Biggest Flirts (18 page)

Kaye nodded sadly. “You’d already fallen in love with each other.”

“Well, I don’t know about
him
. That’s what he said, yeah. But I . . .” The full meaning of her words hit me. “Yeah, I’d already fallen . . . Oh, God.” I put my hands over my face, horrified that I was crying in front of them yet again.

Harper drew me closer on the bench. Kaye called, “Group hug!” and wrapped her arms around both of us. This was a little much in the heat, but I relaxed into their embrace and tried to stop panicking about Will.

Kaye knocked her booty against mine so I’d scoot over to make room on the bench. After I’d crushed Harper sufficiently, Kaye sat down, then stroked a lock of hair out of my eyes with her middle finger. “Teen hygiene tip. If you try to get Will back today, bathe first. Guys love that.”

“Yeah, okay,” I grumbled.

“I agree with Harper,” she said. “After seeing you and Will together, I think you may be meant for each other. It’s obvious that he loves you. It would be a shame for your fear to be the only reason you let him go.”

We all turned as the front door opened. I hadn’t realized how late it had gotten—time for my dad to wake up. He called across the yard, “
Lucita!
What happened to the top four layers of the stuff in the house?”

***

Kaye and Harper left when Violet arrived in Dad’s truck with enough groceries for a feast. An hour later, she and Dad and I sat down to our first family dinner since we’d moved in, because we had cleared off the table.

“Lucita,”
he mumbled between bites. “So good.”

“Thanks.” I wondered why he was into this meal now when he’d never wanted what I’d cooked before. Maybe the table made the difference. Or Violet. Or the fact that the meal was not offered with an air of desperate sacrifice.

“Violet,” he said. “Delicious. And—” He put his hand over hers on the table. In Spanish he told her that he was very glad she’d come home. He said he’d always thought she would return eventually. He’d wanted her to figure that out for herself. Love was a complicated thing, but that boy she had picked out would not be his choice for her. Then there was a series of epithets that involved Ricky’s private parts.

“I know, Dad.” Violet took a bite. “This house doesn’t seem like home, though, with Sophia and Izzy missing. I haven’t seen Izzy and the kids in months. Maybe I could cook again one day this week, and we could have them over, now that the house isn’t a death trap for the children and we’ve found all the chairs. I could drive up to get Sophia and the baby one weekend.” She gazed around the den/dining room/kitchen. “It would be kind of small in here for all of us, though.”

“The white house is for sale again,” I said casually.

Dad’s eyebrows shot up. Suddenly he looked more awake than I’d seen him in years. “Really?” The eager look settled into wistfulness. “I loved that house. I think about it a lot.”

“Me too,” Violet said.

“Me too,” I said.

“I looked forward to tackling that fountain,” he said. “Remember, in the atrium, with the mermaids?”

“I’ll bet it would be cheaper than it was before,” I said. “It’s been on the market a few times. Why don’t we buy it back?”

He laughed. “I wish. I work too much,
lucita
.”

“Yeah, you do,” I said. “Why? Izzy is stable now. Sophia is stable-ish.”

“Ish,” Violet echoed with a laugh.

“Violet will get there,” I said.

Violet snorted.

“And you don’t have to worry about me,” I told him. “I’ll get college paid for.”

“College!” he exclaimed. “I always said you would be the first one to go to college, but you’ve been hemming and hawing.”

“I decided I’m going,” I said.

“When did you decide this?”

“Today. I’m getting online and registering to take the SAT in a minute.” I had no doubt I could score high enough on the SAT to get a full ride to college, provided I could get really stressed out with responsibilities before test time. The way things with band and work and Will had been going, that shouldn’t be too hard.

“In the meantime, I would help you with the house,” I said.

“I would too,” Violet chimed in.

“I’ll only be here for a year before I leave for college,” I said, “but we could get a lot done.”

Dad put down his fork and nodded, staring into space. “I was about to sign up for another month of weekends at work. I didn’t know how to break it to you,
lucita
, but I was going to miss all your band performances at the ball games. It’s funny how you work so much that you don’t even have time to think about how much you’re working, or what you’re working for.”

“Yeah,” said Violet. “Sometimes when you’re in the thick of something, you lose perspective.”

I put my fist to my mouth and squeezed a sob back in. Talk about being in the thick of things. I’d been so caught up in my own childish way of dealing with my fears that I’d driven off my favorite pirate, maybe forever. But before that possibility settled into fact, I had to try to get him back.

