Perfect Couple

by Jennifer Echols

  Before Aidan could protest, Will said in his strangely rounded accent, “I haven’t been here long, but I get the impression that the homecoming dance is a huge deal at this school. Everyone in Mr. Frank’s class has been talking about it and looking forward to it. We can’t simply cancel at the first sign of trouble.”

  “We just did,” Aidan snapped. “Now sit down while I’m talking.”

  Sawyer banged the gavel. I should have gotten used to it by now, but I jumped in my seat again.

  Aidan visibly flinched. He turned on Sawyer and snatched the gavel away. Holding it up, he seethed, “Don’t do that again, De Luca. You’re not in charge here. I’m the president.”

  “Then act like it,” I said.

  Aidan turned his angry gaze on me. I stared right back at him, determined not to chicken out. Will and Sawyer and I were right about this. Aidan was wrong.

  As I watched, Aidan’s expression changed from fury to something different: disappointment. I’d betrayed him. We’d had a long talk last week about why we couldn’t get along lately. He understood I disagreed with him sometimes, but he wanted us to settle our differences in private, presenting a united front to the school as the president and his vice president.

  Now I’d broken the rule. No matter what the council decided, he wouldn’t forgive me for defying him in public.

  And I didn’t care. Keeping the peace wasn’t worth letting him get away with acting like a dictator.

  “We don’t have time to debate this in a half-hour meeting,” he repeated. “There’s nothing to debate. The decision has been made. The school already canceled the dance because we don’t have a location for it.”

  “We’ll move it,” I said.

  “It’s only two weeks away,” he said.

  I shrugged. “You put me in charge of the dance committee. It’s our job to give it a shot.”

  Aidan’s voice rose. He’d forgotten we’d agreed not to argue in public. “You’re only pitching a fit about this because you’re still mad about—”

  “Give me that,” Sawyer interrupted, holding out his hand for the gavel.

  “No,” Aidan said, moving the gavel above his head.

  “Mr. President,” Sawyer said in a lower, reasonable tone, like talking to a hysterical child, “you’re not allowed to debate the issue.”

  “Of course I am. I’m the president!”

  “Exactly. Robert’s Rules of Order state that your responsibilities are to run the meeting and give everyone the opportunity to speak. If you want to express your opinion, you need to vacate the chair.”

  “I’m not in the chair,” Aidan snapped. “You’re in the chair.”

  “I mean,” Sawyer said, rolling his eyes, “you need to step down as president while we discuss this matter, and let Kaye preside over the meeting.”

  “I’m not stepping down.”

  “Then you need to shut up.”

  “Sawyer,” Ms. Yates said sharply. I couldn’t see her behind Will, who was still standing, but her thin voice cut like a knife through the grumbling and shushing in the classroom. “You’re being disruptive.”

  “On the contrary, Ms. Yates,” Sawyer called back, “the president is being disruptive, trying to bend the entire council to his will. Ms. Patel’s study hall elected me to represent them. The student council chose me as parliamentarian. It’s my duty to make sure we follow the procedure set down in the council bylaws. Otherwise, a student could sue the school for a violation of rights and due process.”

  The room fell silent, waiting for Ms. Yates’s response. Horrible visions flashed through my mind of what would happen next. Ms. Yates might complain to Ms. Chen that Sawyer was disrespectful. They could remove him from student council or, worse, from his position as school mascot. All because he’d helped me when I asked.

  Underneath the desk, I put my hand on his knee.

  “Sawyer,” Ms. Yates finally said, “you may continue, but don’t tell anybody else to shut up.”

  “So noted.” Sawyer pretended to scribble this reminder to himself. Actually he drew a smiley face in Robert’s Rules of Order. “Aidan, if you’re really running the meeting, let Will bring up the idea of saving the dance, then put it to a vote.”

  Aidan glared at Sawyer. Suddenly he whacked the gavel so hard on the block on Ms. Yates’s desk that even Sawyer jumped.

  Sawyer didn’t take that kind of challenge sitting down. I gripped his knee harder, signaling him to stay in his seat. If he could swallow this last insult from Aidan, he and I had won.

  THE REMAINING TWENTY MINUTES OF the meeting seemed to take forever. But Aidan followed procedure—at least I figured he did, because Sawyer didn’t speak up again. By the time the bell rang to send us to lunch, the council had agreed that I would lead the committee in charge of relocating the dance instead of canceling it.

  On top of leading the committee in charge of homecoming court elections.

  And leading the committee in charge of the parade float. I didn’t understand why Aidan opposed the council taking on more projects when he simply passed all the work to me.

  As everyone crowded Ms. Yates’s door, Sawyer stood and stretched. Then he leaned over and said in my ear, “We make a good team. Maybe you and I got off on the wrong foot.”

