I shrugged. “My brother is coming home from college for the weekend.”
“Already?” Sawyer asked. “Didn’t their school year just start?”
“He was there all summer,” I explained. “Currently he’s flunking out of Brown.”
“Barrett? Is flunking? He was the valedictorian here.”
“Well, I guess technically he’s not flunking,” I admitted. “He’s getting Bs and Cs. To hear my mother tell it, that’s flunking. She made him repeat those classes over the summer and bring his GPA up.”
“I see.” Sawyer’s tone made it clear he didn’t see at all.
“She was already disappointed that he didn’t get into Harvard and had to settle for Brown. His high school GPA was perfect and his test scores were phenomenal, but he didn’t have the extracurriculars to look well rounded. That’s when she got on me about adding some. But I tried out for cheerleader, and she told me that’s not what she had in mind. She’s like, ‘What career will that help you with, professional cheerleader?’ And I was already on student council, but she pushed me to run for office. Now that I’m in charge, she’s like, ‘Why are you expending effort on something other than school?’ It’s frustrating.”
“I can tell,” he said. “Maybe you should concentrate on another kind of extracurricular activity.” He put his arm around me, with his hand in my hair.
Here we went again. He came after me because something about me screamed target to him. I knew he was only making fun of me, like he made fun of everybody, and I should stay away from him.
Especially since I had a boyfriend.
My deep, dark secret was this: Lately when Sawyer touched me, my palms got sweaty. And I liked it. My make-out sessions with Aidan weren’t as frequent or intense as they’d been when we first started dating three years ago, but we did still have them. And of course, there were the few times we’d gone all the way. But nothing we’d done affected me like Sawyer getting a laugh at my expense.
So I would put up with Sawyer exactly to the point that my ironic patience might start to seem suspicious to onlookers, and they figured out I had a crush on him.
Or, worse: He did.
Sawyer stroking my hair definitely was something I wouldn’t tolerate if I didn’t like him. I tried to dodge away from his hand, which hurt because he’d already wound a curl around his finger.
“Ow!” Collecting myself, I informed him drily, as if he wasn’t holding me captive by a thread, “I don’t like it when people touch my hair.”
He raised his brows. “That’s a completely different statement from ‘Stop touching my hair, Sawyer.’ ”
It certainly was. And now that he’d pointed this out, I was afraid he did suspect the truth. Overdoing my reaction now, protesting too much, would just draw attention to the fact that my crush on him was getting more serious. I gave him my best withering look—I was good at these, if I did say so myself—and grumbled, “I’m sensitive about my hair, Sawyer. I just had a huge fight with Aidan about this.” In fact, that’s where my recent trouble with Aidan had started.
I’d never straightened my hair, but I hadn’t been bold enough to let it pouf twice the size of my head, either. I’d worn it tamed in twists or braids until two weeks ago. Natural hair had been gaining popularity—not so much around small-town Florida, but in the parts of America that mattered, like New York and California and TV. I wanted to try it.
I’d finally found the courage to spend a long Saturday unbinding my hair and nudging my curls to life. My mother had been supportive and helpful at first, working with the twists I couldn’t see in back. Halfway through she’d started complaining that she made enough money to pay someone else to do this.
When we had finished, I liked the way it looked. I couldn’t wait to show Aidan when we went out that night. He’d told me it looked like an Afro. Logically I knew I shouldn’t have taken this as an insult, but he’d meant it as an insult. I was wearing my hair the way it grew on its own, more or less, and he told me it was ugly. Or dated. Or at least not what he wanted or expected in girlfriend hair.
“Judging from the part of your fight that I overheard at the Crab Lab,” Sawyer said, “I think you came down too hard on Aidan about that.” I couldn’t see what he was doing, but it felt like he was looping a bit of my hair around and around his finger, then carefully pulling his finger out, curling iron–style, seeing if my hair would stay that way. It would.
