* * *
The senior band bus beat us back. Watching out my window as we pulled to a stop, I saw Sawyer open the door of his truck and heft the bag with his costume into the passenger side. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to apologize at Harper’s house later with Harper and especially Tia there—at least, not the way I wanted.
“See ya soon.” I jumped over Harper into the aisle with my bag and pompons in tow, raced down the steps, and galloped over to Sawyer’s truck just as he was glancing over his shoulder to back out. When he saw me, he gave me that cold, emotionless look again, but he cranked down the window.
“Can I have a minute?” I asked.
He bit his lip and gazed at me like he wasn’t at all sure I deserved a whole minute. Finally he turned off the engine and raised his eyebrows at me.
“I had no idea you’d moved out until Harper told me in the van,” I said in a rush. “When I mentioned the box, I wasn’t trying to insult you.”
He watched me silently for a moment. “You were trying to insult me. Just not about that. You were insulting me for not being good enough to get into Columbia.”
“Saw-yer!” A shrill majorette, decked out in skimpy sequins, pushed past me to lean through his window. This was a freshman who didn’t view the head cheerleader and student council vice president with the proper awe. She was young enough to be rude. “I didn’t drop my baton even once during halftime. You can’t make fun of me anymore!”
“Oh, I can always make fun of you,” he assured her.
To put as much of herself as possible through his window, she stood on her tiptoes in her knee-high majorette boots, with her sequined ass in the air. I stood there staring at it, feeling like a bellboy lugging my bag and pompons around. Without ceremony I walked one parking place over, unlocked my trunk, and dumped my stuff inside. I didn’t want to interrupt Sawyer when he was busy coming on to his new girlfriend for this particular half hour.
“Kaye,” Aidan said beside me.
I whirled around. “Hey!” I was halfway between guilt that he’d almost caught me talking to Sawyer, and satisfaction that Sawyer could peek in his rearview mirror and see me talking to Aidan. Maybe Sawyer could find out what jealousy felt like, for once. I hadn’t been so glad to see Aidan in months.
“Do you want to follow me back to my house so I can drop off my car?” I asked. “Or we could go to the beach now. I brought my bag for Harper’s, and I’m sure my car would be safe here overnight.” As I heard my own words, I pictured making out at the beach with Aidan, as we’d planned.
And I didn’t want to.
He shocked me by saying, “I don’t think we should go.”
“Okay,” I said a little too cheerfully. “Why not?”
“I talked to Ms. Yates.”
I nodded. “Again? At the game?” Maybe they’d realized they’d been wrong to protest saving the homecoming dance.
No such luck. “I mean, I talked to her in the lunchroom today,” he said. “She told me about the screwup with the Superlatives elections.”
“Oh.” I felt fresh sweat break out along my hairline. Ms. Yates must have decided Aidan, as student council president, needed to know about the Superlatives problem after all. I wished I’d told him first. I should have told him, even if he’d had to keep it a secret from Ms. Yates that he knew.
And now that I’d spent the whole game cuddling with Sawyer, I felt like I’d been caught.
“Being elected Perfect Couple with Sawyer doesn’t mean anything,” I said quickly. “I’m sure it was just a joke. Sawyer probably organized people to vote for him and me, just to make me mad.” I did think this was possible—though if it was true, that was some joke, and Sawyer had done more than try to make me mad. He’d tried to get my attention.
“That doesn’t matter,” Aidan said. “The idea of him going after you is so ridiculous anyway. I mean, it’s Sawyer.” He wrinkled his nose as he said Sawyer’s name. “I’m more offended that you lied to me about being elected Most Likely to Succeed with me. But that doesn’t matter either. What matters is that you screwed up the election.”
His words hit me like a slap in the face. “I didn’t screw up the election,” I protested. “I had nothing to do with it. Ms. Yates wouldn’t let me work on the election staff because I’m part of the senior class. That’s exactly why the election got screwed up, if you ask me.”
