I got in my car, and he followed me to Harper’s.
* * *
It was impossible to stay depressed in Harper’s tiny house with the five of us pushing past each other and laughing about it: me, sweet Harper, hilarious Tia, Harper’s hippie mom, and of course Sawyer. Just as Harper had said, he didn’t draw a lot of attention to himself or make much noise. It was almost like he was trying to blend in so Harper’s mom wouldn’t kick him out. He kept his clothes in a backpack stuffed under a side table. I knew this because he drew some out right after we arrived, then disappeared to take a shower.
Harper’s mom made us cookies from store-bought frozen dough. They didn’t taste nearly as good as my mother’s homemade, but I appreciated them more because they were made specifically for me. I was stuffing the fourth in my mouth when Sawyer stepped out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam, wearing his Pelicans T-shirt and threadbare sweatpants that hung low around his waist.
He looked like a different person with his blond hair wet and dark. But the defiant lift of his chin was the same as always when he saw me holding my bundle of pajamas. He motioned with his head toward the bathroom door.
I jumped up, eager to ditch my sweaty cheerleading duds. As I passed him, our bare arms brushed. I asked, “Did you use all the hot water?”
He said quietly, “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
I locked myself in the bathroom and set my clothes on the counter. Even though I’d had no idea when I packed my overnight bag that Sawyer would be here, luckily I’d brought a cute tank and pajama pants, sexy without being indecent. I wasn’t worried about how I would look to him. It was the feel of his breath in my ear as he’d passed me that still sent shivers up and down my arms—and now the idea that I was stepping into the shower where he’d just been. (Naked.)
Harper might think this sleepover was innocent. She was wrong.
I hurried through showering and brushing my teeth so I didn’t miss anything. When I exited the bathroom, the living room was empty. Harper’s mom’s door was closed like she’d gone to sleep. Laughter pealed from the opposite direction. I padded down the hall and found Harper in her room, which was wallpapered with photos and art and fashion shoots she’d torn from magazines. She shared her desk chair with Tia as they scrolled through Harper’s yearbook photos on her computer. Sawyer lay on his stomach crossways on Harper’s bed with his chin propped on his hands, looking over their shoulders. I stopped in the doorway. He turned around to glance at me and patted the bed beside him.
Any other night we’d found ourselves thrown together like this, I would have flounced across the room to drag Harper’s beanbag chair closer to the computer. I never would have accepted Sawyer’s invitation to lie next to him. But Aidan and I were on a break. I was a free woman who could do what I wanted.
And though I wasn’t at all sure where I stood with Sawyer, we’d definitely moved into new territory for us. What I wanted was to lie down beside him.
“Oh my God, is that Xavier Pilkington?” I exclaimed, keeping my eyes focused on Xavier’s photo filling the computer screen as I crawled onto the bed beside Sawyer. There was a moment when I had to decide whether to settle a few inches from Sawyer or lie right alongside him with our arms and hips and legs touching. I chose to touch him. If he was still so angry with me that he found me distasteful, this would serve him right. Cooties.
“Doesn’t Xavier look great?” Harper asked, grinning at me over her shoulder. She did a double take when she saw how close Sawyer and I were lying, but she smiled right through it and turned back to the computer.
“Like a 1940s movie star,” Tia agreed, “especially with the grease in his hair. How do you make people look so good, Harper? If you really want to expand your business to wedding photos, you should post what Xavier normally looks like as the ‘before,’ and this picture as the ‘after.’ ”
“Two-part secret to good pictures.” Harper held up one finger. “Lighting.” She held up a second finger. “Lots of frames. Let me pull up the rest of my shots for Most Academic, and you’ll see why.” She opened another folder and expanded a photo of blond Angelica, primly perfect as usual, next to Xavier, who looked like Harper had caught him mid-sneeze.
“Ah, there’s our Romeo,” I said.
Sawyer laughed. For someone with a great—even if snarky—sense of humor, he didn’t laugh a lot. The sound warmed me up.
“Speaking of Angelica,” Tia said, turning to me.
“Don’t tell her,” Harper muttered.
