The Bad Boy and the Tomboy

by Nicole Nwosu

  Growing up before Grandpa had died, before Mom had died, we used to go to my grandmother’s house all the time. We would meet our grandparents’ friends, have nights filled with board games and great food, and hang out as a family. Last I heard, she had been in Italy, where she had lived before moving to Canada with my grandfather after Mom was born.

  “I’m in,” said Justin.

  “Macy?” Dad asked.

  He shouldn’t have sounded worried. I would jump at any chance to be reconnected with my mom in some form. My brother looked at me curiously and I cleared my throat. “Does she still live—”

  “In your mom’s childhood home? Yes, she moved back recently. She wants to see you guys. I figured spring break was a good time for you all to know each other.”

  “I’m in.”

  A week of the past without any thought of the future was exactly what I needed.

  On Monday, as I shoved my duffel bag in my locker at school, Andrew approached me. “Jas said you had a little encounter with Sam.”

  His name was not the first one I wanted to hear this morning. “He’s annoying.”

  “You met him once.”

  “And? I don’t like him,” I declared. “Besides, how do you know him?”

  “We had history together.”

  “Did everyone have the same history class last semester?”

  “He transferred this school year,” Andrew explained as some classmates greeted us as they passed by. Wellington Secondary School was in the middle of a suburban area, not too far from my house, but a ways away from the downtown core of Port Meadow. With a big population of students, I didn’t know or expect to know everyone. “You really didn’t know who he was?”

  “No clue,” I admitted.

  “Talk about timing.”

  Sam—scrolling through his phone—was walking down the hall with someone who was talking animatedly.

  “Hey, Sam.” Andrew’s voice carried down the busy hallway. He and Sam did a subtle fist bump.

  “Hey . . .” Sam looked at me as I scowled and closed my locker.

  “Nice to see you again too,” he said.

  I recognized Sam’s friend, Caleb. We didn’t run in the same circles—he was popular, me, not so much. He had dark-brown hair, tanned skin, and his approachable nature showed in the bright smile on his face. “Caleb, right? We had math together last semester,” I said.

  “You’re Macy. The soccer player?”

  “That’s her.” Andrew slung his arm around me.

  “You two are together?” Caleb asked.

  Instantly, I gagged. “God, no.”

  Andrew pushed me away. “Never.”

  “Ever,” I added.

  “Forget I said anything.” Caleb raised his hands in defense.

  “It’s not that—” Andrew looked nauseated. “She’s like my sister.” We’d known each other since preschool. He was my best friend, there was definitely no changing that. “The thought of—it’s a no.”

  “A definite no.” I shivered involuntarily. Sam stared at me. “What?”

  The first warning bell cut through the air, and everyone in the hallway rushed to their first-period classes. Caleb followed suit, waving at us. “See you later.”

  “Bye, Hazel.” Sam smirked.

  What? “That’s not my name.”

  “Make sure you don’t trip on any soccer balls on the way to class.” He disappeared into the passing crowd with Caleb.

  “He’s annoying,” I muttered.

  “He’s playing around,” Andrew said as we walked to class. “I’m surprised you didn’t know him. Especially with his last name.”

  “What’s his last name?” We got to our desks in time for the national anthem.

  When the anthem ended, Andrew still didn’t answer. I pinched him and he hissed, “Fuck.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Wait longer.” He smirked. “Maybe I’ll keep this information from you; after all, what’s in it for me?”

  “Would you just—”

  “His last name’s Cahill.”

  I gasped dramatically, tapping Andrew’s arm frantically. “He’s Cedric’s brother?”

  “He’s Cedric’s cousin,” he clarified.

  “What!”

  Cedric Cahill and I met when we were in ninth-grade science class. I wasn’t one to be head over heels for anyone—my friends got into relationships, broke up with people, and went through rejection to a point where I didn’t want to be involved in any of that. The idea of feeling that way for anyone made me squeamish.

  However, meeting Cedric changed my perspective slightly. He had moved here from the UK when he was younger. He played rugby, was smart, and had kind brown eyes. Eventually, as I talked to him more often, I began to have feelings for him. Feelings I’d never acted upon.

  “Macy Anderson.”

  The loud voice coming from the front of the room forced the class into silence. My voice had carried throughout the entire classroom, interrupting announcements and violating homeroom’s number one rule.

  To make things worse, I was given detention, aggravating me further as I stood outside the gym after school with my friends, where practice was going to be held today.

  “We’ll see you at the next practice,” Jon Ming said. “Don’t worry about it, the team’s not going to fall apart with you missing one practice.”

  “Cheer up.” Jacob patted me on the back before he slipped inside the gym with Jon Ming. Brandon and Austin fist bumped me as they followed the other two inside.

  Along with Andrew and Jasmine, Jon Ming, Austin, Brandon, and Jacob were my closest friends. I’d played soccer with them for the past four years, since we’d started high school. They were weird beyond belief, ate as much food as I did, and were the most annoying people I knew. Yet I wouldn’t change any of them for the world.

