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.
2
“FLORIDA ISN’T AGREEING WITH YOU so far?” I asked Will, swinging his hand as we strolled down the sidewalk toward my neighborhood, old houses lining the street, palm trees and live oaks overhead.
“It’s too soon to judge,” he said. “So far it seems hot and weird.”
“Are you sure that’s Florida and not me?”
The warm notes of his chuckle sent tingles racing up my arm. “You’re not weird. That’s weird.” He nodded toward the crazy monster face carved into the stump by Mrs. Spitzer’s house.
“That’s not weird either,” I said. “That’s artistic. Just ask the Chamber of Commerce. We have a large number of creative people in town, but that doesn’t make us any stranger than a town in Minneso—”
We both stopped short. An enormous white bird, about a yard tall from feet to beak, stood in the center of the sidewalk in front of us.
Will arched his brows, waiting for me to take back my protest that Florida wasn’t weird.
“That is a snowy egret,” I said self-righteously. “They are very common. In Minnesota you have moose wandering the streets.”
“You’re mixing us up with an old fictional TV show about Alaska. Get behind me. I’ll protect you.” He nobly placed himself between me and the egret as we edged into the street to go around it, then hopped up on the sidewalk again. Will kept looking back at the bird, though, like he thought it would stalk us. “Honestly, more than the weirdness, it’s the heat that’s getting to me. Right now in Duluth it’s probably in the fifties.”
I shook my head. “If I lived there, I would lose so many parkas at parties.”
“Parkas!” He gave me a quizzical smile. “You don’t really have an autumn here, do you?”
“Define ‘autumn.’ ”
“The leaves turn colors.”
“No, we don’t have that.”
“Hmm. It doesn’t even get cool?”
“Define ‘cool.’ ”
“Below freezing.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s cool ?” I exclaimed. “We would call out the National Guard for that. But it has gotten below freezing here before.”
“When?”
I waved away the question, because I didn’t know the answer. “There’s probably a plaque commemorating the event on the foundation of the Historical Society building. Turn here.” We walked up my street. Even if the power to the streetlights had gone out and the moon and the stars had been blocked by clouds, I would have known when we approached my house from the sound of the crispy magnolia leaves strewn across the sidewalk. Several years’ worth.
He nodded ahead of us. “Isn’t that the high school behind the fence?”
“In all its glory.” I swept my arm in an arc wide enough that I pitched myself off balance and stumbled over a root that had broken through the sidewalk. Will grabbed my arm before I fell.
The campus didn’t look too impressive. I’d had a good time for my first three-fourths of high school, but that was because I had a lot of friends and didn’t do a lot of homework, not because the school was some kind of fun factory. It was just a low concrete block labyrinth built to withstand hurricanes, although the gym and auditorium were taller, and our football stadium was visible in the distance. There were lots of palm trees, too, and a parking lot bleached white by the sun.
“That’s a convenient location for you,” Will said. “Though I guess you have to go all the way around the fence to get to the front entrance.”
“Yeah, I ride my bike when I have time. Then I can go straight to work after school. But some mornings I’m running late. Well, most mornings. Then I go over the fence.”
“What if you have books and homework to carry?”
“I don’t do my homework, so I don’t bring my books home.”
“Oh.” He followed me onto the front porch and waited while I unlocked the door. When I turned back to him, his head was cocked to one side like he was trying to puzzle me out.
I didn’t play games with people. Mostly I told the truth. What you saw was what you got. Maybe that confused him.