That seemed like plenty of time to me, but whatever. “Beverly from Minnesota was your only one, then.”
Because of his silence, I assumed that the answer was yes.
“There’s your problem,” I said. “You want to do it with someone you’re in love with. Love gets you in trouble. If it were only sex, you could have been getting it on with Angelica by now. But you fell in love with Beverly, and you vowed to make it home to her as soon as you could. Now that she’s cheated on you, you’re caught between two worlds. You can’t move back, and you can’t move forward. You’re stuck.”
“I am,” he agreed. “But so are you. You’re afraid to make plans because they might get broken. What would having a boyfriend prevent you from doing? Seems to me you don’t want to do anything at all.”
I glared at him. “You’re probably right about getting arrested. We’d better move on before the current owner of this house suspects we’re casing the joint and chases us off with a chainsaw.”
Will ignored that. Stubbornly he asked, “Why aren’t you applying to college or . . . anything? Why won’t you even try out for drum corps? You don’t talk about any plans after high school, like your life is going to stop. But every one of your close friends is leaving town after graduation.”
“Sawyer isn’t.” As soon as these words left my lips, I regretted them. Will wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t true, but the truth hurt, and lashing out was my natural response.
“I’ll bet he does leave,” Will said.
I wondered what he saw in Sawyer that made him think so. There was a lot more to Sawyer than most people knew. He seemed to grow deeper all the time. And since he’d convinced me yesterday that he was interested in someone . . . maybe Will was right. Sawyer would follow a girl elsewhere. I couldn’t picture most of our class hanging around town. Not just anybody could get elected Mr. and Ms. Least Likely to Leave the Tampa/St. Petersburg Metropolitan Area.
Will reached over to me. I stiffened, expecting him to take my hand again. Instead, he tugged his art pad out from my hands and tucked it back into the glove compartment where it was safe. He didn’t trust me with his work anymore.
He ran his fingers through the shorn back of his hair. “Remember when you told me that Izzy insulted you, and you haven’t seen her since?”
I nodded.
“Does Izzy know you’re mad at her?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I really didn’t care. “Why?”
“When you’ve got a beef with somebody,” he said, “you don’t act mad. Not right away. You avoid confrontation. It only comes out later, when you make cutting comments. Izzy’s lived with you, so she understands that about you. But if you haven’t been by her shop, she probably doesn’t even know you’re angry. She’s busy with her job and her kids, but she’s wondering why you’ve gone missing. She thinks you’re just busy too.”
Letting that hypothesis hang in the air, he started the car.
I was shocked into silence. It made me uncomfortable that he understood so much about me, so quickly. We were already driving through the town’s main drag, past the shop where Izzy worked, before I managed to stammer, “I’m—I’m sorry, Will. I’m sorry about unloading all of that on you. I have a chip on my shoulder.”
“What you have is not a chip,” he said.
As he prepared to turn onto the street leading into my neighborhood, he looked right. His earring glinted under a streetlight. Feeling miserable, I wished I could take back the last half hour of spilling my guts. I tried to balance the evening a little by asking him a personal question, something I’d been curious about since our first night together. “Why did you pierce your ear? Is it a Minnesota thing?”
He huffed out the smallest laugh. “It’s a drum line thing.”
“Some kind of sick initiation for the Marching Wrath of God? I love it! We should totally do that to the damn freshmen.”
“No,” he said, “we won the state championship.”
“What?” I exclaimed. I was impressed with his band, and frustrated all over again about everything our second-rate town was putting him through. Our band made great marks at contests, but we didn’t win.
“A tattoo would have been better,” he said, “but you can’t get ink in Minnesota until you turn eighteen.”
“You mean, everybody on the drum line got an ear pierced?” I couldn’t imagine everybody on our drum line doing anything, especially not as an organized group.
“Yeah.”
“What about the girls?”
“They both had their ears pierced already, but they got another piercing in one ear. Carol—” As the memory came back to him, he cracked up. “They loomed over her with the gun, and she passed out. The first thing she said when she came to was, ‘Drum line forever!’ ” He laughed again, then looked sidelong at me. “I guess you had to be there.”
“It sounds like you guys had a lot of fun together.”
“We did.” He smiled into space and fingered the stud in his ear.
And with a rush, I realized how much he’d lost when he’d moved here. Not just the position of drum major, the office of student council president, the status of Most Academic, but a group of close friends. Like a second family.
Will put his hand down and glanced at me. “Is wearing a stud uncool in Florida? I thought I might quit wearing it, but then I would have a hole in my ear. Somehow that seems worse.”
“I see what you’re saying,” I told him, because I really did. “And I have never met anyone who took his earlobe so seriously.”
He cracked another smile. “I’m a serious guy.”
A week and a half ago, I would have agreed with him wholeheartedly. Now I was beginning to wonder. I’d thought Sawyer was growing deeper the longer I knew him, but Will seemed fathomless.
I told him truthfully, “Your earring is the first thing I liked about you.”
“For all the wrong reasons.” He pulled to a stop in front of my house and looked across the car at me in the dim light. “You were completely wrong about me.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I may be the first person who’s been absolutely right.”
13
I FELT SO TERRIBLE ABOUT my pity party Wednesday night that I was determined to make it up to Will when we went out Thursday. I’d been wrong when I’d made fun of him for thinking the Tampa area was a hockey mecca. There was a rink not far from town. I laced up skates and let him half teach me, half drag me around the oval. But I wished I could have sat there, without being a weirdo, and watched him skate. He made it look easy, even natural. The cold breeze ruffled his short hair as he sped around the rink without me. Best of all, it was cold as Minnesota in the building. While I shivered in a sweater, he grinned in his T-shirt and looked genuinely happy.
