A quick glance around the room told me that I was in foreign territory. Frankford High pulled from four districts, and my elementary school was one of the smallest, so I wasn’t going to see too many kids from middle school.
“This is honors English, kids.” Mr. Dawes’s growl made me sit up straighter and cap my pen with purpose. “I don’t accept late work. At all. And I don’t announce every quiz and in-class writing. Stay on your toes.”
He looked slightly like one of Santa’s jolly old elves, just in a really scowly, pissed off mood. He tossed us copies of Lord of the Flies by William Golding and we passed around the sheet where we put our names and how beat up the books were, probably so he could fine us accordingly when we handed them back in. I thumbed through the book, which I’d read before. Even though it was about a bunch of killer school boys, I never managed to get into this one. But I decided it was a fresh year, and the best tactic was to give everything an equal chance, even if it disappointed me before. The boy in front of me turned around and stared at me like I was a fish in an aquarium.
“You need something?” I asked. His direct gaze made me squirm.
“Who are you?” His social graces were so awful they were almost funny.
“Brenna Blixen. Who are you?”
“Devon Conner.” He shuffled his big feet and blinked hard. “Are you new?”
“Kind of.” I watched him bite the inside of his cheek.
“Mr. Conner, Ms. Blixen, why don’t you join your classmates in silent reading?” Mr. Dawes scowled.
I ducked my head over my book quickly and Devon followed my lead. Pissed off a teacher on day one, in first period. Great.
I focused on the story, the boys on the mysterious island, lost and confused and clinging to the order that had dictated their lives in their schools back in England. I felt like I had the sacred conch shell in my hand, my feet on the white sand beaches, Jack and Ralph glaring on either side of me, when the bell jarred me back into the noisy classroom where Mr. Dawes waved a hand, dismissing us.
I had to race across the school, stopping a few times to ask directions before I found my next classroom. I got there last, again, slipping into the chair at the bell. The teacher barely looked up.
This was my AP class, in American government, where I’d be at least a year younger than every other student. My classmates checked me out coolly, a group of sharks just waiting for the chum.
A total of eight students and our teacher, a graying hulk of a man in a too-tight button down who wrote with a ruler, sat in an antechamber around a u-shaped table. The teacher took names with impersonal speed and wrote each one in his plan book with the ruler underneath his pen at all times. It struck me as weird, but the other students were paying no attention, busy organizing notebooks, laying out pens, examining textbooks with sharp, eager eyes. Whoa, alpha class.
There was one exception.
He had inky black hair that looked both perfectly styled and like he’d just crawled out of bed. His dark brown, almond-shaped eyes flicked slowly around the room, clearly unimpressed with everyone and everything. His olive skin was smooth except for the prickle of five o’clock shadow already darkening his jaw. Those nearly-black eyes settled on me and his lips curved into a taunting grin that tugged at me and made me fight not to grin right back. He didn’t have a backpack, didn’t have any papers out, didn’t seem the least bit interested in his textbook. He was calm amidst all the busy chaos, leaned back in his chair with a sleepy, bored look in his eyes.
“Sit up before you break your neck, Saxon!” the teacher barked. The dark-eyed boy gave him a sharp salute and banged the chair down on all four legs, never taking his eyes off of me. My mouth dried up and my heart hammered fast and erratic.
“I’m Sanotoni, for whoever’s new. Who’s new?” The teacher looked down at the roll book and up at me. “Blixen? Like the reindeer?” The class chuckled with him.
I cleared my throat. “Like the Danish author. Pen name Isak Dinesen.”
“I like this one.” Mr. Sanotoni pointed at me with his ruler and laughed, a strange sound that was something between a bark and a howl. Everyone else joined in except Saxon.
Sanotoni snapped up and pulled down a map of the United States. “We’re dividing into parties and setting up a mini caucus,” he ordered. “Let’s make it a three party system in honor of the kooks who think that might ever work.” He barked/laughed again, counted us off quickly, handed out pamphlets and instructed us to start working answering the campaign sign-in questions using the textbooks he passed out. A petite girl looked at Saxon then me, rolled her eyes, and headed over with lots of huffing and sighing.