“But you were still in charge,” Aidan said. “You were supposed to tell the staff what to do, and somehow they didn’t get the message. When that happens in business, someone at the top resigns so confidence in the organization can be restored.”
“You’re resigning?” I was astonished. Aidan was way too proud of his position to let go so easily.
“No,” he said. “Not me.”
“Me?” I squealed. “You’re asking me to resign?”
“Yes.”
This made no sense. I was counting on entering “student council vice president” on my college applications, and Aidan knew it.
“I don’t understand this,” I said. “Maybe you’re taking this too far because I’m your girlfriend, and you don’t want to be seen as soft on me. But Aidan, there’s something to be said for that sometimes. We’re not in a corporation. We’re in high school, and I am your girlfriend. You seem to be forgetting that a lot lately.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t be my girlfriend.” At the shocked look on my face, he blinked and said, “We need to take a break and find out.”
I’d been wrapped up in what he was saying to me, trying to maneuver out of his anger. But as he uttered these words, suddenly I became aware again of a good portion of the student body moving all around us. Football players streamed out of the team buses, lugging bags of equipment into the locker room. Members of the marching band wearing bright tank tops and their uniform pants, or plaid shorts and their military-style uniform coats, honked obnoxiously on their instruments as they walked to the band room. Sawyer’s majorette followed them, swinging her sequined butt.
But Sawyer hadn’t left yet. He might be able to hear what Aidan and I were saying. He could certainly see Aidan scowling down at me like an outraged teacher.
I asked carefully, “You want us to take a break because you’re mad about the election? It was a mistake, Aidan.”
“Not just because of that. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. We’ve been partners for a long time. I’m not convinced we’re such a good match, in our personal lives or in student council.”
Oh, now I understood. I managed to mumble, “So, when I fucked up the Superlatives election, that was the last straw.”
He winced at my curse word, but he said firmly, “Yes.”
“Which you found out about from Ms. Yates at lunch.”
“Right,” he said more uncertainly.
“That’s why you came to my house this afternoon.” My voice was rising, and Aidan was glancing around to see who was listening, but I didn’t care anymore. “You’d already decided you would tell me tonight that you wanted to ‘take a break’ ”—I made finger quotes—“but you wanted to get your recommendation letter for Columbia from my mother first. And you wanted to screw me one last time!”
He reached out for me. I never knew what he intended to do—hug me, hit me. Most likely he meant to slap a hand over my mouth to silence me. But he looked so angry that adrenaline rushed through my veins. Necessary or not, I jumped backward, out of his reach.
He crossed his arms and glowered at me. Nothing made him madder than me getting angry with him. “This is exactly why you need to resign. Using that language and talking about your sex life in the school parking lot!”
“My sex life!” I exclaimed. “Weren’t you there?”
He looked up at the dark blue sky, gathering self-control. Then he said, “Don’t try to argue your way out of this. I’m not changing my mind.”
“Your mind?” I asked. “Since when does a student council president get to decide that other elected officials sh
ould resign?”
“That’s what’s best for the school,” he said.
“I’m not resigning.” Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. What would my mother say?
“We’ll see, after I talk to Ms. Yates again,” Aidan sneered.
“And after I talk to the parliamentarian,” I shot back. “There are rules for trying to make your girlfriend resign just because you’ve broken up with her.”
“Oh.” Aidan rolled his eyes and shot me the bird.
Speechless for the first time, I stared at him, trying to get my head around the fact that my longtime boyfriend, the one I’d thought I would marry, had broken up with me and was now shooting me the bird. If that’s how mature he wanted this breakup to be, I wished I had my mother’s entire container of homemade cookies to throw at him one by one.
Finally I said, “Thanks for confirming that I’ve wasted the last three years with you.”
He stalked away. A few band members who’d stopped to witness our fight were watching me and talking behind their hands.
I wondered if Sawyer was listening. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of turning to look.