“She needs to know!” Tia defended herself. “Kaye, I swear to God, not ten minutes after Aidan told you he wanted to take a break, I saw him talking to the majorettes and, specifically, hitting on old Angelica.”
“You don’t know that he was hitting on her,” Harper reasoned. “She’s dating Xavier.”
“Oh, and you think Aidan couldn’t steal a girl from Xavier Pilkington?” Tia challenged her. “Xavier’s mom still cuts the crusts off his sandwiches.”
“I’m not saying he couldn’t,” Harper clarified. “I’m saying I saw Aidan having that conversation with Angelica too, but that didn’t automatically signal he was making a move in my mind.”
“You’re right,” Tia said. “Most likely they were discussing the Higgs boson and the standard model of particle physics. It only looked like he was hitting on her.”
Tia was what my mother referred to as “highly excitable.” She had a reputation for stirring up trouble. Aidan might have been passing pertinent information along to Angelica about the student council’s upcoming doughnut sale or something. He wasn’t the type to hit on girls. But what did I know? He’d never had the chance before. Maybe he would become our school’s playboy now that he’d decided our relationship was temporarily over.
And his choice of Angelica struck me. In the student council’s incorrect tally of the Superlatives votes, Angelica had won Most Academic along with Xavier. In the newer, correct tally Ms. Yates had claimed we weren’t letting out of the bag, Angelica had won Most Likely to Succeed with Aidan. Maybe he wanted to date the girl whom the school had paired him with. He obviously had no use for me now that he knew I hadn’t really won the title. And now that he had my mother’s recommendation letter.
I said, “I guess we won’t be on a break after all, then. We’ve broken up permanently, because there’s no way I can out-nerd that girl.”
“You got that right,” Harper said at the same time Tia said, “Es la verdad.”
As I uttered this realization, I honestly expected Sawyer to smooth his fingertips across my back. Maybe I would poke him in the ribs in retaliation. Maybe not. But he’d embraced me in a full-bird hug when Aidan handed down his initial decree. Seemed like my letting Aidan go deserved at least some touch from Sawyer. He didn’t move, though. He kept staring at the computer screen.
“Now that’s a handsome bloke,” he said. The photo was of him in the pelican costume—actually, it could have been anyone in the pelican costume, but I assumed it was Sawyer—looking very studious and contrite as he sat in Principal Chen’s office with his legs crossed at the knees, reading Crime and Punishment. Perfect.
Suddenly I felt a flash of panic that I hadn’t started my Dostoyevsky paper, which was due to Mr. Frank on Monday. My mother had reminded me this afternoon that the title of valedictorian probably hinged on everyone’s AP English grade because Mr. Frank was a stickler. But getting up from Harper’s bed to make a few outline notes when I was trying desperately to flirt with the class criminal was something Angelica would do, not something I would do.
Not anymore.
I called, “Are you really using that picture for Most Likely to Go to Jail?”
“Yes,” Harper said. “Kennedy complained. He said I hadn’t really taken Sawyer’s photo for his title in the yearbook if his face wasn’t showing. But we were on deadline. Kennedy had to let it through. And we’re not using this next one for Most Likely to Succeed, but we’re putting it in one of the front collages.”
She clicked to a picture of Aidan and me grinning behind Ms. Chen’s desk—we’d fought over who would sit in the chair that day too, and finally pushed it out of the way—with Sawyer behind us, only one huge cartoon eye of the pelican popping up over Aidan’s shoulder. Sawyer had photobombed us on purpose.
“That’s classic,” Tia cackled.
“You were in the way,” I said quietly, actually poking Sawyer in the ribs this time. I turned toward him.
When he faced me, we were already so close that I could feel his breath across my lips. His deep blue eyes were serious.
And then he turned forward again without touching me or flirting back at all, like I was some freshman majorette he found more annoying than sexy.
I took the hint. We stayed on Harper’s bed for another half hour as she led us through an overview of the senior class. I laughed with Harper and Tia. Sawyer laughed with Harper and Tia. Sawyer and I didn’t laugh together.