I stood to take my plate to the sink. On my way, I stopped and kissed my dad on the cheek. “Please consider it. We’d rather have you home.”

***

I’d never been inside Will’s house, but he’d pointed it out to me on our tour of town last Wednesday. I rode my bike into his neighborhood, a newer development where the trees were small, the houses all looked the same, and there weren’t any unique architectural details for Will to draw. I felt a little sick as I laid my bike carefully on the lawn and walked up to the door. I put out a finger to ring the doorbell and noticed my hand was trembling.

Will’s mom was as tall as me, with Will’s worry line between her brows. She wore a tank top and shorts. Those clothes would have made sense if she was walking at the beach or working in the yard, but I was surprised she wasn’t freezing when she had the air-conditioning in the house set below zero. It seeped out, surrounding me and making me shiver as she said in her own clipped Minnesota accent, “Oh, hello. Will’s talked about you a lot. I’m afraid he’s asleep right now, though. He said he was feeling sick.”

“Sick?” I repeated. “Is he okay?”

His mom nodded. “I think he’s just homesick.”

I nodded too, because that seemed to be the thing to do. “Homesick.”

“There’s no cure for that but time,” she said sadly. “But thanks for coming by, Tammy. I’ll tell him you were here.” She backed me out of her house and onto her porch. She shut the door, sealing out my voice, before I could tell her my name wasn’t Tammy.

I stood there for a moment in the quiet night, listening to the breeze rattle the palm fronds. It was an evening for staying inside, where it was cool, and wishing you were back in Minnesota, away from me.

I walked down the sidewalk and picked up my bike. What else could I do? Yes, Will and I had argued, and we’d been genuinely mad at each other, with reason. But in the back of my mind, I suppose I’d assumed that we could fix it. We hadn’t flirted like we used to since the trouble began—it all started with that stupid title—but I’d thought we would get back there.

And now I knew we wouldn’t. I was such a poor replacement for his friends that I made him sick.

I got back on my bike and rode. The Sunday night was bustling with traffic. Folks were driving inland after a day at our beaches, one last weekend before Labor Day. Families had eaten one last meal out on the main drag and were packing into their cars to go home and prepare for work and school. I was riding the wrong way, heading downtown. I steered into the alley and propped my bike against the railing of the Crab Lab.

Employees kept the lights out on the restaurant’s back porch so they could do what they wanted without being seen from the alley. I was all the way up the steps before I could make out Sawyer’s shape in the darkness. When he saw me, he put down his beer. I walked into his open arms.

“Things didn’t work out with Will?” he asked, his breath warm in my ear. “You wouldn’t be hugging me otherwise.”

I sighed as I collapsed on the bench beside him. “I broke up with him.”

“Why?” Sawyer asked.

“Violet finally decided to come home, and we went to get her, and . . . I don’t know. I guess I started comparing Will and Ricky.”

“Will is not a shit like Ricky,” Sawyer said. “
I
am a shit like Ricky.”

This seemed like a new low of self-deprecation, even for Sawyer. I nodded toward his beer. “Starting early, aren’t you? How many of those have you had?”

He didn’t respond to my question but asked, “What happened then?”

“I cleaned my entire house.”

“Oh, poor baby,” he cooed. “You
are
upset. I’ve got something for you.” He pulled a joint from his pocket. I watched him light it, closing his eyes against the smoke. He took a long toke and handed it to me.

I held it between my fingers and looked at it. This was what I needed: to forget a problem that couldn’t be solved. But my brain was stressed, which put my body in organization mode. It did not want this weed. I needed to take my hit so Sawyer’s pot didn’t burn down and go to waste, but every atom inside me screamed to hand the joint back.

Sawyer snatched it from me. When I looked at him in surprise, he was staring past me. I turned. Will was on the top step.

“That’s exactly what I thought,” Will said. He jogged down the stairs again.

“Go.” Sawyer nodded at Will, urging me to follow him. “Go, go, go.”

I ran after Will, leaping down the last two stairs in my effort to catch him before he reached his car at the end of the alley. Sweating in the hot night, I grabbed his elbow.

He stopped short and whirled to face me. “Don’t. I told you that I was done with you. You’re just like Beverly. When my mom said you came by, I thought maybe my instincts were wrong, but now I see I was right about you the whole time. I left town for five minutes and she was cheating on me. You and I have one little fight—”

“Little?” I broke in. “I put a lot of effort into that fight.”

