by Sarah Bates
“Of course, you’re welcome.” Hayden looked at me and smiled again. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow…Coco.”
I felt my cheeks tingle as my blush brightened, and nodded. “See you at school,” I agreed.
He nodded, smiled at my mom, then headed back down the driveway, whistling along the way.
Uncle Jim watched him go, then turned his gaze to me, a contemplative look in his eyes. But he didn’t say anything as he simply went to unload the groceries. When my mom and I each went to take some, he waved us back. “I’ll send the boys out for the rest,” he said, and the three of us went inside together.
But I couldn’t help but look back, and my heart skipped a couple of giddy beats when I saw Hayden pull away, and waved when he did.
Suddenly, I was looking forward to going to school tomorrow.
Four
The next morning, I rolled out of bed early, before the sun rose, and while Kat slept, dug my running clothes out of the drawer she had cleared out for me in her dresser. It felt like it had been forever since the last time I’d gone for a run, and since I’d been awake for most of the night, my mind too busy with thoughts of home, and how much I missed it, to sleep, it made me think; so many other things had changed in my life over the past couple of weeks, but this didn’t need to.
Maybe I wasn’t training for regionals anymore – or nationals, which I’d had a good shot at winning this year, if my now former coach was to be believed – but I was still an athlete. Granted I was now an athlete without a sport, but that didn’t have to mean anything. At least not right now. So, with that in mind, I changed into my compression pants and sports bra and tank top, grabbed my running shoes from the closet, and crept quietly from the room.
I found Jamie exactly where I had expected to, in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, drinking his first cup of coffee. When he saw me, his eyebrows rose in interest, but he didn’t say anything. Instead, he simply watched as I sat at the table and pulled my shoes on.
“Good morning, son,” Uncle Jim said as he came into the kitchen, his uniform nice and freshly pressed. When he saw me, he paused, then smiled. “Morning, Coco. Going out with Jamie?”
“If he doesn’t mind,” I replied. I glanced over to Jamie, and he shrugged.
“Sure.”
I nodded and stood, and gave Uncle Jim a quick hug, then Jamie held a bottle of water out to me, and gestured for me to follow him.
“Have fun!” Uncle Jim called out.
We both waved to him, then Jamie ushered me out the door.
“So, what made you decided to take up running this morning?” he asked as we headed down the driveway.
“Actually, I usually run every morning,” I told him, and I shrugged as I took a quick sip of water. It was so humid out, I was already starting to sweat. “My coach had me run two miles every morning, and then I did thirty to forty minutes of weight training, followed by twenty minutes of yoga – and that was all before I even got on the ice.” I smiled when his eyes widened in surprise. “You don’t become a three-time regional champion, with a shot at national gold, by skating alone,” I told him.
“Three-time champion?”
I nodded. “Yeah. This would have been my fourth year but…it didn’t work out. I did manage to get the silver at nationals last year, though, and the year before, so at least there’s that.” It stung, I’ll admit, that I apparently would never get the chance to go for the gold again.
Jamie grunted and shook his head. “Wow,” he said as he led me to a break in some trees across the road. “I knew you competed sometimes, but I didn’t realize you were that serious about it. Being a two-time silver nationalist, on top of the three-time regional gold? That’s huge, Coco. And definitely not a small thing to give up.”
I shrugged, trying my best for nonchalance, even though my throat was feeling tight again as I held back the sadness that wanted to overwhelm me. “It is what it is. Anyway,” I said when he frowned at me in concern. “I appreciate you letting me tag along with you this morning. I never thought I’d say this, but I’ve kind of been missing this part of my daily routine.”
“Some might call you a masochist for that – namely Margo and my own twin sister – but I get it, actually. I’ve been on the swim team for as long as I can remember, and I don’t know what I would do if I was suddenly dropped down in the middle of somewhere strange, and I couldn’t swim anymore.” He led me along a worn, wooded path, then out into a park, where I could see Leo standing by a bench, stretching.