Saxon sauntered towards me, plopped his textbook down on the table and fell into the chair with a lazy smile just for me.
That smile made me think of a predator for some reason. I shivered suddenly. Meg Yakovy’s dramatics had definitely rubbed off on me.
“I’m Brenna Blixen.” Kind of unnecessary since Sanotoni just mocked my reindeer-based name, but between Saxon’s sexy stare and the girl’s pronounced scowl, I felt like someone needed to make normal introductions.
“I’m Lynn Orr,” snapped the dark-haired girl with daggers shooting out of her eyes. “This is Saxon Maclean. Are you planning on actually working this term, Saxon?”
“Why should I bother? Don’t you already know all the answers, Lynn?” His words stretched out slow and sweet as warm taffy. He turned the wattage of his lazy smile on Lynn, and that smile only widened when she snarled in his direction.
“You’re such a stoner. I don’t even know how you got in this class.” She threw her textbook open with a pout.
Saxon uncrossed his long arms and leaned close to her, his words sliding out with lazy glee. “Well, it wasn’t based on the fact that my mommy’s the big, fat mayor. Isn’t that how you got in?”
“Screw you, loser,” she hissed, her hands clawed around the edges of her book, her teeth bared.
“Um, so I think the answers to questions one through three are on page eighteen,” I announced a little loudly. “About registration requirements. Here on page eighteen.” I thumped my index finger on the page, hoping to distract them away from jumping across the table and ripping each other’s throats out.
“You’re right,” Lynn sneered at me, her glare fixed on Saxon. He crossed his arms and flexed, the biceps bulging under the sleeves of his t-shirt, clearly enjoying Lynn’s simmering temper. “Aren’t you going to write this down, Saxon?”
He flipped her a smile and shrugged.
“Why don’t we all just do our thing and not worry about anyone else’s?” I suggested desperately.
“Yeah, and what if we get a group grade, genius?” Lynn turned her malice on me. “Are you willing for your GPA to take a nosedive for this idiot?”
I blinked in the face of her open hostility. “Well, if we get a group grade, it will probably be based on one paper,” I pointed out. “So, let’s get one done.”
“This is bullshit,” Lynn muttered, but she began filling her questions in with angry slashes of her pen.
Saxon winked at me and pulled his chair over so our shoulders bumped. He wore cologne. I had smelled guys’ cologne a million times before, but whatever he wore made me want to bury my head in his chest and take long, deep breaths until my lungs couldn’t take it anymore. My pen wobbled in my shaky fingers. Saxon leaned over my open book, his warm arm pressed against mine, his cheek inches from my face, and acted as if he were innocently checking the pages. “You rode a bike in.” His voice was low, so low that Lynn didn’t even look up.
He noticed I rode a bike in? How? When? How had I missed him this morning? My head swam. Words. I needed words. “Yeah,” I finally managed. “I ride my bike to school.”
“You won’t be able to do that for long. New Jersey winters are long and cold. Lots of snow.” His voice had a vibration to it that I felt right in the pit of my stomach. It was almost like he was this big, purring jungle cat.
&
nbsp; Ugh, what was I thinking? Who was I, Mowgli? I had to focus on government, on not failing, not on some good-smelling, purring jungle boy. I brushed my bangs back, sat up straighter, and decided to breathe through my mouth, do my work, and stop my brain from curling around this guy in ways that made my heart thump.
“I know. I’ve lived in New Jersey for most of my life. Listen, I had this speech from my mom this morning. But I haven’t figured out what the average percentage of incumbent wins over a five year period in the Northeast is, so can we get back to that?” I gave him my best all-work, no-messing-around, strictly-school face and prayed he couldn’t tell how much I wanted to smell him and stare at his lips all day long.
There were little gold flecks floating in Saxon’s eyes, but mostly they were almost the same inky black as his pupils. He leaned close to me, licked his lips and whispered, “Bottom of page twenty one.”
It took a minute for me to shake myself out of his hypnosis. I looked down frantically at page twenty-one, seeing the numbers but not processing. I felt hot, very hot, fever hot.