No, I took the only possible course of action in this situation. Blinking back tears, I went off in search of Harper and Tia.
5
WAY ACROSS THE PARKING LOT, Will stood beside one of the band buses. He wore his uniform pants but had already ditched his coat. He pulled his T-shirt off over his head, wadded the cotton into a ball, and reached upward with it.
Tia stuck her head out of the bus window and laughed with him, then accepted the T-shirt and lobbed another out the window at him. At the last second before the shirt fell to the pavement, he snagged it from midair with one of his drumsticks. He shook it out and pulled it over his head. Then he reached up to the window again.
Tia put her hand out the window. They held hands for a few moments while she smiled down at him and told him something. I was still half a football field away from them and couldn’t hear anything they said, but I knew they were stalling, milking another minute of excitement out of seeing each other before he walked away to make sure all the instruments safely traveled the distance from the truck to the band room. He and Tia would be separated for only fifteen minutes. They were ridiculous, acting like they wouldn’t see each other for a month.
That’s how Aidan and I had felt about each other when we were fourteen.
Now Aidan had told me he wasn’t sure I was good enough for him because I hadn’t upheld his high standards of running an election correctly—even though I hadn’t been allowed in the room when the votes were counted.
It had finally happened. My mother had told me a million times that because I was a woman, I had to work twice as hard as a man for the same amount of respect. And I was black, so I had to work four times as hard. To get twice as much respect, I had to work eight times as hard, and that’s what she expected of me.
But she’d been wrong. I worked as hard as I could, eight times harder than most people, probably fifty times harder than Tia, who didn’t work at all, and Tia was still acing the tests and ruining the curve in calculus. My mother might want me to have twice the respect of other people, but she gave me none. She demanded perfection. I wasn’t perfect. I would have to work sixteen times as hard, and I just couldn’t do it anymore.
My tears blinded me. I didn’t notice Will had come across the parking lot to meet me until he filled my blurry field of vision. “Kaye,” he said, “what’s wrong?”
“Math,” I sobbed.
“Um . . . Come over here.” He grabbed my hand and tugged me toward the band instrument truck. “Watch out,” he warned, settling his other hand at my waist and guiding me through the half-dressed band members kneeling over black cases laid out across the asphalt. He slid onto the back bumper of the truck and sat me down beside him.
“Now,” he said, “what’s wrong besides math?”
“I hate it here,” I grumbled to the silhouettes of the palm trees that dotted the parking lot.
“Really?” he asked. “I love it here. I just wish it wasn’t so hot.”
I sniffled. “It’s Florida, Will.”
“They keep telling me that.” He eyed me. “Tia will be out in a sec. She’s looking for some stuff she lost on the band bus.”
“Uh-oh,” I managed to say calmly, my voice gravelly. “What’d she lose this time?”
“Her phone, one of her drumsticks, one of her shoes, and her bra.”
“Her bra?” I repeated. “You might have had something to do with her losing her bra.”
“She said it was uncomfortable on the long drive. I was helping.”
A shadow fell over us as the lights overhead were blocked. We both looked up to see Sawyer standing in front of us, his gloved hands on his padded hips. The white pelican suit glowed like it was some mutant creature born of a nuclear accident in a B movie.
“Why are you in costume again?” Will asked.
Sawyer reached out and swatted Will to one side.
Will slid off the bumper and nearly fell. “Hey!” he yelled.
Sawyer settled next to me, then scooted back into the truck to give his padded butt more room. He put his arm around my waist where Will’s had been. With his other hand he turned my chin so I had to look at him. His white-gloved thumb erased the tracks of tears on one of my cheekbones, then the other.
I didn’t want to admit how touched I was by this gesture. “You’re getting mascara on your glove,” I said.
He held his glove up in front of his foam head, appearing to look at it. He wiped it on my bare knee.
Out in the field of instrument cases, Will and Tia were talking. He must have told her I was upset. She ran toward me, hurdling rows of cases as she came. “What’s the matter?” she called when she was still surrounded by discarded drums.