“Hey,” Leo said when he saw us. He and Jamie exchanged one of those manly sorts of half-hugs, then he nodded to me. “Decided to give running a try this morning?”
I gave Jamie a bland look, and he smirked. Sighing, I turned down the paved path, and called out, “Do try to keep up,” as I started my warmup jog.
Behind me, I heard Jamie laugh.
After our run – which wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped, but it had been the better part of two weeks since the last time I’d been running, and I wasn’t used to running in quite such humid conditions – Jamie showed me the weight set out in the garage. We spent a good forty minutes working out together, listening to his playlist, which consisted mostly of Blackstone Revisited’s newest album, then while he left to go shower, I finished up with my twenty minutes of yoga and deep breathing exercises.
I was a bit tired, my muscles tender, but I felt looser and more limber than I had since I’d arrived on the island. And the endorphins might have helped a bit, too. They were probably why I had been smiling when I stepped into the kitchen from the garage.
When I found my mom standing there, clearly waiting for me, a familiar looking blender cup in hand filled with a familiar looking green smoothie, I felt a sharp tug of homesickness. But I blinked back the tears and accepted the smoothie, and the kiss she pressed to my cheek, and went to get ready for school.
“Are you ready for your first day at Treasure Key High?” Kat asked around a mouthful of everything pizza forty minutes later.
She was, I had discovered over the past few days, not a morning person, and tended to stay in bed as long as possible. This morning that meant not bothering to roll out of bed until ten minutes before we had to leave, making a quick dash to get ready, and subsequently eating whatever was handiest while hurrying for the door, which in this case, was cold leftover pizza straight from the refrigerator.
It wouldn’t have been my first choice, but then again, the pulled pork wouldn’t normally be, either, and it had been good, so who was I to judge?
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I replied, dragging my thoughts back to the present. I rode in the back middle seat of her mom’s van with her, while Jamie drove, and Zach finished reading the last book from his summer required reading list for his English class in the front passenger seat.
I’d gotten a look at Kat’s, and had been relieved to find that I had already read the ones on hers, and felt semi-confident that I remembered them well enough if any of them were discussed in class today.
Kat rolled her eyes and poked at me. “Oh, come on. You can’t tell me you’re not excited to see Hayden again.”
“Say what?” Jamie asked as he drove through downtown.
“Hush, you. We’re having a female discussion,” Kat told him. She rolled her eyes again and took another bite of her pizza.
I spared her a bland look, then, when she lifted her eyebrows and poked at me again, I sighed. “Fine. Yes. It will be nice to see him again,” I admitted. The truth was, my heart raced in a giddy sort of way when I thought about seeing him again.
She grinned and wiggled in her seat in some kind of dance, then popped the last of her pizza in her mouth as Jamie pulled into the school parking lot. “This is going to be so much fun!”
I wasn’t exactly sure how school could be fun, but I didn’t question her. Besides, at the moment I was too busy gaping at the school itself. It was huge, and beautiful. And that wasn’t something I’d ever thought I’d thi
nk of a school building. But Treasure Key High was truly a work of architectural art. Like most other places here on the island, it was Spanish in style, but somehow more authentically so. Which was probably a weird comparison, but the building, which was enormous and sprawling, with arched colonnades and balconies, and high, red-tiled roofs, seemed older.
And, it turned out, I was right. When we got to the front entrance, I saw the bronze plaque adhered to the sand-colored stucco, declaring it a historical landmark. Apparently, it was the oldest building on the island, and had once served as a Catholic mission back when the Spanish had first come to the New World. Which explained the bell tower, and the massive cast iron bell that still hung there. In later years it had been converted into a private boy’s boarding school, which also explained why it had eventually been converted yet again into the current junior and senior high school.
Shaking my head over the fact I was now going to school in a building that predated my country by well over a century, I followed my cousins inside.
As soon as we got through the doors Zach took off to meet up with his two best friends, Alec and Donovan, and Jamie and Kat took me to the front office to pick up my class schedule.
