my life sitting in a tiny room, ciphering. That’s what my career is going to be like. That’s what my college experience will be, too.”
“Surely Columbia has cheerleaders,” Sawyer said.
“I never really thought about it,” I admitted. “But their football team sucks. Cheering them on wouldn’t be much fun. The whole school seems focused on academics. They put classes ahead of sports in a way the entire state of Florida doesn’t really comprehend.”
“What about actually trying out as a professional cheerleader?” he asked. “You could do that while you’re in school. I don’t think it pays much at all. Those girls are trying to get discovered as models. But if you were just doing it for fun . . .”
“My mother would disown me.” I enjoyed saying these words more than I expected. After picturing myself for half a second in a low-cut bra top and shorts the size of panties, I shook my head sadly. “I’ll bet I can’t try out until I’m twenty-one.”
“I’ll bet you’re wrong,” Sawyer said. “Men still make most of the rules in this country. Men aren’t going to prevent an eighteen-year-old from being a professional cheerleader. It’s her God-given right.”
I stared at Sawyer, who watched me with his brows raised. The interstate lights caressed his face and released him, then slowly moved across his face again. I was so accustomed to Aidan talking me out of crazy schemes that I hardly ever came up with them anymore. This one was so nuts that I was having a flashback to eighth grade, before I started dating Aidan, when my friends laughed and called me a live wire. At some point along the way, the life had gone out of me.
And here was Sawyer, calmly encouraging me to do exactly what I wanted.
I fished in my bag for my phone, then looked up the Giants. “The Giants don’t have cheerleaders.” I typed the Jets into the search engine. “The Jets have a cheerleading squad called the Flight Crew. That’s adorbs.” I thumbed through to an information screen and enlarged the tiny print. “I can’t do it. Tryouts are in March. My mother would never let me go up to New York for that. And I won’t be eighteen by the deadline. But I could try out the next year, when I’m already at Columbia.” I took a closer look at photos of the current squad. “They would make me relax my hair.”
“You don’t know that,” Sawyer said, “but it makes an excellent excuse not to try.”
I eyed him. “You’re daring me.”
“I’m definitely not. You’d be wearing next to nothing, and men would leer at you. I wouldn’t encourage you to do it, except that you obviously want to. I think you understand the leering aspect and accept it, even want it. And that’s okay.”
“You wouldn’t be jealous about the skimpy uniforms and the leering men?” My tone was teasing, but suddenly I wanted so badly for him to acknowledge that the thought made him crazy.
“Your body belongs to you,” he said solemnly, “not any guy, and not your mom. You really don’t seem to understand that.”
Across the aisle from me, Cathy shifted in her sleep and nearly fell off her seat. Instinctively I dodged away from her, cupping my hands over my phone screen.
“It’s not a joint,” Sawyer said.
“I feel awful even looking this up, like my mother is watching me and doing calculations about how much money I’m wasting if time is money.”
“Anything making you feel that guilty is definitely worth doing.”
I looked over at him, at his sharp nose and soft mouth coming in and out of focus as the van moved through the interstate lights. My lust for him had grown as the ride went on. I wondered if he meant we should indulge our own guilty pleasure. I’d reached the point that I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight, or ever, if I didn’t find out.
I bent to slip my phone back into my bag. Then I moved toward him.
His eyes widened, but he didn’t back away.
I cradled his chin in my hand, his blond stubble scratching across my fingertips.
His lips parted. He looked a little outraged, honestly, like this was unseemly behavior for a future valedictorian.
If I’d thought about the expression on his face, I would have backed away. But I was sick to death of thinking. I kissed him.
He opened his mouth for mine. I swept my tongue inside. He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t reciprocate, either. I knew I could kiss. Aidan and I had had plenty of practice. But I felt as if I was initiating Sawyer in a decidedly unsexy way, like when DeMarcus had taught me to French kiss in front of an audience of our peers at his Halloween party in seventh grade, directly after Tia had taught DeMarcus.
I broke the kiss and pulled back until I could see Sawyer. His face was mostly in shadow. I wished yet again that I could gauge the look in his eyes. “I feel like I’m taking advantage of you, which is no fun at all. You don’t want to kiss me?”
“I do.” He swallowed, and he actually looked like he was in pain as he said, “I don’t want to get hurt.”
“This won’t hurt.” I slipped my hand into his hair and kissed him.
Again I felt that I was leading the dance. I was about to give up on him. That lasted about five seconds.
