Biggest Flirts

by Jennifer Echols

  Then I walked right up to Kaye and eased my drum down onto the grass. Facing her with nothing between us, I wasn’t sure what to tell her. I’d meant everything I’d said to her in the lunchroom. I thought she was a hypocrite for letting a boy take over her life, then scolding me for doing the same. I just hadn’t meant to yell it.

  She glared at me a moment more. Then she stuck out her bottom lip and opened her arms.

  I walked into her embrace, slid my arms around her, and squeezed. We were going to argue about our issues again, obviously, but not today.

  Softness enveloped me like a blanket. Sawyer had put his wings around both of us.

  Kaye got the bad end of this deal. She was shorter than me and way shorter than Sawyer in his costume, so her head was down in a hot hole between us. Her voice sounded muffled as she called, “I love you, Tia, but for some mysterious reason, I find your friendship suffocating.” Sawyer let us go, but he got very close to patting her on the butt with his wing.

  On our way up the stairs, Chelsea asked Kaye and me if we wanted to go to a chick flick that night with her and a couple of other girls from calculus. Kaye said she was going out with Aidan. Remembering that he was waiting for her in the parking lot, she skipped ahead of us on the steps. Then I told Chelsea I couldn’t go either, because of work. She asked if it would be better for me if we all went tomorrow night instead. “I would love to,” I said, “but it’s a school night, and I need to do my homework.”

  “Do you think I’m a stupid fool?” Chelsea asked. “Don’t beat around the bush. Just go ahead and tell me, ‘Chelsea, I think you’re a stupid fool.’ ”

  “Kidding!” I exclaimed. “Sarcasm! Tonight I have to work, and tomorrow I’m going out with Will.”

  She gazed up at him climbing the stairs with his drum. Then she raised one eyebrow at me. “I thought he was dating Angelica.”

  I grinned brilliantly. “That was yesterday.”

  ***

  “If you were really dating Will, of course you and I wouldn’t hook up,” Sawyer said, eyeing me from across the cab of his truck. He faced forward again as he drove past the HOME OF THE PELICANS sign and turned onto the road by the school. “We’re philanderers, but we’re not cheaters.”

  I wasn’t sure of the difference. I resisted the urge to ask Sawyer to look up “philanderers” for me using the definition app on his phone, because he was driving. He aced standardized tests, but only the verbal part, never the math, and definitely not the logic.

  He was doing a great impression of a logical person, though, backing me into a corner. “If you’re only fake-dating Will,” he reasoned, “why can’t we still hook up?”

  “He asked me not to,” I said. “I understand where he’s coming from. He’s trying to make Angelica jealous. If he and I are supposed to be dating, but you and I have something on the side, it won’t look like Will and I are serious.”

  “What if we were careful?” Sawyer said in the voice of a lecherous old man, sliding his hand under the leg of my shorts and up to the top of my thigh.

  “I don’t think so.” Laughing, I tossed his hand away. “You are the opposite of careful.”

  “This sounds like the opposite of faking,” he pointed out. “Will really cares what you and I are up to. You’re genuinely concerned about what he thinks. There’s nothing fake about that. Why don’t you give in and date him?”

  I shrugged to the live oaks passing by the window. “I don’t want a boyfriend,” I said for the millionth time in my teenage life. “But for once, somebody’s come along who’s making it hard to keep that promise to myself.”

  I turned to look at Sawyer, so handsome in an offbeat way. His white-blond hair, even when it was damp from his shower, was a color I’d only seen before on small children, and his preppie clothes looked like something his mom would have picked out for him in elementary school. But his strong hands lay on the wheel, his sinewy forearms tensed as he steered downtown, and something dark behind his eyes reminded me he was more experienced than he should have been at seventeen.

  “You’ve never come across a girl like that?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said like he didn’t have to think about it.

  Suddenly I burst out, “Sawyer, you can tell me if you’re gay.”

  “Gay!” He gaped across the cab at me, then jerked the steering wheel to straighten the truck and avoid hitting the curb. “After what we did Sunday night?”

