Paper Airplanes (9 page)

I
could tell immediately that she wasn’t as okay as she wanted everyone to think. And that made me feel sort of bad for her. Apparently I was just a nice guy when it came down to it, and no matter how much I’d disliked Cassie in the past, I couldn’t be an asshole to her.

“So this is pretty easy,” she commented
when I didn’t say anything else.

I
just nodded in response. Rolling silverware was a piece of cake.

“It’s mundane, and we have to do it each day,” I told her. I’d been doing it for two years, so I was kind of over it.

“Thanks for training me today,” she said, still trying to keep the conversation going apparently. She obviously wasn’t as comfortable with silence as I was.

I shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I train everyone.
”

“Well, I appreciate you taking the time to do it. Maybe I could buy you a coffee sometime to thank you?”

I looked up at her in surprise. Had she just asked me out? No, that couldn’t have been it. She was just being friendly. Why was she being friendly – to me? Had she been serious when she said that she wanted to be my friend? Why was that making my heart pound?

I tried to decipher what she was thinking, but I couldn’t read her expression. She wasn’t looking up anymore. She’d gone back to rolling her silverware.

“You seriously want to be friends with me?” I asked bluntly.

She looked up and met my gaze. Then she smiled. She had a really nice smile.
No wonder she’d won that award.

Dammit.
I did not want to think Cassie Witter had a nice smile. And I didn’t want to be even the slightest bit excited that she wanted to be my friend. But I was. My hands were starting to sweat. I rubbed them on my khaki shorts.

“
Well, yes. I want to be friends with you and Scott, I suppose, since he’s actually friendly to me, and you two seem to be a packaged deal.”

“We’re not,” I told her
and then looked back down at what I was doing.

I could do it without looking, but I had to force my gaze from her, because I knew I’d keep staring if given the opportunity. And I didn’t want to stare. I didn’t want her to elicit any more
of the weird twingy feelings that were swirling in my stomach, because I knew they were one-sided.

She didn’t want to be friends with me. She wanted to be friends with Scott because he was nice to her. I’d been terse and
unwelcoming, and because she thought Scott and I were a packaged deal, she thought that meant we had to be friends too. But I didn’t want her to feel obligated to be nice to me or to be my friend. I didn’t need her as a friend. Of course what I needed and what I found I suddenly wanted were two very different things.

Cassie
stopped rolling her silverware and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Jared.”

I liked the way my name sounded on her lips. Seriously, what was wrong with me?
I’d hated this girl thirty minutes earlier and now I was getting all excited when she said my name? I was such a fucking idiot. It was like Brooke all over again.

“Jared,” she said again when I refused to look up at her.

I looked up and met her gaze but didn’t say anything. She just shook her head.

“You know, I’m
actually a nice person. You could at least try to get to know me before you write me off.”

I
didn’t say anything, because I was fearful of what might come out of my mouth. Current confusing feelings aside, six years of hatred for her and her friends could spill out in a waterfall of emotion, showing her just how vulnerable I was after being picked on for most of my life by the people she’d called friends all throughout high school. And what sucked is that I’d thought I’d gotten over it, that I’d risen above it and let go of high school, but apparently I hadn’t. Sitting across from one of the most popular and beautiful girls I’d ever known, the things I used to feel in high school when one of her friends called me a loser or shoved me in the hall came flooding back. All I’d wanted was for them to leave me alone, but they never had.

“Look,” she continued, “I have no idea what impression you have of me, but I can tell that you don’t like me for some reason
, which means I had to have done something to you. And whatever that was, I’m sorry. I know I wasn’t the nicest person in high school. I get it, but things change. People change. I’ve changed, and I’m asking for a chance to show that to you.”

I sighed.
I could give her a laundry list of the things her friends had done to Scott and me – calling us fags and homos, slamming our heads into lockers, tripping us, mocking us as we uncoordinatedly suffered through gym class, beating us up just because they could – the list was long. And it would probably make her remember exactly who I was. I knew she had no clue. I’d changed a lot in the two years since we’d graduated. But if I told her, she’d definitely remember, because although she’d never done anything directly to me or Scott, she’d stood by and laughed while her friends had treated us like lepers and she hadn’t said a word about it.

But maybe she
had
changed. Maybe she’d grown up. Maybe going through something as traumatic as a shooting spree caused her to gain some perspective. It happened all the time. People went through a life and death experience and came out of it a different person. Maybe that happened to Cassie, and maybe that was why I felt inclined to give her the chance she was asking for.

I still had
no clue why she’d selected Scott and me out of all the people in our town to be friends with, why she’d want to be friends with two ‘losers’ like us after never giving us the time of day in the past, but she seemed adamant. I figured it wouldn’t do me any good to question her intentions. I probably didn’t want to know. But I could see that she looked so desperate and vulnerable sitting across from me that I couldn’t be a jerk to her, no matter how much my sixteen year-old self wanted me to be. It just wasn’t in my DNA. It never had been. I was an eternally nice guy.

“You know
Scott has a massive crush on you, right?” I said instead of delving deeper into where she’d started to take our conversation. I wasn’t ready to go there with her.

Of course I’d just blurted
out something Scott may or may not have wanted me to share. He was either going to kill me or hug me when he found out. It could really go either way. I’d just have to apologize and beg for forgiveness if he was upset.

“I know,” Cassie
said as she looked down and started to roll her silverware again with more vigor than before, so I knew Scott didn’t have a chance in hell. She wasn’t interested in him, and that sucked, because he was a good guy.