Friday we drove a few towns south to a tourist spot full of neon lights and corn dogs for their sunset celebration. The long pier was full of couples embracing each other, acting like they couldn’t wait for the day to end and the dark to start their night of romance. More than once I caught Will glancing at girls and guys our age making out. Now that our relationship was fake-official, flirting wasn’t as easy as it used to be. An awkwardness still hung between us after I’d gone all TMI Wednesday night.
Saturday was different. I could feel it when I woke up, and I heard it in his voice when he called me to ask about going out that night. We were both sick of these polite dates that ended with him giving me a peck on the cheek at my front door. I made sure that when I opened my front door on Saturday night, he had something to look at.
He gaped at me. Simply looked me up and down with his mouth open.
“You’ve never seen me quite so clean before.” I bent toward him. “Smell me.”
He obliged, taking a long whiff of my floral hair. “Great dress.” He stared at my legs.
“Thanks.”
He lifted my chin with two fingers. “Is that . . . mascara?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed, triumphant.
His eyes roved all over my face, making me feel like our senior class’s Best Looking, a title I’d never wanted but that didn’t sound too bad when Will was the one bestowing it on me. Finally he said, “Your hair’s down.”
“It unravels from the braids, sure enough.”
“Indulge me for a minute.” He tapped his phone, then held it out in front of us. “Selfie. Kiss me right here.” He pointed to his cheek.
Taking this picture reminded me a bit too much of Beverly’s treacherous selfie with Will’s best friend back home. But I wasn’t going to deny him this. I pursed my lips—with shiny gloss on them, even—and gave the phone a knowing glance. He snapped the photo.
As we looked down at the image, he slipped his arm around my back with more of that Minnesotan sleight of hand. He said ruefully, “I wanted to post it online to show my friends how cool I am. It’s not going to work. You look gorgeous, but I look too exuberant standing beside you, like I can’t quite believe it.”
I laughed. He did look a little starstruck. Guys didn’t get starstruck around me. “I think it’s perfect.”
***
Kaye was throwing the night’s party in her big, beautiful historic home on a lagoon where the homeowners docked their massive sailboats and had access to the ocean. As we parked at the end of a long line of cars stretching along the grass near her house, I explained to Will that Kaye didn’t have parties when her parents weren’t home. Her mom actually helped her throw them. Consequently there was no alcohol, but the food was good enough that people came anyway. These gatherings had an innocent, fifties, sock-hop vibe. Frankly, I found them a refreshing change from sitting on the ground and trying to use an empty Coke can as a weed pipe. But guests really bluesing for a drink could always access a box of wine. One had only to determine whose truck bed it was in.
As we hiked up the lawn to her house, holding hands, Will asked the next logical question, knowing me. “Do you want a drink?”
I had a crazy answer: “Not if you’re not. It’s really hard to communicate with somebody when one of you is drinking and the other isn’t.”
He gave me a quizzical smile. Now that we were walking near the house, we were getting close to other couples making their way up the yard, so he lowered his voice. “That’s an excuse. You don’t want to drink every time you go to a party, but by now you have a reputation to uphold. You’re glad I’m here, aren’t you? You can blame me for all your good behavior.”
This boy scared me sometimes, he was so right. I tried to throw him off balance by murmuring, “If I cut down on my drinking, I will still have plenty of bad reputation left. I’ll show you later tonight.”
He laughed out loud. He looked as pleased and astonished as he had when we took a picture a few minutes before.
“Aw, you’re blushing!” I exclaimed, squeezing his hand. “You’re cute.”
Chelsea and DeMarcus were walking a few yards away—approximately fifteen, in my expert estimation from years of marching up and down a football field. Chelsea called, “I thought it was a robot, but it laughs!”
“It laughs only for me,” I called back. I said more quietly to Will, “Seriously, I think that’s where we went wrong the first night, why we were misreading each other. I was drunk and you were . . . new.”
He winced. “It’s terrible being new.”
“Is it? Sometimes I fantasize about what it would be like to start over.”
“You want to move to Minnesota?” He made it sound like a threat.
“No. I would freeze to death.”
Keeping hold of my hand, he backed far enough away to get a good look at my gauzy dress. “You would,” he agreed, “because I would want you to keep wearing stuff like that.”
“And I think it’s beautiful here.”
He looked up at the live oaks arching over the house. “It is.”
“But I fantasize . . . this is terrible.”
He tugged me closer. “You’ve told me a lot of terrible things.”
“Er, this is not sexy-terrible but actual-terrible,” I said. “I wonder what it would be like to start over without sisters. Not that I want them dead, of course, but if they never existed, and it was just me. I wonder if I would be the same person, or if I would be like Angelica, fighting it out for valedictorian with Aidan and Kaye and DeMarcus and Xavier Pilkington.”
Will gave me a dubious look. “You would never be anything like Angelica.”
That hurt. After he’d been so nice tonight, though, I was pretty sure he hadn’t meant to spray lighter fluid on my feelings and set them on fire. “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t mean that!” he exclaimed. “It’s just . . . Angelica tries really hard, but she’s not that bright.”
“Really!”
“Yes. Not to be mean. Just my opinion.”
Why do you want to date her, then? I wondered. But we didn’t all want a rocket scientist, did we? Girls didn’t hang out at Xavier’s locker. I tried to edit the bitterness out of my voice as I said, “That’s my opinion too. I’ve never heard anyone else say it, but I’ve known this about Angelica since kindergarten.”
He nodded. “She does well in school because she cares and she worries. Like me.”
At the bottom of the grand stairs up to the covered front porch, I pulled him to a stop. “You’re not like that. Angelica and Aidan care, and they worry, and it’s part of their nature. You care and worry too, but it makes you tired.” I reached up and rubbed my thumb across the worry line between his brows. “Do you feel tired?”