I said carefully, “We’ve been out, but we’re not together now.” Changing the subject so fast that Will and I both risked neck injury, I asked, “What city are you from? Minneapolis?”
“No.”
“St. Paul?”
“No, Duluth.”
“Never heard of it.”
“I know.” He raised the unopened beer can to his forehead again. Perspiration was beading at his hairline and dripping toward his ear. I felt sorry for him. Wait until it got hot tomorrow.
“What’s Duluth like?” I asked.
“Well, it’s on Lake Superior.”
“Uh-huh. Minnesota’s the Land of a Thousand Lakes, isn’t it?” I asked. Little had Mr. Tomlin known when he interrogated us on state trivia in third grade that I would later find it useful for picking up a Minnesotan.
“Ten Thousand Lakes,” Will corrected me with a grin.
“Wow, that’s a lot of lakes. You must have been completely surrounded. Did you swim to school?”
He shook his head no. “Too cold to swim.”
I couldn’t imagine this. Too cold to swim? Such a shame. “What did you do up there, then?” I ran my eyes over his muscular arms. Will didn’t have the physique of a naturally strong and sinewy boy such as Sawyer, but of an athlete who actively worked out. I guessed, “Do you play football?”
His mouth cocked to one side. He was aware I’d paid him a compliment about his body. “Hockey,” he said.
A hockey player! The bad boy of athletes who elbowed his opponent in the jaw just for spite and spent half the period in the penalty box. I loved it!
But my reverence for him in my mind didn’t make it to my mouth. I had to turn it into a joke. “Ha!” I exclaimed. “Good luck with that around here. We’re not exactly a hockey mecca.”
“Tampa Bay has an NHL team,” he reminded me.
“Yeah, but nobody else here plays. The NHL rinks are probably the only ones in the entire metropolitan area. A high school guy playing hockey in Tampa makes as much sense as the Jamaican bobsled team.”
I’d meant it to be funny. But his mouth twitched to one side again, this time like I’d slapped him. Maybe he was considering for the first time that our central Florida high school might not have a varsity hockey team.
I sipped my beer, racking my brain for a way to salvage this conversation, which I’d really been digging. He held his beer in both hands like he was trying to get all the cold out of it without actually drinking it. His eyes roved the corners of the porch, and I wondered whether he was searching for Angelica as a way to escape from me if she and DeMarcus got tired of each other.
Before I could embarrass myself with another gem from my stand-up routine, the porch vibrated with deep whoops of “Sawyer!” The man himself sauntered up the wooden steps to the porch, waving with both hands like the president in his inauguration parade—but only if he’d bought the election. Nobody in their right mind would elect Sawyer to a position of responsibility. The only office he’d ever snagged was school mascot. He would be loping around the football field this year in a giant bird costume.
What didn’t quite make sense about Sawyer De Luca was his platinum hair, darker at the roots and brighter at the sun-bleached tips like a swimmer who never had to come in from the ocean and go to school. The hair didn’t go with his Italian name or his dark father and brother. He must have looked like his mom, but she lived in Georgia and nobody had ever met her. A couple of years ago, she sent him to live with his dad, who was getting out of prison, because she couldn’t handle Sawyer anymore. At least, that’s what Sawyer had told me, and it sounded about right.
After shaking a few hands and embracing DeMarcus, Sawyer sauntered over and stood in front of Will. Not in front of me. He didn’t acknowledge me at all as he stepped into Will’s personal space and said, looking down at him, “You’re in my place.”
“Oh Jesus, Sawyer!” I exclaimed. Why did he have to pick a fight while I was getting to know the new guy? He must have had a bad night. Working with his prick of an older brother, who ran the bar at the Crab Lab, tended to have that effect on him.
I opened my mouth to reassure Will that Sawyer meant no harm. Or, maybe he did, but I wouldn’t let Sawyer get away with it.
Before I could say anything, Will rose. At his full height, he towered over Sawyer. He looked down on Sawyer exactly as Sawyer had looked down on him a moment before. He growled, “This is your place? I don’t think so.”