“He’s a cool guy,” I said, feeling the need to defend my
best friend.

“I know,” she said,
and even though she sounded sincere, I also knew she wasn’t going to change her mind. She just rolled the silverware packet in front of her tighter and then squeezed it between her small fingers. When she looked up at me, my heart started pounding again. “I’m not really interested in dating anyone this summer.”

Then she got a faraway look in her eyes as she fingered the triangle charm around her neck. I watched her for a few seconds as she battled with somethin
g inside her, but she didn’t volunteer what was on her mind. I went back to rolling my silverware, pretending that nothing was wrong. If she didn’t want to talk about what was suddenly bothering her, I wasn’t going to pry.

After a few minutes, she spoke up. “
Why don’t you like me, Jared? Seriously, did I do something to you?”

I sighed and shook my head,
not looking up to meet her gaze.

“Did I?” she prompted, and I knew she
wasn’t going to let it go.

“No,” I said, hoping it would be enough, but I should have known better.

“You’re lying,” she said, shaking her head.

How she knew I was lying was beyond me. I’d mastered the ability to mask my emotions, but it seemed like she could see right through me.

Finally I looked up and made eye contact with her. “We sat next to each other in English our senior year of high school, and you used to try to cheat off my quizzes. And in pre-calc, you sat two seats behind me, and then in American History, I sat next to your boyfriend, so close that I could read all of the dirty notes you passed him. And I’ve been your neighbor for almost three years, yet you have no idea who I am. To top it all off, I was a punching bag for your friends all four years of high school, so no,
you
didn’t do anything to me directly.”

She looked appalled for a few seconds, and I wondered if I’d been too harsh
, shared too much.

“My friends beat you up?” she questioned, and I wondered if she could be that naïve. T
hose assholes beat everyone up, but Scott and I were their favorite victims.

“Yeah, they did,” I said curtly, not wanting to relive the humiliation I’d faced too many times after having my face slammed into a brick wall
or a metal locker.

“Why?”

“Because Scott and I were easy targets, I suppose. I honestly don’t know,” I said, running my fingers through my short dark hair.

Cassie
still looked like she couldn’t wrap her head around that concept. “But you’re really built,” she said her gaze shifting to my exposed bicep. “Didn’t you fight back?”

I shrugged. “Not back then.”

I’d said it so resolutely that she must have known this was a sore subject. I hoped she’d drop it like I wanted her to, but she was still watching me. I could see it even with my head down.

“I didn’t
sit next to you in English,” she said after a few seconds of silence, the disbelief in her voice palpable. “I sat next to this short, punk kid who needed to wash his hair, use some zit cream and stop shopping at Goodwill.”

I
looked up and raised my eyebrows at her, and her mouth dropped open as she realized she’d just described the guy I used to be and not in a very flattering way. And not that she wasn’t accurate in her description, but she didn’t have to be such a little bitch about it. I guess she was showing her true colors. So much for thinking she’d actually changed.

“No, that wasn’t you,” she said quickly,
shaking her head.

I smiled, but it was full of sarcasm.

“No way. That guy was
short
– shorter than me – and skinny and weird and not at all hot. He was such a loser,” she said, digging the knife in deeper and twisting it just right so that it made my chest burn.

I was well aware of how I’d looked for most of my life, and because I’d been shy and insecure and bullied because of my height, my confidence had been shit back then. I’d grown my hair long in high school so I could hide behind it and did what I could to be invisible.

And I hadn’t shopped at Goodwill. At that point in my life, Austin and I had been living with Scott’s family after our dad left, and my clothes had all been courtesy of Scott’s mom. She realized when we moved in that Austin and I didn’t have much since our father had drank away most of our money after our mother left him. And what little money I made back then had been used to pay for Austin to play football, since our father wasn’t going to do it, and Austin loved the game. I didn’t use my money to buy clothes.

Diana was shocked when she saw what little we both had, so much to my protest, she decided from day one that we needed new wardrobes. She took us both to the mall and spent thousands on new clothes for us. Of course, she k
new from shopping for Scott back then that he and I both favored clothes that looked worn and tattered when they, in fact, cost as much as the preppy stuff my brother wanted. Either way, I might have looked like I shopped at Goodwill, but it was the furthest thing from the truth.

But that was the last thing I was ever going to tell Cassie. My life story wasn’t something I told people readily, because it was embarrassing, and Cassie already had such wonderful opinions of me. Instead I just stared at her and clenched my fists together, trying to hold back from lashing out at her for calling me an unwashed, ugly, loser, but I was pretty sure she’d also said I was hot now, and for some reason as I zeroed in on that comment, my anger started to ebb,
my brain having a mind of its own. Stupid brain.

Cassie was looking
at me speculatively, as if trying to see the guy I’d been in who I was today. I looked different, that was for sure, but not that different. I’d grown about six inches since high school, my hair was short, and I’d started working out, but my face was exactly the same as it had always been. I could see the recognition slowly starting to dawn on her face.

“That guy used to sit in class and watch Mr. Clark l
ecture while he turned his notes into paper airplanes. He didn’t even look down. He just did it blindly,” she said, pulling a memory out of the past.

Keeping my eyes on her, I grabbed a napkin and folded into a paper airplane while she watched me with wide eyes. Then I flew it across the table where it died in her lap since it was too heavy to gain any real flight momentum. Making paper airplanes had been a nervous habit I’d picked up years earlier. If I didn’t
do it, I’d start spending class time writing, and I’d never listen to the teacher. It kept my mind focused.