Biggest Flirts

by Jennifer Echols

  A couple of yards farther on, I picked up the other half of his phone cover. It was printed with the slogan MINNESOTA IS THE STATE OF HOCKEY. Sad.

  The phone itself glinted in the sunlight—smack on the white goal line. I dusted off some of the lime before holding it out to him.

  “You can look,” he grumbled.

  I didn’t want to invade his privacy. But I was dying to know what had happened. And clearly he wanted to tell someone.

  I peered at the screen. It was a text from someone named Lance. All it said was “Dude.” Attached was a photo of a dark-haired beauty with porcelain skin. She smiled sweetly into the camera, eyes bright. A cute guy with curly blond hair kissed her neck.

  “Who’s the girl?” I asked, my heart sinking into my stomach.

  He verified what I’d been thinking. “My girlfriend. Beverly.”

  I nodded. “Who’s the guy?”

  “My best friend.”

  I looked up at him sadly. “Only two days after you left?”

  “The same day I left,” he said. “I mean, that picture was from last night, but I already heard they got together the night before that.”

  “So she didn’t waste any time after you broke up?” I asked gently.

  “We didn’t break up,” he snapped. “I’m going to be down here for only a year, and then I’m going back to Minnesota for college.”

  “Oh,” I said. Right. He wouldn’t be here long enough to get used to the heat.

  “We weren’t going to have to do the long-distance thing forever. Less than a year. We were going to see each other at Christmas when I visit my grandparents, and maybe spring break. So we said good-bye two days ago, and I left in my car, right? My parents wanted me to sell it, if anyone would even buy it, because they didn’t trust me to drive it down here by myself. But I convinced them.” He was talking with his hands now. The car was important. He had this in common, at least, with boys from Florida.

  “I was at a gas station in Madison when I checked my texts. I had ten different messages from everybody that she was cheating on me right then with my best friend at a party.” He pointed to the phone in my hands, as though this was all the phone’s fault. “I tried to call her, but she didn’t answer. I tried to call him. I thought maybe I should drive back and confront . . . somebody. But what good would that have done?” He paused like he wanted me to answer.

  “Right,” I said. Going back to fix it would have been like trying to repair a house of cards with a window open to the breeze.

  He looked toward Ms. Nakamoto as rim taps raced across the field to us. While Will and I were missing, Jimmy was beating the rhythm for the band to march into the next formation.

  “I ended up driving around Madison for an hour,” Will said. “I knew going back to Minnesota wouldn’t do any good. And I needed to get here in time to try out for drum captain today. But the farther I drove from home, the less relevant I was going to be to any of my friends’ lives. Then my dad chewed me out for being an hour late to the checkpoint in Indianapolis. He kept asking me where I was all that time. I was watching my entire life go down the drain, thank you.”

  I set my sunglasses down on my nose so I could look at him in the real light of day. “Therefore, when you came to the party last night, you were looking for a good time. A rebound girl. I didn’t read you wrong after all.”

  He folded his arms on his bare chest like he was cold all of a sudden. “I’m sorry, Tia. For the first seventeen years of my life, I did everything right. For the past forty-eight hours, I’ve done everything wrong.”

  He hadn’t kissed wrong last night. I wanted to tell him that to cheer him up. Then I decided against it because he seemed to be counting me as one of the things he’d done wrong.

  A lot of boys considered me the wrong kind of girl. I wasn’t offended. At least, I thought I wasn’t, until this came out of my mouth: “You didn’t do the deed with her just before you left, did you?”

  “I . . . what?”

  “She cheated on you the same night you left. Last night she was at it again. That’s why someone sent you this picture, right? Lance can’t believe her gall.”

  “Right,” Will said tentatively, afraid of where I was going with this. Good instinct.

  “Any guy in his right mind would be outraged at her and think, ‘Good riddance.’ But you’re devastated. You know what would do that to you? Finally having sex with her on your last night together. That’s where people go wrong—not doing it for a long time, and putting so much emphasis on the act that when it finally occurs, it leaves you an emotional wreck. She probably wanted to do it for months, but you refused because she was a nice girl. She told you she wanted one special night with you, and then she would wait for you until you came back for college. Really it was her way of tricking you into sex and taking advantage of you.”

  “That’s enough,” he bit out. He held out his hand for his phone.

  Feeling sheepish now, I gave it to him.

  He pocketed it and picked up his drum.

  I snagged mine by the harness and hurried back toward the drum line. Jimmy thought it was funny to speed up the beat until the band was practically running to their places rather than marching. That was going to annoy Ms. Nakamoto, who was probably nearing the end of her rope already. She would blame Will and threaten to give the drum captain responsibility back to me again. I started running myself, determined to prevent one tragedy today.

  Will returned right after I did, taking over the marching rhythm from Jimmy. But the camaraderie between us was gone. He stayed utterly silent for the rest of the hour.

  And I felt sorry for him. With only a little glimpse into his life back home, I could tell he was a nice guy. A hockey player and the drum captain, who had friends and a girlfriend. The friends he’d had and the titles he’d held were a big part of who he was. Rip him away from that and he wasn’t even a nice guy anymore. Down here he was just an unknown hottie with no tan and a temper.