  “For two years?” I asked.

  He opened his mouth to respond but stopped. Aidan brushed past the desk on his way out the door. He didn’t say a word to me.

  Will was the last rep remaining in the empty room. He paused in front of the desk. “Thanks, you guys, for taking my side.”

  “Thanks for taking ours,” I said, standing up and gathering my stuff, which was tangled with Sawyer’s stuff. One side of my open binder had gotten caught beneath his books.

  “For me, this wasn’t just about the dance,” Will said. “People have been talking about it, and Tia told me what fun it was last year. Of course . . .” He looked sidelong at Sawyer.

  I knew what that look meant. Sawyer and Tia used to fool around periodically, up until she and Will started dating a few weeks ago. The homecoming dance last year had been no different. Too late, Will realized what he’d brought up.

  “It was fun,” I interjected before Sawyer could make a snide comment that everyone would regret. “Come on.” I ushered them both toward the door.

  “I was student council president back in Duluth.” Will followed us into the hall and closed Ms. Yates’s door behind us. Down at the end of the freshman corridor, a teacher frowned at us. Will lowered his voice as he said, “That is, I was supposed to be president this year, before we moved. I know what the president is supposed to do, and Aidan’s not doon it. Sometimes you have to stand up and tell somebody, ‘You’re not doon it right.’ ”

  I thought Sawyer would make fun of Will’s Norse doon. He might have stopped insulting Will behind his back, but he wouldn’t be able to resist a comment to his face. Yet he didn’t say a word about Will’s accent.

  Instead, Sawyer grumbled, “If the storm had destroyed the gym completely, the business community would rally around us, give us money, and solve the problem for us. They’d get lots of publicity for hosting our homecoming dance. Nobody’s going to help us just because our roof leaks.”

  “Leaking isn’t good PR,” Will agreed. “I signed up for the dance committee and I want to help, but I’m the worst person to think of ideas for where else to hold an event. I still don’t know this town very well.”

  “Doesn’t the Crab Lab also own the event space down the block?” I asked Sawyer. “One of my mother’s assistants had her wedding reception there. Could you sweet-talk the owner into letting us use it for cheap? Better yet, for free?”

  “It’s booked that night,” he said.

  “That’s two weeks from now,” I pointed out. “You’ve memorized the schedule for the event space down the block?”

  “A fortieth class reunion is meeting there after the game,” he said. “The owner asked me to wait tables. I said no because of the
dance. I have an excellent memory for turning down money.”

  Sawyer waited tables a lot. While a good portion of our class was at the beach, he often went missing because he was working. Even though he’d helped me in the meeting, I was a little surprised the dance was important enough to him personally that he would take the night off.

  And, irrationally, I was jealous. As we stopped in the hall and waited for Will to swing open the door of the lunchroom, I asked Sawyer, “Who are you taking to homecoming?”

  He gaped at me. “You!” he exclaimed, like this was the most obvious answer in the world and I had a lot of nerve to joke about it. He stomped into the lunchroom.

  Will was left holding the door open for me and blinking at us. He didn’t understand the strange social customs of Florida.

  “It would help if you could brainstorm over the weekend,” I told Will, pretending my episode with Sawyer hadn’t happened. “Ask around at lunch and on the band bus tonight. See if you can scare up ideas. Maybe we’ll think of something by the next meeting.”

  “Sounds good,” he called after me as I headed across the lunchroom to the teacher section.

  Aidan, Ms. Yates, and I had eaten at one end of a faculty table after the last council meeting, discussing projects like the dance. Possibly the one thing worse than spending lunch with Aidan while he was mad at me was spending lunch with Aidan and Ms. Yates, who, judging from the expression on her face, hadn’t liked how the meeting had gone down. But I was the vice president, so I straightened my shoulders and walked over.

  They were deep in conversation. Trying not to interrupt them, I looped the strap of my book bag over the back of the chair beside Aidan. They both looked up anyway. I said, “Sorry. I didn’t know we were meeting, or I would have gotten here sooner. I’ll just grab a salad and be right with y—”

  Ms. Yates interrupted me. “This is a private talk.”

  “Oh” was all I could think of to say. My face tingled with embarrassment as I slipped my bag off the chair and beat a retreat across the lunchroom to the safety of Tia, Harper, and the rest of my friends. By the time I finally sat down with my salad, they were spitting out and shooting down ideas for where to have the dance—led by Will, who repeated how angry he was at Aidan for what he’d been doon in the meeting.

  I listened and waited for them to come up with something brilliant. For once I stayed silent. I still smarted from Ms. Yates telling me I didn’t belong at the adult table anymore. And I wondered whether I deserved it. Lately I got so furious at Aidan, but I was probably going through an immature phase, like cold feet before a wedding. We’d known almost since we started dating that we were destined for each other. All summer we’d been planning to apply to Columbia together. Whenever Aidan annoyed me, I needed to take a deep breath before I spoke—as my mother reminded me each time I mouthed off to her—and make sure the problem was really with him, not me.