  “Sunday night was good,” I admitted sheepishly.

  “I thought you enjoyed it,” he said as though I hadn’t spoken. Turning onto the main drag through town, he grumbled, “You’ve just got gay on the brain because you work for Bob and Roger.”

  “No.” Well, maybe. “It was just an explanation for why you never commit, even to the point of asking the same girl out twice in a row.”

  He pulled the truck into a space near the antiques store, killed the engine, and looked over at me. “What’s your excuse?”

  He had me there. Backed against the door of his truck already, I had nowhere to go. I didn’t want to talk about this. He knew it. And in his challenge, I heard all the regret I felt myself when I expected to hang with him at a party but he went home with another girl.

  Seeming to realize he’d gone too far, he took a deep breath, popped his neck, and settled his shoulders back against the driver’s seat. “I like somebody who would never fall for me,” he admitted. Then he gave me his sternest glare. “A girl-type person.”

  “Is it me?” I asked.

  He blinked. In that pause, I was afraid the answer was yes, and I was the one who’d gone too far. I wished I could take it back.

  “No!” he exploded. “Are you insane?” He started laughing uncontrollably.

  I talked over him. “That makes me feel like a million bucks, Sawyer.”

  Still grinning, he pulled himself together. “Look, Tia, I will just flat-out tell you. I really enjoy getting drunk with you. That’s generally the highlight of my week, besides when you give me a hand job.”

  “I’m so glad.” Yeah, I was beginning to regret Sunday night now.

  “But you and me, together, we would be the death of each other. I’d be like, ‘I know a guy who has some crack. Go with?’ And you’d be like, ‘Sure!’ Somebody has to be the voice of reason in a relationship, Tia, and our voice of reason has had a tracheotomy. If we really dated, in half an hour we’d be facedown in a ditch on the south side of Tampa.”

  I glared across the truck at him. I wasn’t sure whether he was making a reference to my mom doing drugs or not.

  The next second, I decided he wasn’t, at least not on purpose. He seemed to make the connection only afterward, and he looked sidelong at me with a guilty expression. By way of apology, he said, “I know I can tell you anything. If I wanted to come out, you would be the first person I would tell. I’m not gay. I honestly like this girl.”

  “Really?” I honestly like this girl was no statement of undying love. But I’d never heard Sawyer express even that lukewarm level of affection for anyone in his life, except me.

  He nodded sadly. “It’s not going to work out. There’s nothing I can do. Talking about it won’t change that.”

  “Are you sure?” I coaxed him. Despite all these confessions in the last fifteen minutes, Sawyer and I weren’t the kind of friends to discuss our problems with each other at length. We both avoided saying anything serious if we could possibly help it. I was dying of curiosity about who this girl might be, though.

  “This is weird,” he said, “but I want to keep it private. I’m kind of enjoying, for once in my life, thinking something that doesn’t immediately come out my mouth.”

  That made me laugh. “Let me know how it goes. I’ve never experienced that myself.”

  “I know.” He extended his hand across the cab. “Come here.”

  With a gl
ance around to make sure we weren’t being watched by innocent tourists on the sidewalk, I scooted closer to him.

  He kissed me on the mouth. Easily, languidly, like Sawyer and I had been kissing for the last two years.

  He ended by tugging one of my braids, then backing away. Looking deep into my eyes, he said, “Good luck.”

  12

  MY LESSON WITH BOB AND Roger went on forever. I desperately needed them to learn basic spreadsheet skills so they would stop relying on me, but teaching those two to use a computer for anything more than surfing the Web was like teaching Xavier Pilkington, Most Academic, to play a dance-competition video game. Bob and Roger took a certain amount of pride in not being able to do this, and they wasted my time bragging about how hopeless they were. I got frustrated with them and told them as much, and they folded their arms and told me I was being huffy. I hadn’t run a practice as drum captain yet, but this was what it would be like.