“You?” I exclaimed. “Are taking up for Aidan?” Sawyer made fun of everybody indiscriminately, but later you’d see him having a halfway normal conversation with most people. Not with Aidan. He definitely had it in for Aidan. Probably because Aidan’s life was so put together, and Sawyer’s wasn’t.
“I’m definitely not taking up for him,” Sawyer said, tugging at a curl, eyes on my hair rather than my face. “It would be fine by me if you hated him now, but you’d hate him for the wrong reasons. At the Crab Lab, it seemed like you were dancing around the edge of calling him a racist. I don’t think that’s what he meant. None of the girls at school are doing their hair like yours. It makes a statement. Aidan doesn’t want his girlfriend to make a statement.”
Sawyer was just running his mouth, saying anything he could think of to get a rise out of me. This time it was working.
“That’s not true,” I said. “Aidan wanted me to run for vice president of the student council. I make statements in that job constantly.”
“Correction: Aidan doesn’t want his girlfriend to make a statement he hasn’t preapproved. You can’t make a move in student council without him okaying it. If you did, he’d force you to undo it. He’d make you backtrack even if your idea was good, just for spite. That was really clear in the meeting today.” Sawyer paused. His eyes flicked to mine. “I can tell from the look on your face he’s done that to you plenty of times before.”
I glared at him, neither confirming nor denying. The problem with Sawyer was that he moved through the halls of the school with a scorched-earth policy, insulting everyone in his path, but he actually was perceptive about what made people tick. Including me. That’s why his insults were so effective. He understood what buttons to push.
His lips were very near my cheek as he said, “Here’s my theory. You’ve been angry with Aidan for a long time. You knew how he’d react to your hair. That’s exactly why you did it.”
Sawyer had gotten a rise out of me before. But this time he’d taken antagonizing me to a whole new level. I felt my face burning, and it seemed like the space between us was hot with energy. He’d correctly guessed something incredibly personal about me that I’d only half acknowledged myself.
And he acted like he’d only dropped another insult, or made a comment about our team’s chances at the game tonight. “God, your hair is so cool,” he said. “None of the curls are the same diameter. It’s like the track of nuclear particles during fission. It’s a shame you waited so long to wear it this way.”
“It’s hard to maintain,” I said weakly. “It gets dry. It gets squashed when I sleep. Boys mess with my curl pattern. You act like natural hair is this strange, exotic thrill. It’s patronizing.”
Finally (regrettably) he pulled his hand away and looked at me. “Would I patronize you?”
“No, but you also would never be nice to me, even if you were faking.”
“That is correct.” He bent his head toward me. The lighter top layers of his hair fell forward, revealing the darker blond underneath. “Go ahead, touch my hair. It’s this strange, exotic thrill. Get your revenge.”
Any second he would decide he’d proven his point and sit up. I could be patient. But while I waited, my eyes fell on his nape, where his thick hair became light and fine. I couldn’t help wondering what it felt like.
He repeated, “Touch it,” which I now realized was going to attract some unwanted attention from the other girls in the van if they couldn’t see what we were really doing. He groped in my lap for my hand. This was dangerous. My cheerleading
skirt rode up so high when I sat down that my boy shorts underneath almost showed. His palm brushed across the top of one of my thighs, then the other. He found my hand and placed it on the back of his neck.
My fingers sank into his hair. I needed to pull them out. But as I did, they stroked his hair. It felt different from my own wiry hair or the coarse strands of Aidan’s. Sawyer’s was like warm water against my skin.
Over the sounds of girls laughing and the van’s air conditioner blasting, I heard a muffled beeping. The ringtone wasn’t mine.
“Excuse me, won’t you, darling?” Sawyer said in a British accent like a debonair spy. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, touched the screen, only glanced at it, and put the phone back.
“You don’t answer your phone?” I asked.
“I don’t answer her.”
I felt a pang that he was having a quarrel with another girl.