“This is excellent,” Kat said as she read it over. “You have all of the same classes as me, so I can show you around. See you later, James.” She waved at Jamie without even looking up from my schedule. “Ooh, your locker is right across from mine, too. Excellent,” she said again.
Jamie rolled his eyes behind her, then smirked at me and hitched the strap to his bag higher onto his shoulder. “See y’all at lunch,” he said, and catching Leo’s attention, he headed off in the opposite direction as Kat and me. A second later Delaney Butler, who I had in fact met the night before at dinner, fell into step beside him as well.
When we reached my assigned locker, Margo was leaning against it, preening into a compact mirror. A couple of her friends, who I had met at the beach on my first official day on the island, were standing beside her, talking amongst themselves.
“There you are,” Margo said, pushing away from my locker. How did she even know it was mine? “I feel like we’ve been waiting for ages.”
Kat gave her a bland look, and her friends – Aly and Jenny, if I remembered correctly – both smirked. “I just texted you her number, like, two minutes ago.”
“Two minutes eventually turns into two hours,” Margo pointed out as she dropped her mirror back into her bag. “Besides, isn’t time all relative, or something?”
Kat stared at her for a moment, her mouth partially open, then she shook her head. “I’d like to come back with some really pithy comment about you having a flare for the dramatic, or maybe say something about how you sound like a fortune cookie, but honestly, that’s actually hard logic to argue against,” she finally said.
Kat narrowed her eyes then, and leaned closer to her as I got into my locker to unload some of my books – no iPads for Treasure Key High, apparently – and hummed. “Something’s different about you,” she said. “Did you cut your hair?”
“No, Katerina, I didn’t cut my hair,” she replied, and she tugged her phone from the back pocket of her white linen shorts.
“Then what is…” Kat gasped then, which made me jolt, and pressed a hand to her chest. “You’re wearing one of Wes’ nerdy graphic superhero t-shirts!” she exclaimed, pointing at her with her free hand.
It was then that I noticed that she was right. Margo was indeed wearing a graphic t-shirt. It was pale gray and had a sketch of some superhero group on it, the bottom hem of it hitched up and cinched around her slender waist in a knot.
Margo smiled, a tad smugly, and finished tapping something out on her phone. “Why yes, yes I am,” she agreed.
“Is that why you didn’t come to family dinner last night?” Kat asked. “You were out canoodling with Wesley?”
“Maybe.” Margo’s grin widened. “We had a lot of…catching up to do.”
“Um, who’s Wesley?” I asked, feeling out of the loop.
“Margo’s on-again-off-again boyfriend,” Aly replied before either of my cousins could say anything. “They’ve been off for a while now – going on six months this time around – but,”
“They apparently bumped into each other at the Courtyard yesterday, and the sparks flew again,” Jenny continued. Her eyes widened, then she grimaced. “In-coming,” she added, then she grabbed Aly’s hand, and they hurried off.
“What,”
“How many times do I have to tell you to stay the hell away from him and to stop messing with his head?” someone demanded behind me. I jolted again and shifted out of the way.
The girl from Zorbas, Demi, stood there in a black cotton t-shirt dress, combat boots on her feet, thick black leather cuff bracelets around both her wrists, and her short hair was even messier than the first day I’d met her, though in a stylish sort of way. Today she had thick black eyeliner slicked across her eyelids in a perfect, classic cat-eye, and her lips were painted a bright candy apple red. She glared at Margo, completely ignoring Kat and me.
And considering the furious smoldering in her sea glass green eyes, I was kind of okay with being ignored. She was not, I quickly decided, someone I would want to get into a fight with.
“Always a pleasure, Demetria,” Margo said in a bored tone.
“Cut the crap, Griffin. I told you last time, stop messing with him, or you’d answer to me.” Demi folded her arms at her chest. “Do you want me to kick your scrawny ass or something?”