The other boys around us stopped their joking and said in warning voices, “Sawyer.” Brody put a hand on Sawyer’s chest. Brody really was a football player and could have held Sawyer off Will single-handedly. Sawyer didn’t care. He stared up at Will with murder in his eyes.
I stood too. “Come on, Sawyer. You were the one who told Will about this party in the first place.”
“I didn’t invite him here.” Sawyer pointed at the bench where Will had been sitting.
I knew how Sawyer felt. When I’d looked forward to hooking up with him at a party, I was disappointed and even angry if he shared his night with another girl instead. But that was our long-standing agreement. We used each other when nobody more intriguing was available. Now wasn’t the time to test our pact. I said, “You’re some welcome committee.”
The joke surprised Sawyer out of his dark mood. He relaxed his shoulders and took a half step backward. Brody and the other guys retreated the way they’d come. I wouldn’t have put it past Sawyer to spring at Will now that everyone’s guard was down, but he just poked Will—gently, I thought with relief—on the cursive V emblazoned on his T-shirt. “What’s the V stand for? Virgin?”
“The Minnesota Vikings, moron,” I said. Then I turned to Will. “You will quickly come to understand that Sawyer is full of sh—”
Will spoke over my head to Sawyer. “It stands for ‘vilification.’ ”
“What? Vili . . . What does that mean?” Knitting his brow, Sawyer pulled out his phone and thumbed the keyboard. I had a large vocabulary, and his was even bigger, but we’d both found that playing dumb made life easier.
Will edged around me to peer over Sawyer’s shoulder at the screen. At the same time, he slid his hand around my waist. I hadn’t seen a move that smooth in a while. I liked the way Minnesota guys operated. He told Sawyer, “No, not two L’s. One L.”
Sawyer gave Will another wild-eyed warning. His gaze dropped to Will’s hand on my waist, then rose to my serious-as-a-heart-attack face. He told Will, “Okay, SAT. I’ll take my vocabulary quiz over here.” He retreated to the corner of the porch to talk with a cheerleader.
Relieved, I sat back down on the bench, holding Will’s hand on my side so that he had to sit down with me or get his arm jerked out of its socket. He settled closer to me than before. With his free hand, he drummed his fingers on his knee to the beat of the music filtering onto the porch. The rhythm he tapped out was so complex that I wondered whether he’d been a drummer—not for marching band like me, but for some wild rock band that got into fistfights after the hockey game was over.
As we talked, he looked into my eyes as if I was the only girl at the party, and he grinned at all my jokes. Now that my third beer was kicking in, I let go of some of my anxiety about saying exactly the right thing and just had fun. I asked him if he was part of our senior class. He was. It seemed obvious, but he could have been a freshman built like a running back. Then I explained who the other people at the party were according to the Senior Superlatives titles they were likely to get—Best Car, Most Athletic, that sort of thing.
My predictions were iffy. Each person could hold only one title, preventing a superstar like my friend Kaye from racking up all the honors and turning the high school yearbook into her biography. She might get Most Popular or Most Likely to Succeed. She was head cheerleader, a born leader, and good at everything. Harper, the yearbook photographer, might get Most Artistic or Most Original, since she wore funky clothes and retro glasses and always thought outside the box.
> “What about you?” Will asked, tugging playfully at one of my braids.
“Ha! Most Likely to Wake Up on Your Lawn.”
He laughed. “Is that a real award?”
“No, we don’t give awards that would make girls cry. I’ll probably get Tallest.” That wasn’t a real one either.
He cocked his head at me. “Funniest?”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s like getting voted Miss Congeniality in a beauty pageant. It’s a consolation prize.”
A line appeared between his brows. He rubbed his thumb gently across my lips. “Sexiest.”
“You obviously haven’t surveyed the whole senior class.”
“I don’t have to.”
Staring into his eyes, which crinkled at the corners as he smiled, I knew he was handing me a line. And I loved this pirate pickup of his. I let my gaze fall to his lips, willing him to kiss me.
“Hi there, new guy!” Aidan said as he burst out the door. He crossed the porch in two steps and held out his hand for Will to shake. “Aidan O’Neill, student council president.”