He raised his voice for some reason. “—and you just move on like nothing happened, and go back to doing drugs and God knows what else with Sawyer De Luca.”

“I was
not
,” I said emphatically. “I was in the process of politely refusing a joint. Even if I had taken a hit, calling that ‘doing drugs’ makes it sound like I was shooting up heroin.”

“It’s the same,” he said. “You and Beverly are the same. I don’t want you back now that I know what you’re like.” He stalked to the driver’s seat of his car, slammed the door, and roared out of the alley.

I was left standing in a cloud of the Mustang’s exhaust, the smell of frying food, and an utterly empty late summer night.

17

“DON’T YOU LOOK NICE,” MS. NAKAMOTO
said as I sat down in the chair facing her desk. She closed the door on the noise of people dragging their instruments out of the storage room for practice.

I supposed I
did
look nice. I’d set my alarm for school so I had time to iron my dress this morning. I’d fixed my hair and put on makeup. Violet had cooked me a balanced breakfast. I’d gotten my calculus homework finished during class since I wasn’t flirting with Will or even sitting near him. I’d taken great notes in history. I’d generally felt like I was about to lose my grip on my sanity.

And didn’t Ms. Nakamoto
sound
nice? She’d never spoken so pleasantly to me before, possibly because she was usually yelling at me across a football field to stop screwing around.

“Thank you,” I said politely, as though I was pleased with her comment and my brain had been eaten by zombies.

“That usually means something’s gone wrong in your life,” she said. “Is there a problem you want to tell me about?”

“There is a problem,” I affirmed, “but I don’t want to tell you about it.”

“All right, then,” she said, because she was used to this kind of thing from me. “My news probably isn’t going to help. I called you in to let you know that Will Matthews has challenged you for drum captain.”

“Really!” I crowed. Will was fulfilling his promise. He still cared about me!

Wait a minute. He just wanted his drum captain position back. I amended my previous statement: “Really.”

“It’s not going to happen,” Ms. Nakamoto said. “I told him no.”

“But that’s the rule,” I protested.

“All rules are at my discretion,” she said firmly. “We have four contests coming up this season. We’re not going to ruin the cohesiveness of the drum line by switching leadership every week.”

“I don’t want to be drum captain,” I whined. “I challenged Will, but it was a mistake.”

“Correction: You
meant
to throw it, like every other challenge, but you made a mistake and played a perfect exercise.”

I was afraid I would get in worse trouble if I copped to this. But I didn’t want to lie to her either, so I sat there blinking.

“You’re crafty, I’ll admit,” Ms. Nakamoto said. “I didn’t get wise to you until Señorita Higgenbotham told me you made a C in her class even though you’re bilingual. And now there’s talk that you’ve scored high enough to be a National Merit Scholar. A faculty member would have to write you a letter of recommendation, and we’re not sure we can do that in good conscience. Why do you sabotage yourself, Tia?”

I uncrossed and recrossed my legs, because that’s what respectable women did when they were in a meeting and wearing a dress. I had seen this on TV. “I don’t want to be in charge and ruin everything.”

“How have you ruined the drum line in the past week? You haven’t.”

Damn it. “Will would be better.”

“I have no reason to think so,” she said. “I was happy you were drum captain, and I wasn’t looking for anyone to replace you when he showed up. You know when you impressed me?”

“No, I have no idea,” I said honestly, refraining from laughing at the thought.

“When Will cursed and threw his phone across the field on the first day of camp. I was going to kick him out of the position right then, but you handled him and you handled
me
. You saved drum captain for him, at least until you challenged him.” She stood as if the conversation was over.

“No, wait a minute, nuh-uh,” I told her, keeping my seat. “I’m an underachiever. You don’t seriously
want
me in charge!”

“Sometimes we put underachievers in positions of responsibility and they rise to the occasion. You are one of those people. You’re a sharp young lady and a fine percussionist, Tia. You
are
the drum captain. Why not enjoy it? You only get one senior year in high school.” She opened the door for me, letting in the bustle of band, and nodded toward it, since I wasn’t budging. “Now I’m running late. Please tell DeMarcus to get practice started without me.”

Grumbling under my breath, I trudged across the parking lot to Will’s car, where he’d left my drum propped against a tire. I was guessing that I was evicted again. I pulled my harness over my shoulders and carefully descended the stadium stairs.

From this height, the band formation looked beautiful. The circles and curlicues weren’t squashed anymore. They were as precise as if Will had drawn them.