Then he eased the tension, moving his head into my personal space and shaking it so that his hair fell into his eyes. “You can touch it some more. You know you want to.”
I fingered a white-blond lock curving around his ear. “You have such a baby face. Do you even shave?”
He gave me a sideways glare.
“The guys on the football team make fun of you,” I ventured. Tentatively I traced my fingertip down the hard line of his jaw. He did have stubble, just golden and nearly invisible in the sunlight glinting across his face.
“Right,” he said, “I don’t need to shave. Let me show you.” He grabbed me, one hand cradling the back of my head and the other bracing my shoulder so I couldn’t duck away. He rubbed his chin across my neck.
“Ow, ow, ow, rug burn.” Normally I would have squealed, but I didn’t want him to let me go.
He stopped, eye to eye with me. Our faces had never been so close. This time I knew he felt the electricity buzzing between us as strongly as I did. His lips parted. His breath stroked across my cheek.
We couldn’t stay like this. The cheerleaders carried on around us like what we were doing was normal. It wouldn’t be long, though, before these gossip-hungry girls took notice.
He was thinking the same thing. Holding my gaze, he whispered, “If you were so mad at Aidan, why’d you run back to him?”
My friends had asked me this so often in the past few months, my answer came automatically. “I was looking at the long term. We’re applying for early admission to Columbia.” I wanted to get off the subject of Aidan as quickly as possible, though. “Are you applying anywhere?”
“No,” he said.
“What are you going to do, live in a box underneath the interstate?”
Sawyer raised his head and backed away. There was no expression in his blue eyes. Sawyer always had an expression, easy to read. He poked fun at me. He laughed at me. He enjoyed the fact that he made me uncomfortable. That’s why I ribbed him right back. But this time his face was blank.
Without warning, he stood and moved up the aisle.
“Where are you going?” I called. The other cheerleaders turned to me in question. Too late I realized I sounded like I wanted him to stay.
He stopped in the open doorway and threw over his shoulder at me, “Back to my box.” He jogged down the steps.
I watched for him out the window. In a moment he crossed behind the van and headed for one of the football team’s buses. He disappeared up the steps. A few seconds later he came reeling down to the pavement again like they’d thrown him.
He walked over to one of the four band buses next. The door was closed. He knocked. The door folded inward. I recognized Tia’s long auburn hair as she reached down and held out her hand to him. He let her pull him up the stairs.
The door shut.
I stared at that bus until the cheerleading coach, Ms. Howard, finally guided our van into motion, leading the school caravan across central Florida. Maybe Sawyer had planned to ride with the band all along, and he’d only been visiting me. Yet he’d dumped his pelican costume into the back like he planned to stay. I couldn’t help thinking I’d actually offended him with my comment about the box. But that wasn’t possible, when Sawyer acted like he didn’t have any real feelings.
At least, not for me.
4
I SPENT MOST OF THE drive with my forehead pressed to the window, staring at the orange groves flashing by beside the interstate, mulling over the homecoming dance. I was trying to brainstorm for an alternate place to hold it, but I kept getting sidetracked by my anger at my mother, and Ms. Yates, and Aidan, and a mass of confused feelings about Sawyer. Anger at him, too, for storming off without explanation, guilt that I’d really hurt him somehow, lust as I remembered his hand in my hair.
As soon as the van pulled to a halt in the opposing school’s parking lot, Sawyer climbed back up the stairs. He hardly glanced at me as he moved down the aisle. I peered nonchalantly over my shoulder, as if I were just curious about the view out the back windows. He was sitting beside the pompons on the bench, stripped down to his gym shorts, pulling the bird suit up to his knees.
Sawyer had never had an ounce of fat on him, as far as I could tell. But the last time I’d seen him with his shirt off, after the Labor Day race, he’d looked drawn and sinewy, like he could kick anybody’s ass more through sheer force of will than bodily strength. In the two and a half weeks since then, he’d been working out with the football team, and I could tell. He’d gained muscle. Most guys going down that path would have gained confidence, too. Sawyer didn’t need any.