“Aidan told me he wanted to take a break,” I said shakily. Sawyer squeezed my shoulder.
Tia reached us and stomped her foot. “What the fuck for? Was it because of the shit in student council today?”
I sighed. “That probably had something to do with it, but he’s mad at me for other stuff too. I don’t meet his standards. He wants me to resign as vice president.”
“Wait until I find him,” Tia said. “I’ll take every one of his standards and shove them up his— What? ” Exasperated, she turned to Will, who was poking her in the side.
“That’s not helpful right now,” he said.
“It’s helpful to me!” she exclaimed.
“Come on.” He started to pull out the ramp attached to the underside of the truck where we were sitting, but Sawyer’s costume overflowed into its path. “Tia and I have to get into the truck. Scoot over, bird,” Will said, kicking Sawyer’s cushioned butt.
Sawyer rose, pulling me up with him. But he didn’t let me go. The soft padding and feathers of his costume enveloped me. Rather than fighting him, I let him hug me.
Will and Tia tromped up the ramp and maneuvered a huge xylophone on rollers onto it. Steadying the lower end, Will walked carefully backward. “Oh, wait,” Tia called, “I don’t have it. Oh, ack!” The xylophone slid down the last foot of the ramp, knocking Will in the gut. “Are you okay?” she called.
“We didn’t really need that lower octave, anyway,” he groaned.
Sawyer put his hands over my ears.
Taking the hint, I inhaled deeply and shut my eyes, letting myself melt into his softness. I could still hear Will and Tia flirting as they coaxed instruments down the ramp and other band members laughing as they passed. But their voices were muffled and smoothed over, just as Sawyer’s downy but firm hug was soothing.
For those few seconds in Sawyer’s arms, I tried to live in the moment and remember what I loved about high school: my friends, our sports events, and our fun gatherings like the homecoming dance, which I was more determined than ever to save. It wasn’t until rare interludes like this, when I felt the weight lifted from my shoulders for a short time, that
I realized how much pressure I was under, and how that anxiety turned my whole world dark.
Through my closed eyelids I sensed a flash. Blinking, I pulled away from Sawyer just as Harper snapped a picture of us with her fancy camera.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “You two hugging with Kaye in her cheerleader outfit and Sawyer in his pelican costume struck me as a symbolic photo for our school. It’s also one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.” She turned to me. “I hear Aidan wants a break?” She held her camera out of the way with one hand while she embraced me with the other.
“Tia told you already?” I asked into Harper’s shoulder. Tia wasn’t good at keeping news on the down-low.
“Tia isn’t happy with Aidan,” Harper said as she let me go.
And then—granted, the lights in the parking lot were bright, the shadows strange, and I was feeling out of sorts after my cry—but I could have sworn Harper gave Sawyer a knowing look, like they were hiding something from me.
Which was ridiculous. I spent way more time with Sawyer while he was in costume than Harper did, and I still didn’t know which part of his bird head he saw from.
She stuck out her bottom lip at me in sympathy. “Are you okay to drive?”
“Oh, sure. I’ll see you in a few.” I turned to Sawyer. “Did you put your costume back on just so you could hug me, even though you’re still mad at me? Because that’s kind of sweet, and kind of twisted.”
He shrugged.
“Well, go take it off. I know you’re hot.”
He nodded, nearly poking me in the eye with his foam beak, and curled his arm to show me his bird biceps.
I actually managed a laugh. “Yes, that kind of hot. You are one sexy waterfowl.”
He swaggered toward his truck, lifting his huge feet high and wagging his feathery bottom.
Suddenly the instrument truck, the cheerleader van, and all the buses around me were moving, like curtains rising and sets changing behind an actress onstage. Everyone in the parking lot drove away at one time, making the windblown palm trees seem stark and lonely. Only Sawyer remained, out of his costume again and unable to get over his anger at me, yet waiting for me behind the wheel of his truck.