“Enough,” Harper finally said. “Even I get tired of photography after eighteen hours.” She turned off the computer and led the way out of her bedroom, through the narrow hall to the living room.
We filed behind her. I was the last one out, behind Sawyer. It wasn’t often that I was this close to him when we were standing up and he wasn’t dressed as a pelican. I was eye level with his shoulder blades. I got a great view of the white-blond, baby-fine hairs at his nape. And I was disappointed he didn’t take this opportunity to turn around and grab me playfully. Maybe it was all in my head, but I got the impression he was dissing me by doing nothing.
When we emerged from the hallway, Tia was rummaging through the kitchen, insisting she was hungry again, and Harper was trying to help her find the right junk food. Sawyer put a hand on the armrest of a wing chair and the other on the armrest of the sofa and hopped over both, then plopped onto one end of the sofa, as if he did this four times a day and that was his place. My first instinct was to join him on the sofa. The night had been squeaky clean so far, and it would stay that way if we weren’t sitting next to each other.
But I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of chasing him around. I chose the wing chair and didn’t look at him.
Tia was the one who claimed the other end of the sofa, collapsing her entire five-foot-nine frame onto it while clutching a bag of chips. She looked and sounded like a tree falling in the forest. Harper took the other side chair and clicked the remote so the TV turned on to our usual viewing, a bridal gown reality show.
Actually, I didn’t know whether this show was their usual viewing. Maybe they only watched it with me whenever we had a sleepover, because it was my usual viewing. I’d been planning my wedding to Aidan ever since we started dating. Perhaps a little before. Harper would have a Florida wedding, barefoot on the beach. Tia, if she changed her mind and got married someday, would probably elope. But my wedding would be in New York where I would live and work, and the gown would be the centerpiece. In an old city that embodied intellect and effort and the collective culture of the entire world, my dress would stand out, a white work of art against the somber gray stonework of a church, or a monument, or a bank, wherever Aidan and I decided to hold the ceremony.
This had been my dream for years, more consistent than my fantasy that our next sex together would finally blow my mind. I had recited the slowly evolving details of my dream wedding to Tia and Harper. Suddenly the entire scenario seemed hopelessly naive, an invention of sixth grade instead of ninth.
Now I was in twelfth, and I was hoping against hope that Harper and Tia wouldn’t bring up my obsession in front of Sawyer.
“There’s . . . ,” Harper began as a bride swept across the screen in a classic gown with a slim silhouette. She was about to say the dress was perfect for me. It was exactly the kind of gown I would have called dibs on the other hundred times we’d watched this show.
Behind the retro glasses she’d settled across her nose when she took out her contacts, her eyes flicked to Sawyer. “. . . a dress that should not be accessorized with pink cowboy boots,” she finished as the bride pulled up the hem and showed off her special brand of quirky.
“That’s a Kaye dress,” Tia said, typically missing our hints at subtlety and restraint. “If you wore that with pink cowboy boots, your mama would shit twice.”
Luckily, the next dress was exquisitely sewn with hundreds of delicate fabric flowers, a Harper dress. Following that was a cleavage-baring number with sheer panels down to the navel in front and the butt crack in back—definitely a dress for Tia, who couldn’t tell sexy from raunchy. The conversation moved far enough from the topic of me that I worked up the courage to steal a glance at Sawyer.
He was asleep. His elbow was draped over the armrest, cradling his chin. His eyes were closed, his blond eyelashes casting long shadows down his cheeks.
“Hey,” Tia said, shoving his shoulder. Without opening his eyes, he let out a groan.
“Come on,” Tia said, pulling his arm until he stretched out across the sofa with his head on her thigh. He never opened his eyes, and the whole process was so seamless that it looked like he’d slept in her lap a million times. Maybe he had. The two of them had been off and on forever. They made my attempts at flirting with him look like something out of kindergarten.
In deference to him, she turned off the lamp on the table next to her. The only light remaining came from the TV hung over the fireplace, and a faint glow from the streetlights outside through the gauzy curtains on the big front window. Now Sawyer and Tia looked like a boyfriend and girlfriend getting cozy.