  The best part of my evening was getting text messages from Will. After we’d politely said good-bye in band and gone our separate ways, I hadn’t expected him to check up on me. I definitely hadn’t thought he would entertain me with texts like “Sorry you have to work. You should be here. This partay is off da HOOK!” with a photo of his mom scrubbing the ahffen.

  I got home so late that my dad had already left for his shift. Then I stayed up later to do some calculus. Ms. Reynolds was totally on my ass about turning in my homework. She had threatened to petition the principal to make me join the math team if I didn’t clean up my act. I was pretty sure this was unconstitutional.

  ***

  “Tia,” Will whispered in my ear. His warm breath tickled my earlobe.

  “Mmmm,” I said, enjoying this dream, even if doing my calculus homework on a date with Will did cast me in the part of Angelica.

  “Time for school.”

  I sat straight up in bed. Morning light streamed through the window blind. Will jumped backward just in time to avoid my head smashing his.

  I scowled at him. “Are you real?” He looked real. He was tall and taking up half my room, in the Vikings T-shirt he’d worn the night we first met.

  He sounded apologetic as he said, “Harper told me where the key was. You can’t skip. She said you skipped a bunch of days last year, and then, when you got the flu, you had to come to school anyway or you would have flunked. She said whenever you haven’t shown up at school by seven fifteen, everybody knows your dad stayed late at work and didn’t come home to wake you. You don’t wake up when people call your phone, apparently? Or when people bang on the front door.”

  “Mmph.” I collapsed on my bed again. Something stuck me in the back of the neck. I pulled my calculus book out from under me and placed it on my tummy. “Why did she send you? She doesn’t love me anymore?”

  “She and Kaye said it’s my turn. I hope you don’t mind. I figured it would look like we’re into each other if I came to get you.” He wagged his eyebrows at me. “You know, for Angelica.”

  “Oh, we are into each other,” I assured him. “You are seeing my sexy boudoir and sleeping ensemble. Take it all in, lovah.” I flung my arms wide so he had a clear view of my tank top and plaid flannel pants. Then I held out my hand. After he helped me up, I brushed past him, whispering huskily, “Let me grab a shower.”

  He looked around the room for my nonexistent clock, then pulled his phone from his pocket and glanced at it. “We don’t have time.”

  I winced. “I smell, though. Do I smell?” I leaned down so he had access to the top of my head. “Sorry, I usually ask my dad, but you’ll have to fill in.”

  He sniffed my hair. “Yes, but not unpleasantly.”

  “Aw, you’re such a romantic.” I yawned and shuffled toward the door. “Just let me brush my teeth, then.”

  “You’re going to school in pajamas?”

  “It won’t be the first time. Or the last, probably, because production has picked up at the boat plant, and my dad will be taking a lot more shifts in the next few months.” I stopped in the doorway and looked back toward the piles of clothes in my room. “I guess I could put on a bra.”

  “If you insist.” He watched me like he was waiting for me to do this in front of him. Finally he said, “I’ll leave you alone to do that.”

  He was clanking around in the kitchen as I slipped on a bra under my tank top. With weird green lace sewn around the edges of blue satin cups, it looked like something Violet might have bought at a discount store when she was twelve. I didn’t know where half my clothes had come from or whether they were actually mine. I used to get in huge trouble for touching my sisters’ stuff, but now that they were all gone, ­whatever they’d left behind had gotten absorbed into my wardrobe. The bra showed under my tank, but I didn’t have time to paw through piles for another. While I was at it, I traded my pajama pants for gym shorts. I would have to dash home and change before work. On the other hand, if I showed up for my shift that afternoon looking like I’d just left the gym, maybe Bob and Roger would stop threatening to promote me.

  I ducked into the bathroom to pee and wash my face and brush my teeth. When I opened the door, Will was standing there waiting for me with a plastic cup of orange juice in one hand and a Pop-Tart in the other. Toasted! I hadn’t had a toasted Pop-Tart in years. “Dude! Where’d you find the Pop-Tarts? I lost them.”