Then he was kissing me back. He pulled me closer, deepened the kiss, and explored my mouth. He bit my lip, almost hard enough to hurt. As I opened my mouth wider to protest, he gave me a taste of what other girls were talking about when they said Sawyer turned them on. In one minute he had controlled me completely.
He took his hand out of my hair and placed it on my breast. I broke the kiss to gasp at the intensity of tingles racing through me.
Just as suddenly as he’d started, he let go of me and backed away, his shoulders rising and falling rapidly as he panted. He said hoarsely, “We just can’t. I want to, but I know this isn’t going to work out.”
I gaped at him. I could not believe, after everything we’d been through to get to this point, that he was dumping me when we’d hardly gotten started.
I’d heard so many reports of him having trysts like this with different girls. Strangely, those accounts included the beginning, and the good stuff, but never the ending of those relationships. Maybe that’s because they all ended like this.
I jerked my pillow out from behind him, then grabbed my bag from the floor.
“Kaye.” His hand circled my wrist.
I glowered at him. I wasn’t sure he could see my face in the dark, but he knew what the sharp jerk of my head meant. He let me go and put his hand up, surrendering.
I stood and shuffled to the back of the van. Normally I was the one who told the other girls to treat their pompons right, leaving them in clean places rather than in pools of half-dried Coke on the concrete steps of the stadium. This time I was the one who unceremoniously knocked Sawyer’s costume bag and a pile of pompons to the floor in a hiss of plastic streamers. I lay down with my pillow underneath my head and closed my eyes, listening for Sawyer over the drone of the van motor, and hating him.
What I heard was a grunt near the floor. After a few seconds I realized it wasn’t a rogue bullfrog that had found its way onto the van but my phone vibrating in my bag and bouncing against the van’s carpeted bottom. I snatched the phone out. I knew Sawyer was texting me.
Sawyer: I never had a chance to tell u what ur stupid abt.
I waited. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of prompting him: What’s that, Sawyer? But he’d heard me take my phone out. He knew I was hanging on what he would say next.
Sawyer: Me.
I texted back so angrily that my thumbs pressed rogue characters and my message was full of )$&@. I had to take a deep breath. I wasn’t going to send him an answer that was less than perfect. Finally I got it cleaned up and texted this:
Me: I’m not stupid about u. YOU lead me on and then shut me down. U have done that for the last time. 3 strikes and ur out.
I turned my phone off, threw it in my bag, and rolled over with my back to the van.
As soon as I’d done this, I regretted it. “3 strikes and ur
out”? That was the kind of draconian statement my mother would make, setting limits and sticking to them no matter what, even if they had no meaning later and caused everyone misery.
But I wasn’t wrong, was I? Showing Sawyer how much I liked him was hard for me. There were only so many times I could go out on a limb like that, only to have him cut off the limb at the trunk and watch me fall. I’d been worried at lunch that his problems were too serious for us to get over. Well, I was done. Now he could start worrying about my problems.
I pictured my life as I would start living it tomorrow: single. I wouldn’t go after Sawyer. I wouldn’t worry what Aidan was up to. I wouldn’t try desperately to find a date for my nonexistent homecoming dance. I had great friends and lots to do my senior year—too much, according to my mother—and I could enjoy it all by myself.
I sat up and peered around the seat in front of me only once to see what Sawyer was doing. His worried face was lit clearly by the glow of his phone. He was still typing.
* * *
An hour later, the instant I arrived home and escaped to my room, I turned my phone back on and opened his texts.
Sawyer: 3 strikes makes it sound like ur playing a game w ME.
Sawyer: Kaye
Sawyer: We need to talk abt this. You can’t just pretend I’m not here. I’m RIGHT HERE & if u don’t answer I will do something inconceivably cruel to ur pompons.
Sawyer: Kaye
Sawyer: Kaye.
11
THE NEXT NIGHT HARPER CALLED me after dinner. “What’cha doing?” she asked.
“My next paper for Mr. Frank.”
“Oh, shit. On Saturday night? Have I missed something? I thought it wasn’t due for another two weeks.”
“It’s not,” I said. “My mother is making me write it early, because she doesn’t trust me anymore. Like she ever did.” I wished Harper hadn’t asked. I hated the bitter sound of my voice. “What’s up?”
“I was wondering if you would help me buy a car.”
I waited for Harper to explain what the hell she was talking about. When she remained silent, I said, “What?”