  By the beginning of the third hour, I’d had enough. Will wandered away from me and sat on the grass. I spread my towel out right next to him and sat down. He stubbornly slid away. I picked up my towel again and moved it closer. He looked toward the press box, chin high in the air, but he bit his lip like he was trying not to laugh.

  “What I said was way too personal,” I whispered in his ear. If he’d been obsessing over our fight as I had been, he would know exactly what I was talking about. “I’m sorry. You said some personal things about me, and I pretended not to care when I really did, and then I jumped down your throat when you came to me for help.”

  He smiled with one corner of his mouth. “I’m sorry too. We’ve insulted each other a lot for two people who hardly know each other.”

  “We’ve also made out a lot for two people who hardly know each other. It all evens out. But we’ve got to find a way to make peace. Otherwise it’s going to be a long year of standing next to each other. Almost as long as the last thirty minutes.”

  He gave me a bigger smile. “Agreed. Don’t mention lutefisk again, okay?”

  “I promise. I will also bathe from now on, or stand downwind of you.” I tossed my hat onto the grass and pulled the hair bands off the ends of both braids, which probably looked like old rope on a shipwreck by now. I bent over to shake my hair out, then turned right side up again and started one French braid down my back by feel.

  He watched me without speaking. When I finished, he said, “As long as you’re tidying up, your shirt’s buttoned wrong.”

  I looked down. Sure enough, one side hung longer than the other. “You did that,” I accused him.

  “What are you saying? That you want me to fix it?”

  “If you dare.”

  He glanced over at Ms. Nakamoto, then at DeMarcus. He unbuttoned my top button and put it through the proper hole, then fixed the next button, perio
dically looking up to make sure he wasn’t about to get expelled for molesting me one button at a time. He never rubbed me “accidentally” or undid more buttons than necessary at once, but the very act of letting him do this in public was enough to make chills race down my arms.

  “I think we’re sending each other mixed messages,” he said.

  “I think I’ve sent you a very clear message,” I corrected him, “and you’re choosing not to receive it.”

  His hands paused on the bottom button. “You mean you do like what I’m doing right now, but you don’t want to date me.”

  “Date anybody,” I fine-tuned that statement. “See? You do get it.”

  Ms. Nakamoto called through her microphone, “Mr. Matthews, take your hands off Ms. Cruz.”

  The whole band said with one voice, “Oooooh.”

  Will put up his hands like a criminal. This time, despite my shades, I could tell he was blushing.

  Jimmy called from the next towel over, “At least Ms. Nakamoto knows your name now.” Travis gave him a high five.

  Will and I sat in companionable silence while the band lost interest in us. Ms. Nakamoto was making the trumpets into a square, which seemed fitting, knowing our trumpets. DeMarcus got into a shouting match with a trombone. A very stupid heron, even bigger than the egret from last night, landed near the tubas, and they followed it around. Out on the road past the stadium, a car cruised by with its windows open, blasting an old salsa tune by Tito Puente. Will absentmindedly picked up his drumsticks and tapped out the complex rhythm, which he’d probably never heard before, striking the ground and his shoe in turn to create different tones, occasionally flipping a stick into the air and catching it without looking.

  I hadn’t thrown that challenge after all. He really was a better drummer than me.

  “Can I ask you something?” His voice startled me out of the lull of the hot morning.

  We were trying to be nice to each other, so I refrained from saying, You just did. And I braced for him to probe me about my aversion to dating. He didn’t seem to want to let that go.

  “There was a girl at the party last night named Angelica.” He pointed across the field at her with a drumstick. “I saw her this morning. She’s a majorette.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Shut up. I know you’re making fun of me. She was with the drum major last night, but some of the cymbals told me they broke up afterward.”

  Wow. DeMarcus and Angelica had dated since the beginning of the summer. They’d texted each other constantly for the month DeMarcus had been in New York. I knew this because he would occasionally mention it online. And she’d broken up with him the first night he got back? I bet it was because he’d drunk a beer at Brody’s party.

  I could have told Will, Better than her breaking up with him on the day he moves across the country, eh? Instead I said diplomatically, “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “My question is, were they really serious? Because if it was casual, I might ask her out. If they were serious, I wouldn’t move in. I don’t want people to hate me. Not my first week, anyway.”

  I had no skin in this game. But I wondered if he was playing me, to get back at me for turning him down last night, and saying what I’d said about his ex-girlfriend this morning. It didn’t make sense that he would really be interested in both Angelica and me. The gap between the two of us could not be accounted for by the normal boundaries of taste.

  So maybe he didn’t really like me.

  I told him the truth. I owed him that much, after the trials I’d put him through in the past twelve hours. “As far as I know, it was casual.”

  “Good,” he said, and then, “Thanks.”

  We uttered hardly a word to each other for the rest of the time we sat together. The silence was as awkward as it had been before we made up, but this time it was because Will had designs on Angelica. I wasn’t sure why that would turn him cold to me. For my part, I wasn’t jealous, only disappointed that he had such poor taste in women besides me.