I made a noise. It went something like “blugh” and was loud enough for Aidan to hear. I knew this because he looked at me with the same expression he gave me when I made fun of his penny loafers. He was Kaye’s boyfriend, so I tried to put up with him. But we’d been assigned as partners on a chemistry paper last year, and any semblance of friendship we might have had was ruined when he tried to correct me incorrectly during my part of the presentation. I’d told him to be right or sit down. The only thing that made Aidan madder than someone challenging him was someone challenging him in public.
“Blugh” wasn’t a sufficient warning for Will not to talk to him, apparently. Aidan sat down on Will’s other side and launched into an overview of our school’s wonders that Minnesota probably had never heard of, such as pep rallies and doughnut sales.
“Time for everybody to get lost,” Brody called. “My mom will be home from the Rays game in a few minutes.”
“Thanks for hosting,” I told him.
“Always a pleasure. Looks like this time you may have more pleasure than you can handle, though.” He nodded toward the stairs, where Sawyer was waving at me.
Sawyer held up his thumb and pointer together, which meant, I have weed. Want to toke up?
I shook my head in a small enough motion that Will didn’t notice, I hoped. Translation: No, I’m taking Will home if I can swing it.
Sawyer raised one eyebrow and lowered the other, making a mad scientist face. It meant, You’d rather go home with this guy than get high with me? You have finally lost your marbles.
I raised both eyebrows: We have an agreement. We stick together unless something better comes along. This is something better.
He flared his nostrils—Well, I never!—and turned away. He might give me a hard time about it when I saw him next, but Sawyer and I never really got mad at each other, because why would you get mad at yourself?
I turned to rescue Will from Aidan and saw to my horror that Aidan was disappearing back into the house. Will stared right at me with a grim expression, as if he’d witnessed the entire silent conversation between Sawyer and me, understood it, and didn’t like it. “Don’t let me keep you,” he said flatly.
Damn Sawyer! We would laugh about this later if I wasn’t so hot for the boy sitting next to me. This was not funny.
Heart thumping, I tried to save my night with Will. There wasn’t any time to waste. If word that Brody was closing down the party got inside to Kaye and Harper before I left, they would try to stop me from hooking up with the new guy. They might have sent him back to meet me, but they wouldn’t want me leaving with him. They didn’t approve of Sawyer, either, but at least they knew him. Will was a wild card. They would find this frightening. I found him perfect.
I slid my hand onto his knee and said, “I’d rather go with you. Could you walk me home?”
And then some.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennifer Echols has written many romantic novels for teens and adults. She grew up in a small town on a beautiful lake in Alabama, where her high school senior class voted her Most Academic and Most Likely to Succeed. Please visit her at www.jennifer-echols.com.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
TEEN.SimonandSchuster.com
authors.simonandschuster.com/Jennifer-Echols
Also by Jennifer Echols
Endless Summer
The One That I Want
The Ex Games
Major Crush
Going Too Far
Forget You
Love Story
Such a Rush
Dirty Little Secret
Biggest Flirts
Perfect Couple
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
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www.SimonandSchuster.com
This Simon Pulse edition August 2015
Text copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Echols
Cover photographs copyright © 2014 (back) and 2015 (front and spine) by Michael Frost
Author photograph copyright © by Mark Oxley/Studio 16
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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Cover design by Regina Flath
Interior design by Mike Rosamilia
The text of this book was set in Adobe Caslon Pro.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:
Echols, Jennifer.
Most likely to succeed / by Jennifer Echols. — First Simon Pulse paperback edition.
p. cm. — (The Superlatives)
[1. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 2. Love—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction.
4. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.E1967Mo 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2014029505
ISBN 978-1-4424-7452-9 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4424-7451-2 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4424-7453-6 (eBook)
Contents
* * *
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Acknowledgments
Biggest Flirts Excerpt
About the Author
Table of Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
; Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Acknowledgments
‘Biggest Flirts’ Excerpt
About the Author
Copyright
Jennifer Echols, Most Likely to Succeed
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