  “This is your fault,” I snapped at Andrew as we watched our friends start to set up for drills. Where I was supposed to be.

  “You’re the one who yelled.”

  Yes, but I shouldn’t have gotten detention for it. Not when we had a game next week against our biggest competitors, Crenshaw Hills. Wellington had had a huge rivalry with them for years, and soccer was a sport both schools were known for, making us the biggest competitors in the city.

  My phone buzzed as Andrew slipped into the gym and I headed to the classroom to serve out my penance at detention.

  Jasmine: sucks that you’re in detention

  Me: I can feel your sympathy from a mile away.

  Please note the heavy sarcasm

  Jasmine: ;)

  I entered the classroom, gave the teacher who usually held detention, Mr. Malik, my pink slip, and sat down at the desk farthest away from the others who were in the room. I slouched in my chair, putting my earphones in before lifting the hood of my sweater over my head. Suddenly, my earphones were pulled from my ears.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Sam.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He straddled a chair backward in front of me, his elbows perched on the desk. “Got caught skipping class.”

  When I proceeded to put my earphones back in my ears, he hooked his fingers on the wires and pulled. “Dude,” I protested.

  “Why are you here?” he repeated. “You should be at practice, no?”

  “It’s not your concern.” From the look on his face I figured he wasn’t going to budge until I gave him a proper response. “I may have sort of accidentally yelled during the announcements this morning.”

  “Which teacher?”

  “Mr. Oliver.”

  He snorted then glanced over at the now-empty desk where a teacher should have been sitting. Where the heck did he go?

  Sam stood, his chair scraping the floor, and looked a
t the clock. “Want to get out of here?” I must’ve made a face of disapproval at his suggestion because he continued. “Mr. Malik usually leaves then comes back toward the end. We’re good.”

  “I don’t know you. Why the hell would I trust you?”

  “It’s not a matter of trust.” His green eyes were mischievous. “We’re not getting caught.” Sam gestured to a few other students who had started leaving the classroom. It was either here, stewing over not being at soccer practice or—“C’mon, Hazel.”

  “That’s not my name.” My earphones went back in. “And I’m not skipping detention.”

  Sam didn’t bother me any further, settling in and taking a seat at the desk next to me. We sat in silence for the next hour and a half, him going through his phone and me doing the latest physics homework until the students who had left eventually came back into the classroom. Not long after them, Mr. Malik returned, and detention ended.

  I was out the door and headed toward my locker to grab my jacket when Sam caught up to me. “Do you want to hit the diner? You’ve got to be hungry.” He wasn’t wrong. My stomach was eating itself from the long day at school. “Practice is probably over. What else do you have to do?”

  A few minutes later, Sam and I were sitting at the diner a block away from school. Various people greeted Sam as they passed by, but he didn’t pay attention to them. His focus for the next half an hour was annoyingly on the girl over my shoulder, as he gave her flirty eyes. He even had the nerve to send her a little wave that she returned before continuing her conversation with her friends.

  “You’re related to Cedric?”

  Annoyance flashed across Sam’s face. “Not exactly who I would like to be associated with. We aren’t exactly fond of each other.” He took a fry from my plate. I hated sharing. How did someone not like Cedric? Sam said, “Change the topic.”

  “But—”

  “Change. The. Topic.”

  “Okay!” Holy. I moved the plate out of his reach. He held his hands out, stunned. “Wait, the only reason you know me is because of my cousin?”

  Outside of my close friends, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to anyone else. I recognized faces, but names? There was much more to focus on. Like the soccer team and picking between universities.

  “Hello? Earth to Hazel.” Sam snapped his fingers in my face.

  “Not my name,” I said. “Unlike you and me, Cedric and I are actually friends. I’ve seen you around but, I don’t know, I never knew your name.”

  Sam didn’t reply, his attention drifting back over my shoulder as I shoved a fry in my mouth. He reached for my plate, snagging himself another fry. “Bro, you’ve got to stop doing that.”

  “You don’t like sharing?”

  “Buy your own.” I reached into my backpack and pulled my camera out of its bag.

  “Possessive.” He tilted his chin at the device in my hands. “What’s with the camera?”

  “I like taking pictures.”

  “You can do that with your phone,” he pointed out. “The captain of the football team has a hobby?”

  “It’s soccer.”

  “I’m from England. It’s football.”

  “I’m not getting into this argument with you,” I said. “I’m going home.”

  “Hazel, c’mon.” He gestured back to my seat as I rose. “Sit, I’ll stop being annoying. What kind of pictures do you have in there?”

  “You sure you don’t want to talk to the girl behind me?”

  He reached a hand out for my camera and I gave it to him. He flicked through the pictures and I leaned over the table to get a better look. One was Andrew giving me the middle finger as we walked to his car the other day. “You and Andrew have been friends for a long time?”

  “A very long time,” I said. “What about you and Caleb? You guys seem close.”

  “We are.” Looking at his phone, he cursed under his breath then handed me back my camera. “Shit. I got to go. Maybe I’ll see you in detention again, Hazel.”

  “Don’t count on it,” I muttered as he shrugged his jacket on. “How often do you get in trouble?”