  And I knew in my heart that the problem was mine, all because of the Superlatives mix-up. On the first day of school, the student council had run Superlatives elections for the senior class. We thought Harper and our school’s star quarterback, Brody, had been voted Perfect Couple That Never Was. If I’d been in charge of the elections, as in years past, that mistake wouldn’t have been made. Even though I was still the chair of the elections committee, Ms. Yates wouldn’t let me count the votes. Since I was a senior this year, I had a conflict of interest.

  But without me to watch over them, the wayward juniors had screwed up the whole election. They said I’d been chosen Most Likely to Succeed with Aidan. That sounded right. He was president. I was vice president.

  Here’s what didn’t make sense: In reality I’d been elected Perfect Couple That Never Was with Sawyer.

  When I realized the juniors’ mistake, Ms. Yates had made me tell Brody and Harper they didn’t really win the title since they’d started dating because of it. But I wasn’t allowed to divulge the truth to anyone else. Each person in the class could get a maximum of one Superlatives position, so the single error had created a snowball effect. Almost every title was incorrect. And since Harper had already taken the pictures and sent them to the yearbook printer, Ms. Yates wanted to leave well enough alone. Not even Sawyer was in on this secret.

  Definitely not Aidan.

  I was thankful Harper and Brody had been able to work through their problems and keep dating after I told them the truth. They were adorable together, even if part of what made them fascinating was the fact that they were so obviously mismatched.

  Now I was cycling through the same feelings Harper had when she believed she’d been paired with Brody. She’d seen Brody with new eyes and longed for a relationship with him because she’d mistakenly thought someone else had told her it could work. The only difference was, this time there was no mistake. I was not Most Likely to Succeed along with Aidan. Angelica, nefarious and cunning, had received that honor.

  The senior class said Sawyer and I should be together.

  I’d started to think so too.

  Which was dumb, because the election was just a stupid vote for yearbook pictures. Aidan and I would attend Columbia University together, take a while to establish our banking careers in New York, and then get married. After three years of knowing that was my plan, letting a class election change my mind didn’t say much about my decision-making skills.

  Neither did obsessing about Sawyer. On the far end of my table he attacked his huge salad with the appetite of a seventeen-year-old, half-starved vegan. When he looked up and saw me staring, he tapped his watch, then splayed his hand, wiggling all five fingers. He meant he would meet me at the cheerleading van at five o’clock this afternoon, and we would ride to the game together, exactly as I’d promised (not).

  I couldn’t wait.

  JENNIFER ECHOLS has written many romantic novels for teens and adults. She grew up in a small town on a beautiful lake in Alabama, where her high school senior class voted her Most Academic and Most Likely to Succeed. Please visit her online at www.jennifer-echols.com.

  SIMON PULSE

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  Watch videos, get extras, and read exclusives at

  TEEN.SimonandSchuster.com

  authors.simonandschuster.com/Jennifer-Echols

  Also by Jennifer Echols

  Endless Summer

  The One That I Want

  The Ex Games

  Major Crush

  Going Too Far

  Forget You

  Love Story

  Such a Rush

  Dirty Little Secret

  Biggest Flirts

  * * *

  Thank you for reading this eBook.

  Find out about free book giveaways, exclusive content, and amazing sweepstakes! Plus get updates on your favorite books, authors, and more when you join the Simon & Schuster Teen mailing list.

  CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com/teen

  * * *

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This Simon Pulse edition January 2015

  Text copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Echols

  Cover photographs copyright © 2014 (back) and 2015 (front and spine) by Michael Frost

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book
an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Cover design by Regina Flath

  Interior design by Mike Rosamilia

  Jacket designed by Regina Flath

  Jacket photographs copyright © 2014 (back) and 2015 (front and spine) by Michael Frost

  Author photograph copyright © by Mark Oxley/Studio 16

  The text of this book was set in Adobe Caslon Pro.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:

  Echols, Jennifer.

  The superlatives : perfect couple / Jennifer Echols.

  — First Simon Pulse paperback edition.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When yearbook photographer Harper and the star player of the high school football team get voted “the perfect couple that never was” by their senior class, the unlikely pair start falling for one another. But a handful of obstacles, including Harper’s boyfriend, stand in the way of their perfect ending.

  [1. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 2. High schools—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Photography—Fiction. 5. Popularity—Fiction. 6. Family life—Florida—Fiction. 7. Florida—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.E1967Sup 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014006872

  ISBN 978-1-4424-7449-9 (hc)

  ISBN 978-1-4424-7448-2 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4424-7450-5 (eBook)