“First, my ass isn’t scrawny, it’s perfectly proportioned to the rest of my body, and it’s very nicely shaped and toned, thank you very much. Second, Wes is a big boy, and more than capable of making choices for himself. I didn’t force him to kiss me, or put his hands on me. He did that all of his own volition. If you have a problem with that, maybe you should take it up with him. Or maybe you should even take a moment and consider why it bothers you so much that he likes to do those things with me,” Margo said.
“It bothers me because he’s my best friend, and he’s got a soft heart, and you’ve trampled on it too many times,” Demi said. “He’s got a weak spot for you, though only God knows why, and you know it, and you like to exploit it whenever you get bored, or don’t feel like you’re getting enough attention.”
“Spoken like someone who’s clearly jealous of something,” Margo said in return.
“Whoa, hey now, let’s just cool down, shall we?” a tall guy with glasses said as he joined us. “Why are you two fighting?”
“Because she’s jealous,” Margo said, at the same time Demi said, “Because, you idiot, she’s going to break your heart again.”
“And on that note,” Kat reached out and grabbed my hand and dragged me away.
“Do I even want to know what all of that was about?” I asked as she led me to our first class.
“Long story, I’ll tell you over lunch,” Kat replied, and just then the bell rang.
Thus began my first day at Treasure Key High. I had a feeling it was only going to get more interesting from here on out.
☼
“All right, do you want the full sordid story, or the Cliff’s Notes version of it?” Kat asked as we entered the cafeteria at lunch.
“Um…”
“The saga of Margo and Wes,” she clarified when I gave her a blank look. “Long or short version? Before you answer that, take into consideration that the long version will take longer than a single lunch period to tell,” she added, pulling me into the line at the lunch counter.
I hummed at that, and glanced over to where Margo was, for all intents and purposes, holding court at one end of the cafeteria. She was, currently, smiling and flirting with the guy who had tried to break up her argument with Demi. Given that he was sitting between the two of them, and was all smiles and flirting right back with Margo, I was certain it was a safe assumption to make that he was Wes.
While he and Margo schmoozed, Demi scowled and poked irritably at
a bowl of salad.
“Maybe the abbreviated version of the short version,” I decided, looking back to Kat, and I took the tray she held out to me.
“Abbreviated, huh? Well, I’ll do my best. Okay, so Wes and Demi are best friends; like the absolute best, in the entire history of best friends,”
“Wow. That’s,”
“Exactly,” she said before I could continue, and reached out for a dish of mac and cheese.
Since it looked good, I grabbed a dish of it, too, and followed her down the line.
“So, they’ve been pretty well inseparable since they were really little. Then, suddenly, comes puberty,”
“Kat.” I grimaced and shook my head. “Seriously?”
“You said abbreviated,” she reminded me.
“I think you can still skip that part,” I told her, reaching for a small side salad while she reached for French fries.
She considered this for a moment as she contemplated between a bowl of mix tropical fruit and a bowl of grapes and strawberries. “Fine. But, in my opinion, it plays a role in the rest of the telling. But we’ll skip that part,” she agreed when I gave her a bland look, and she grabbed the bowl of tropical fruit.
Since I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about papaya, I went for the grapes and strawberries.
“Suffice to say, Wes began to notice girls in that way, and since Margo is, well, Margo, she was more than happy to be noticed,” she continued as she moved down the line again. “So, they got together, and he began spending more time with her than he was with Demi, so that caused major friction between Demi and Margo, and by the first time Margo and Wes broke up, Margo and Demi’s friendship had basically disintegrated.”
“Wait. Margo and Demi used to be friends?” Honestly, this shocked me, because they were so different from each other, and clearly held a great deal of disdain for each other to boot.
“Hmm? Oh, yeah. They used to be super close.” She sighed and shook her head. “But things fell apart, and now for the most part they can’t stand each other. It doesn’t help, I think, that Margo has also hooked up with Jason, who is Demi’s older brother.”