Grace grinned at him from the nearest seat. “Want me to zip you up?”
“Yeah,” Sawyer said with none of the teasing tone he usually took with Grace. After putting his arms into the feathered suit and flexing his bird gloves, he stood. Grace rose beside him and put her hands at the base of his spine, her fingertips probably brushing across his bare back. She moved the zipper all the way up to his neck. I wondered if he shivered at her touch.
Next she bent, flashing everybody her full butt in her boy shorts underneath her cheerleader skirt, and fumbled with his costume bag. She came up holding the huge pelican head. “Here, Sawyer,” she said, “I’m giving you head.”
Cathy and Ellen squealed with laughter. Sawyer, who normally would have shot her a sly grin and said something even dirtier in response, only turned bright red and looked straight at me.
Suddenly I realized I’d been staring at him the whole time, and he’d noticed.
“Aw, he’s blushing!” Cathy exclaimed.
“Sawyer, blushing?” Ellen echoed. “Grace and Sawyer, sitting in a tree.”
Ugh. I faced the front and dove under the seat for my bag.
A huge white shape filled my peripheral vision. The pelican stood beside me in the aisle, holding out his gloved hand. He carried my pompons in the crook of his other wing. I took his hand, and he pulled me up like a feathered gentleman.
The rush I’d felt when he singled me out and paid me romantic attention—bird suit or not—was doubled when he escorted me into the stadium, already loud with crowd noise and brightly lit even though the sun wouldn’t set for another hour. My mother might tell me being head cheerleader was the opposite of Most Likely to Succeed, but cheering at football games was the most fun I’d had in high school so far.
Thirty minutes later our team kicked off. The stadium was crazy with excitement. The opposing team had beat us last year, but this season Brody had led us to wins in our first three games. If he and the team could pull off a difficult victory tonight, our chances were good of making it all the way to the playoffs. Knowing this, our fans packed the smaller guest side of the stadium and overflowed into the home side. All the football parents and marching band parents were here, and every cheerleader’s parents except mine.
Most of the students from our school were here too. Aidan had driven to the game with a couple of other guys: our friend Quinn, whose boyfriend, Noah, was on the football team, and Kennedy Glass, the yearbook editor, who was self-important enough to think so
meone cared whether he attended the game or not. Come to think of it, Aidan had driven here for the same reason. He didn’t understand football, but he felt it was his duty to show up since he was student council president. That’s the way he’d explained the trip to me, anyway. He hadn’t said anything about wanting to support me personally or see me cheer.
So I didn’t scour the stands to spot him and wave. I just cheered. My fellow cheerleaders might annoy me with their weekend drinking and nonstop whining, but they were terrific athletes. We made pyramids—I was lightest, so I was on top—and I knew I wouldn’t fall, because they would hold me. We led the crowd in chants, and the students were great about playing along. We hadn’t come in third in the state cheer championships last winter for nothing.
For short stints I turned around with my hands on my hips and my back to the crowd, watching for Brody’s big plays. Dad loved football. I’d spent many weekends curled up on the couch with him while he explained the rules to me. Now, even from field level, I could watch our formations and warn the other cheerleaders that we needed to get ready to make some noise.
In short, I felt like a successful head cheerleader—way more of a success than I was as student council vice president. If only my mother thought this counted.
But my favorite parts of the night were the dances we’d choreographed. Whenever the opposing team had the ball and it looked like our team would slog through the next several plays without much movement, I pointed at Tia, who was drum captain, up in the sea of band uniforms in the stands. She consulted with Will about what jam to play next, then gave me a hand signal to tell me which one. I passed this along to the cheerleaders. The next thing we knew, we were dancing to a groove. I felt high. Little kids held on to the chain link fence separating the crowd from the field, shaking their bottoms, dreaming about being cheerleaders themselves one day.