Watching them with a ball of resentment burning in my stomach, I realized I didn’t have a chance with Sawyer, even if I wanted one. We both pretended I was too good for him. But realistically, why would he want a stick-in-the-mud like me? Life-of-the-party girls like Tia were more his speed. Staring at them owning the sofa together, with Tia’s hand lying on his chest, was a great way to finally drive that fact home to my beleaguered, lovelorn brain.
That’s when Tia piped up. “So, Kaye, tell us more about this break you’re taking with Aidan.”
6
“NO!” I WHISPERED HOARSELY AND a little desperately, nodding toward Sawyer in Tia’s lap.
“He’s asleep,” Tia said in her normal tone.
“If he is, you’re going to wake him up.” I was still whispering.
“Nothing wakes him up,” Harper offered. “He sleeps like a log.”
“So it’s okay to discuss my personal business in front of him? I don’t think so. Any second he’s going to jump up and startle us. ‘Ha-ha, I’ve been listening to you the whole time.’ ”
Tia shook her head. “He’s always worked such long hours at the Crab Lab, and now the mascot job takes a lot out of him. It’s harder than you’d think, so physical, bouncing around in the heat with that heavy costume on.”
“I know,” I said haughtily, offended that Tia would imply she understood more about Sawyer’s mascot job than I did. I was the one who stood next to him at games.
“Anyway,” Harper spoke up, “I don’t think he’d tell anybody your personal business.”
“I think he would,” I said flatly.
“What exactly is your problem with him?” Tia asked, sounding miffed. “You act like he’s a criminal.”
“He did get voted Most Likely to Go to Jail,” I reminded her.
In the dusky room I saw Harper raise her eyebrows at me. She and I knew he hadn’t actually won this title, since he’d won Perfect Couple with me. The real winner of Most Likely to Go to Jail was our school pothead, Jason Price.
“Sawyer and I are pretty good friends,” Tia said, which was the understatement of the century, “and I can tell he’s dead serious about cleaning up his act. He’s always been black and white, all or nothing. When he went vegan last spring, that was it. He never looked back. So if he’s saying no alcohol and pot now, I can guarantee he hasn’t fallen off the wagon. You haven’t seen anything to think he has, have you?”
The f
act that she asked this question made me think she wasn’t quite as sure about Sawyer as she claimed. “I haven’t,” I admitted. “But Tia, you talk like he’s been clean for years. He passed out at school only three weeks ago. And I just . . .”
“You just what?” Tia insisted.
Her usually bright face drew into frown lines. She shifted, moving her arm down Sawyer’s body as if protecting him. He didn’t move, didn’t even stir or flutter his eyelids, as far as I could tell in the near dark. I couldn’t see Harper’s eyes because her glasses reflected the bridal gowns on TV, but she sat up cross-legged in her chair, attentive to my answer.
Without anyone coming out and saying it, I knew we weren’t really talking about Sawyer’s reform. They wanted to know why I didn’t go after him, now that Aidan was—temporarily, at least—out of the picture.
“Sawyer’s never been serious with girls,” I said. “But he’s been with a lot of them. He’s got this whole secret underlife. Cheerleaders tell stories about him fooling around with girls I never even knew he’d gone out with.”
“Why are they doing that?” Tia asked. “They’re assholes.”
“But what if the stories are true?”
“So? He’s not in a steady relationship with anybody. He’s not cheating. Why does fooling around with a lot of girls detract from his moral character?” Now she was talking about herself. We were back to the argument we’d had a million times, in which I expressed concern that she wasn’t being very picky about whom she slept with, and she told me to stuff it.
I shouldn’t have done it, but I took the bait. “When’s the last time you had sex with him?” I asked. “It probably hasn’t been a month.”
“Do we want to go here?” Harper asked. “I do not want to go here.”
Tia’s mouth set in a hard line. “Define sex,” she said.
Damn Tia. Now I was thinking about all the ways Tia and Sawyer might have played around with each other in the past few years. They’d probably done things that I’d never tried in three years with Aidan, and that Aidan would have said were too dirty anyway.