  “Walk and talk,” he said. As I grabbed my backpack and drumsticks and headed for the front door, he told me, “Kaye had some ideas for where they might be.”

  “Where’d you find the toaster?”

  “It wasn’t obvious.” He held the door open. Locking it behind us and hiding the key, he said, “Kaye told me it was just you and your dad living here.”

  “It is.” We headed up the street to the school fence.

  “Why do you have two beds in your room, and someone’s stuff that doesn’t look like your stuff?” Will asked.

  “Oh,” I said, laughing at his reference to Violet’s purple taste. “My sister moved out last spring when she chased her boyfriend down south of town.”

  “And you hope she’s coming back?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” I said. “I mean, do I think her relationship with her boyfriend is dangerously unstable? Yes, but so were my other sisters’ relationships, and they haven’t moved back home. There’s no room for Violet now, really, what with all the stuff in the way. Maybe that’s why my dad keeps downsizing.” I giggled because that was a funny thought, then stopped giggling because it might have been partly true. “Do I act like I hope she’s coming back?”

  “Most people who shared a room would take out the extra bed and dresser, or at least spread their own stuff around, when the other person moved out.”

  “I guess I never felt like I could do anything with Violet’s stuff, because it’s hers.” Of course, Will had a point. Violet had been gone five months. She called me occasionally, but I hadn’t seen her at all. If she’d wanted her stuff, she would have come to get it by now.

  We’d reached the fence. He threw his flip-flops over first—bright boy—and then vaulted over easily. I tossed my flip-flops over, then handed my stuff to him on the other side. By the time I climbed down, he was peering at my phone.

  “You do have an alarm on here, like everybody else,” he said. “You can make it louder so it will actually wake you up.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I picked up my backpack and followed him across the parking lot, tapping my drumsticks on my hip. “But then it goes off on the weekends when I don’t want to get up so early.” Specifically, when I had been out late the night before.

  “You can set it one way for weekdays and another for weekends,” he said. “Look.” He held out the phone.

  I didn’t even glance at it. “Too complicated.”

  He stopped so suddenly that I nearly ran into him. “Remember yesterday when you were complai
ning to me about how Bob and Roger won’t take very easy steps to help themselves? You were getting really frustrated and wondering why they’re such dorks?”

  Grimacing, I secured my drumsticks under one arm and took my phone from him. “Point taken. And ambience ruined. I thought we’d had a nice sexy morning together, but you’re basically calling me a pudgy old man.”

  His eyes softened, and he touched my bottom lip with his thumb and forefinger. He murmured, “Does this school have a rule about PDA in the parking lot?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered. “Let’s find out.”

  He slid his hand down to my chin and held me there while he kissed me. His mouth was hot on mine. My whole body shivered in the humid morning.

  “Hey!” somebody shouted from a passing car. “At least stand on a line while you’re doing that. You’re taking up a space.”

  Will broke the kiss but pulled me closer protectively. Squinting over my head and looking annoyed, he shot the car the bird.

  “That’s not going to help your popularity,” I warned him.

  “This is the Home of the Pelicans,” he reminded me. “Shooting the bird is a sign of solidarity. Come on.” He slid his arm around my shoulders, and we walked to calculus together, where I took my rightful place in the desk behind his.

  ***

  In the shop that evening, exactly at closing time, I heard the antique cowbell jangle on the door. I was back in the shelves, cleaning pretty effectively because I was a little stressed out about my “date” with Will. And that was him!

  Before I could even make it to the front counter, I heard him exclaim, “What a good dog!” But when I rounded the corner, I didn’t see him. I peered over the counter. He was sprawled on the floor (reserved Will Matthews was sprawled on the floor like a three-year-old) and tangled up with the shop dog, which probably weighed almost as much as he did. He was scratching the dog behind the ears, but with his arms around the thing, he looked more like he was hugging it. The dog licked Will’s cheek, flopped its tongue around in its mouth a few times like it was considering the taste, then lapped at Will’s nose. Will laughed. “Good boy. Girl?” He peered up at me. “Whose dog?”