  “Depends on what you consider trouble.”

  I lay on Jasmine’s bed later that night, watching her fix the posters along her walls. They covered almost every inch of her room, images of all her favorite movies. I’d watched the collection grow over the years and she’d never taken a single poster down. “Did you know Sam and Cedric were related?”

  “Did I know that they’re cousins?” she asked. “I think everyone knows.”

  “They’re so”—I tried to find the right word—“different.”

  Jasmine reached up to fix her Star Wars poster. “They’re cousins, not clones.”

  I rolled over on her bed, resting my hands under my chin. “I mean Cedric’s so nice and Sam’s so not.”

  “Remember when you had a thing for Cedric?” Jasmine sat down on the bed next to me and grabbed my camera to look through pictures. “I’d never seen you so unlike yourself.”

  Had a thing for Cedric? Had it gone away? No. I didn’t admit that out loud to anyone. Although he was a popular guy and we didn’t see each other that often, it was strange that he had a cousin I didn’t know about.

  “Cedric’s still cute, no?” Jasmine beamed, eager to hear my response.

  If my face is burning up I swear—“I’m not having this conversation with you.”

  “Who are you going to talk to about boys? Andrew? Please.” Jasmine held up my camera. “Mind explaining this?”

  I snorted at the sight of Sam making a funny-looking face at my camera. He must’ve taken it when I wasn’t looking. I reached for my camera with no plans of deleting the picture. “He had detention too.”

  “Look at you, best friends with troublemaker Sam.” I grunted out a no yet Jasmine wasn’t convinced. “Macy, you never know.”

  “It’s not happening,” I protested. Not with someone as irritating as he was.

  2

  Dumbegg

  The following day, Andrew and I walked into the cafeteria during lunch as he showed me a funny post he had saved on social media. Conversation buzzed throughout the room. Even though Wellington had a huge student body, most people sat with the same group, in the same spot, all five days of the week. Looking around at the familiar faces in their regular spots, I passed by the one face I wasn’t fond of: Beatrice.

  Beatrice and I had known each other since middle school. We were even friends at one point. Close friends. One night at an eighth-grade dance, a boy she liked attempted to kiss me, and that was enough for her to decide that we would never be friends again. And that was just the beginning of her dislike toward me.

  Most likely it was a buildup of little incidents. For instance, in grade nine when Austin and I were fooling around with a soccer ball, I accidentally kicked the ball near her face. She called me a freak even though I apologized. Or in grade eleven, when I won an award for female Athlete of the Year. That pissed her off because she wanted it since she was captain of the varsity dance team. She told half of our grade that the only reason I won the award was because I bribed the athletic committee for it, which wasn’t remotely true.

  As our time in high school progressed, her hate grew as she made comments to piss me off—comments about me having mostly guy friends, or my clothes, or being the only girl on the soccer team.

  Her rude remarks only got worse when she involved Jasmine. Sean, Jasmine’s ex-boyfriend, had dated Beatrice before he dated Jasmine. When Sean and Jasmine had gotten together months after he and Beatrice broke up, Beatrice wasn’t happy, and made it her life mission to make me and Jasmine miserable. Like most mean girls in high school, Beatrice’s hate was based on envy, and that didn’t help me or Jasmine. It was crazy to me that someone could hate another person for being themselves.

  Beatrice was typically
pretty, with fair skin, long, light-brown hair, and brown eyes. She was charming, and people gravitated to her. You’d think that because Jasmine was the same way, they’d get along. But in the four years we’d attended school, I don’t think I’d ever seen Beatrice without her friends close behind, which worked in her favor when she wanted to say something rude and they egged her on.

  A hand came to my shoulder and on impulse, I grabbed it hard, thinking it was one of my soccer friends trying to sneak up on me.

  “Relax, it’s me.”

  I spun around and immediately let go of the hand. Sam shoved it into the pocket of his leather jacket, and raked the other through his curly hair. He greeted Andrew, asking him, “Is she always this jumpy?”

  “Sorry, I thought you were someone else,” I said before they jumped into a conversation. They walked farther into the cafeteria but I didn’t follow.

  My attention was on the boy sitting in the corner of the room, talking to his friends. Cedric. His brown eyes caught mine, and he raised a hand in acknowledgment. I waved back, my heart pounding inside my chest as he gestured for me to come over. Don’t fall, idiot. Don’t you dare fall.

  “Hey, Mace,” Cedric said.

  “Hey,” I said. “I haven’t seen you around much.”

  The resemblance between him and Sam was vague, but it was there. They shared the same nose, but Cedric’s eyes were brown, and his hair was cropped in a buzz cut. He was more muscular, having played rugby competitively in and out of school, and Cedric’s accent was almost unapparent.

  “I’ve been busy. We’ve got to hang out.”

  Keep your cool. Relax. “Sure.”

  “You’re probably busy with school and soccer.” He leaned back in his chair. “How’s it going by the way?”

  “We’re preparing for the season.”

  “When does it start?”

  “In May. We have indoor exhibition games and tournaments before that.”