He stood in his place in the drums, close to Travis, leaving an empty space for me. And—wonder of wonders—today he was
talking
to Travis. As I watched, he threw back his head and laughed.

He glimpsed me on the stairs. His smile faded. He turned back to Travis.

This was how it was going to be from now on. He must have been furious that he couldn’t get his drum captain position back. He’d already been furious with me at school all day. But
furious
on Will was the silent treatment. He simply didn’t interact with me. He stayed away from me. The only time he’d acknowledged I existed was in English when a couple of basketball players hit on me. He’d gone out of his way to walk slowly down the row where we were standing, and he’d shouldered each of them in turn, saying “Excuse me” as if he simply wanted to get by. They’d watched him wide eyed and told me they would catch me later. They’d gotten the message.

I should have been angry. Will didn’t want me back. Where did he get off elbowing basketball players away from me? Apparently I had a better chance of hooking up with someone new now that I was stressed out and practicing good grooming habits. I had tried to lay out my room and bathroom so that when this stress reaction inevitably faded, I would still be organized enough to look decent in the morning. I’d enjoyed the attention I’d gotten at school all day, along the lines of Ms. Nakamoto’s
Don’t you look like you’ve bathed this year!
Too bad the one guy I’d really craved that comment from no longer wanted to take a selfie with me.

When I reached the sidelines, I gave Ms. Nakamoto’s message to DeMarcus. He glanced down at his watch, then up the stairs at the stragglers. We had a little time left before practice began. Rather than spend it in a shroud of silent treatment beside Will, I dumped my drum and sat down on a bench, next to Sawyer. I’d never seen him sit down in his costume. He immediately leaned over until his huge pelican head lay in my lap. I stroked his feathers absently.

“Being in love totally sucks when they don’t love you back,” I said.

He felt for my hand and held it in his feather-covered pelican glove.

Kaye looked over at me from a cheerleader huddle and stuck out her bottom lip in sympathy. She and Harper had taken one look at me when I got to school and had known my talk with Will hadn’t gone well.

DeMarcus climbed to the top of his podium. He was about to start practice. I needed to be in the drum section when that happened, ready to play my riff. “Sawyer,” I said, “I have to go.”

He didn’t budge.

“Sawyer,” I complained, “not funny. You’re going to get me in trouble. You know I’m stressed out, so I actually care about that shit today.”

He was incredibly heavy in my lap.

“Now you’re worrying me,” I said. “You’re making me think you’ve passed out in there. Come on, Sawyer. Joke’s over.”

DeMarcus made his move and Will played the riff, which the rest of the drum line repeated. The boom of drums echoed around the stadium, followed by silence, just as I pulled Sawyer’s pelican head off.

Sawyer’s soaked blond head and broad shoulders lay limp across me. He really had passed out.

“Will!” I shrieked.

DeMarcus turned around on his podium. The cheerleaders off to the side of the band rushed over. “No, no, no,” I yelled as they gathered around, “Don’t crowd us. I need Will.”

And then he was there, towering over the girls. “Back up,” he told them. They all stared at him with wide, heavily made-up eyes and took two steps back. He shouted to DeMarcus, “Call 911.” He told me, “Hold him,” and when I put my arms around Sawyer, Will pulled off the rest of his costume. Sawyer wore only a pair of gym shorts. His muscular body flopped like a rag doll. That’s when I really got scared.

Will knelt down under Sawyer, then stood so Sawyer’s whole body draped over one shoulder. “Come on,” he told me. “Get them out of my way.”

I jumped up. “Move,” I barked to the cheerleaders and majorettes gawking at us. They parted, clearing a path to the gate. I stepped aside to let Will pass, then closed the gate behind me, glaring at the girls and daring them to cross me. I turned and jogged up the stairs behind Will, who was making great time up the incline despite carrying a hundred and fifty pounds.

At the top of the stairs, he grunted, “Help me.” I reached up to ease Sawyer onto the ground, in the shade underneath the bleachers. Will nodded toward a hose coiled next to the concession stand. “Turn that on.”

I dragged the hose over and let the water gush over Sawyer’s legs, then his torso—soaking his gym shorts, which I would have made a joke about any other time—then his arms and his neck, keeping the flow away from his face so I didn’t drown him.

“No, get his head.” Will turned Sawyer on his side.

I wet Sawyer’s hair, then looked to Will for guidance.