  In the last hour of practice, gloriously, we got up, and the whole band played the opening number that we’d been marching through with only a drum tap all morning. I worked out my stress by playing a perfect rhythm, my beat fitting with the quad and bass and cymbal parts like pieces of a puzzle. During the pauses between run-throughs, I showed Will some of the tricks the snares had done at contests in the past, reaching over to play on each other’s drums during some passages, and tossing our sticks in the air, which was only effective visually if the freshmen didn’t drop them. Will taught me some even better tricks he knew from back home. We devised a plan to try some of these ideas in future practices and determine how well the worst players could handle them.

  We’d joked around before, but now we were building solid mutual respect. Now we were friends.

  Or so I thought. Then Ms. Nakamoto let us go for the morning, and Will didn’t even give me a proper good-bye. “See you at practice tonight,” he called over his shoulder as he made a beeline across the field to catch Angelica. Not wanting to witness their young love, I followed at a slower pace, saying hi to some girls in color guard and playfully threatening to bulldoze right over a mellophone player, snare drum first.

  By the time I made it back to the band room to deposit my drum, word among the cymbals was that Will had asked Angelica to lunch. Lunch! I never heard of such a thing. He’d already whisked her off in his famous car. The way the other majorettes out in the parking lot were gossiping about them, Will and Angelica were an item already.

  As I headed home, passing the majorettes on my way back to the fence, Chelsea said, “Wait a minute, Tia. I thought you were dating the new guy.”

  Still walking, eyes on the ground so I didn’t step on glass in my bare feet, I told her, “That was yesterday.” Not that I cared or that Will’s date with Angelica was any of my business, because I didn’t want a boyfriend. But some days this was hard to remember.

  ***

  I snagged my flip-flops from where I’d left them on the wrong side of the fence. At home I grabbed a quick shower, which everybody would appreciate, and another pack of Pop-Tarts for lunch, then hopped on my bike to pedal to the antiques shop.

  On the last day of school my sophomore year, I’d biked through the historic downtown, thinking that I needed a summer job. There’d been a HELP WANTED sign in the shop window. I’d walked in and applied. A job was a job, or so I’d thought. I never would have set foot in there if I’d known what I was getting into: Bob had cancer. When his treatments didn’t agree with him, he needed time off from the shop, and Roger took care of him. I sat through a very stressful half hour while they explained this to me and asked me to work for them. I didn’t want to take on that kind of responsibility. My aversion warred inside me against my desire to help them out and my blooming interest in the bizarre junk that cluttered their hideous store.

  So I’d accepted the job. And I’d done whatever Bob and Roger asked me to do—a long list of responsibilities that had expanded over the past year and two summers to include inventory, bookkeeping, and payroll. When Bob took a turn for the worse, sometimes I got so stressed out that I cleaned and organized the shop. That just made them love me more, raise my pay, and load more responsibility on my shoulders. It was terrible. I didn’t know how to get out of this vicious circle.

  Today wasn’t so bad. Bob was recovering from his last round of chemo, and he and Roger were both in the back office, so I wasn’t technically in charge. I patted the shop dog for a few minutes, then took over manning the front counter from Smokin’ Edwina. Almost as soon as I slid onto my stool behind the cash register, Kaye and Harper bopped in with a clanging of the antique Swiss cowbell on the door. I always welcomed a visit from friends, because it might make me look less responsible and more like a frivolous teen to Bob and Roger.

  This time, though, I could have done
without, because I knew what my friends were there for. They wanted the scoop on Will. I would rather have done payroll.

  They both stopped to pat the shop dog too. Everybody did. But when they straightened in front of the cash register with their arms folded, without so much as a “How you doing?” I amended their mission. They didn’t want a scoop. They were there to scold me.

  “You left with the new guy last night before we could stop you,” Harper said. Admittedly, it didn’t seem much like a scolding coming from a soft-spoken artist in retro glasses and a shift minidress straight out of the 1960s.

  “You sent the new guy out to meet me,” I protested. “If you hadn’t done that, I might not have met him at the party at all.”

  “Was he still at your house when Aidan and I came by?” Kaye demanded. She wore her tank top and gym shorts from cheerleading practice, and her hair stuck out all over in cute twists. No matter how adorable she looked, though, she made a lecture sound like she meant it. “At the time I thought Will couldn’t have been at your house. It was so late. But after the rumors I’ve heard this morning, I’m not so sure.”

  “What’s wrong with him being there late?” I asked. “You and Aidan were still out then.”

  “We were on a date,” Kaye said. “Girls are supposed to say yes to a date, then no to manhandling. You’re not supposed to say yes to manhandling, then no to a date.”

  Ah, so that’s what this was about. It had already gotten around that I’d dumped Will at the end of the night. I needed to talk to him about revealing personal information to cymbals.

  “First of all,” I told Kaye, “you are not saying no to manhandling.”

  She uncrossed her arms and put her fists on her hips, cheerleader style. “That’s different. Aidan and I have been dating for three years. You were manhandled by someone you knew for an hour.”

  More like two, by my estimate. “And second, I want the manhandling. I don’t want the dating. That stuff is fake anyway. The guy is taking you on dates just so he can manhandle you later. You’re not being honest with each other.”