“Keep doing it,” Will said. “We just need to cool him down.” He pressed his thumb over Sawyer’s wrist to feel his pulse.

“How do you know this?” I asked, moving the hose down to Sawyer’s chest again.

“I googled ‘heatstroke’ because I’ve spent the last two weeks thinking I was going to have one.” Will glanced up. “You must have known, or you wouldn’t have called to me for help.”

“I called to you for help because you’re you. I knew you would keep your shit together in a crisis.”

I sighed with relief as sirens approached. And then Sawyer blinked his eyes open and tried to sit up. “Stay cool, man,” Will said softly, pressing one hand on Sawyer’s chest. He told me, “One of us should go with him to the hospital.”

I wanted desperately to go. More than that, I wanted what was best for Sawyer. “You go, because you’ll be more helpful.”

“I’ll go,” Will agreed, “because you have to work after school.” He looked up at me. “Kaye and Harper told me you took off work and cleaned your house yesterday. Are you okay?”

I nodded.

Sawyer tried to sit up again, struggling against Will’s hand. “What the fuck,” he said weakly. “Get the fuck off me.”

Will glanced at me. “He’ll be okay.”

All at once, the parking lot was bursting with sirens, louder and louder until Will and I put our hands over our ears. An ambulance arrived, plus an overkill pumper truck from the fire department, a couple of police cars that had come to see what all the excitement was about, and Ms. Nakamoto, followed by the principal, who was really booking it across the asphalt. I’d never seen an old lady run that fast, especially in heels. I was impressed.

With all those folks crowding around, there wasn’t anything left for me to do but turn off and coil up the hose and watch the paramedics argue with Sawyer, who insisted he was fine, and promptly threw up. I shared one last look with Will before the paramedics closed him and Sawyer inside the ambulance. As it retreated across the parking lot, I heaved a long sigh and realized for the first time how tense my shoulders had been.

I wandered back down the stairs to the stadium. The band was running through the halftime show. While I watched, four people tripped over Will’s drum, which nobody had the foresight to remove from the middle of the field where he’d dropped it. Before I retrieved my own drum from the bench, I took Kaye aside from the rest of the cheerleaders.

“When class is over,” I whispered, “could you hang out around the boys’ locker room and ask someone to get Sawyer’s stuff for you? I have to work.”

Kaye frowned. “You want me to take it to him? His homework can wait until tomorrow.”

“No, he needs his wallet with his insurance card,” I insisted. “He needs his phone to call people because he won’t remember anybody’s number off the top of his head, and he needs his keys to get inside his house in case he’s actually released from the hospital today.”

“What about his dad?”

“His dad is up in Panama City, selling blown-glass figurines on the pier. They have a bigger Labor Day crowd than we do.”

The resistance on her face melted into sympathy. “What about his brother?”

“You can’t count on his brother for anything.”

I snagged my drum and made my way through the band to my place. As the rest of the period crawled by, I decided it was too bad I couldn’t take the SAT on demand. Right this second I would have made a perfect score.

***

Violet was in a job interview with Bob and Roger in the back office, and I was manning the front counter, when the antique cowbell rang. Will came through the door, his big body blocking so much sun that he made the room turn dark.

“How’s Sawyer?” I asked. I hoped he hadn’t come by to give me bad news personally.

“He’s fine,” Will said. “He’s dehydrated. He’s getting an IV.” He touched the back of his hand with two fingers, which I assumed was where the IV went. “A bunch of people from school are there with him now. He wants you to come by after work.”

I nodded.

Will looked uncomfortably around the shop, as if he didn’t want to meet my gaze, then pointed at the floor. “I’m going to borrow this dog.”

“Okay,” I said, like that was not weird.

“Come on,” he said. Even though his voice hadn’t changed and the dog wasn’t looking at him, she jumped up when he spoke to her. They disappeared out the door.

I stared through the window and into the street, which looked like it always did, as though the boy I loved most in the world hadn’t just bopped in to steal the shop dog. If it wasn’t for the antique bell still swinging on its ribbon and chiming gently, I would have suspected it hadn’t happened at all.

I slid down from my stool, emerged from behind the counter, and leaned out the door, peering down the street. Far away, past all the shops, in the tree-shaded park next to the marina, the dog was chasing Will. Will stopped suddenly and reached for the dog, who bent her body just out of his reach and scampered away. Now Will chased the dog. The dog spun to face him. They both crouched in the stance of a dog at the ready, each daring the other to jump first. Will made a grab and the dog dashed away.