“Thanks,” I managed to mumble and wrote down the answer. “Do you want to fill your sheet in?” I offered, hoping that he would look at something other than me.
“No thanks.” His eyes never wavered; the gold flecks shivered. “I have a photographic memory.” His smile went smug.
I narrowed my eyes at him and tilted my head. “Really?” I pulled the word out so it was long and stretched. “How exactly does it work?”
I swear his incisors gleamed like the Big Bad Wolf’s when he smiled at me. “I look at a page.” He traced one finger down a page in my book. “I look for a whole twenty seconds. Then it’s here.” He tapped his head. “And it doesn’t leave. At all.”
“Lucky you,” I croaked, shaking off images of Saxon pulling one finger down me. What was wrong with my brain today?
He shook his head. “It’s a curse.” I frowned, he shrugged. “It feels like my brain won’t turn off.”
I raised one eyebrow, still unbelieving, and he snatched the book out of my hands. He flicked his eyes up and down the page and then snapped the book shut. “An incumbent’s chances for success are magnified by three important factors. The first is…”
Saxon kept talking, his voice smooth and fluid. I grabbed the book, flipped it open, and fumbled for the page. When I had it, I found that he was reading along, word for word. The entire page. He stopped mid-sentence. Which made sense, since that’s how the page ended. I shook my head.
“So that page from our government book is in your head forever?” I looked from his gorgeous face to the boring black-and-white print.
“Yep.” His mouth was set in a grim, unhappy line.
“So if we meet up in an old peoples’ home in seventy years and I say, ‘Saxon, tell me about page twenty-one in our high school government book,’ you’ll be able to?”
He laughed at my old lady voice and nodded. “Sure will.”
“I guess I wouldn’t pay attention to much then either. I’d want to have some say over what stuck in my head.” I traced my finger down the same path his had traveled on the page.
He looked at me like I was an algebra problem with no solution for x. “Exactly.”
“What about things you listen to or hear? Are you a lyrics brainiac too?” I joked to clear the air that had gotten serious and intense fast.
He smiled, but this time his smile was different. It was happy, not made to provoke anyone or mask anything. And it was so beautiful my breath caught in my throat. “No. I’m really bad with lyrics. You know that band from Ireland, The Cranberries?” he asked.
“Love ‘em.” I did love The Cranberries. They were amazing, and I had deep respect for post grunge female-led bands from Ireland on principle.
“They had this song, ‘Zombie,’right? And when I was a kid, I thought it was ‘Tommy.’ So, I’m belting it out, eyes closed, all serious and deep when my dad stops me and says, ‘Idiot! You’re singing the whole thing wrong!’” He laughed.
It was the kind of laugh that pulled at my lips and coaxed my own laugh up and out of my mouth. “Funny.” Our eyes locked, really locked, like they talk about in books and movies. I had a fluttery feeling in my stomach, like I was going to chuck all of that oatmeal I had been so hungry for. The scream of the school bell shocked me out of my trance.
“Tomorrow!” Sanotoni bellowed. “We finish tomorrow!”
Everyone groaned, and I saw Lynn march up to the front of the room to talk with lots of hissing and hand waving as Sanotoni listened with half an ear, then finally barked, “So go with the Independents, but it’s up to you to catch up.”
“Looks like the bitch ditched us.” Saxon picked up my book and handed it to me. “Just me and you, Blixen.”
I had never been on a date, and it’s not like I considered AP Government class the definition of one, but something like anticipation rippled through me, exactly the way I imagined it would if I was going on a date.
“Yeah, okay. Tomorrow. Um, try to not intentionally suck something useless into your brain.”
He stopped in his tracks and looked at me from head to toe, so I looked right back at him. He had on a tightish black t-shirt, dark wash jeans with just a tiny bit of whiskering that actually looked genuinely worn out that way, and some kind of color block Nike’s that no one would have been wearing last year. He didn’t carry a backpack. He had one notebook rolled up and one pen stuck in it.
“Like what?” His voice clicked me out of my eyeball assault.
“Like the ingredient list off of a cereal box. Or the instructions on a conditioner bottle.” I bumped my shoulder against his and we grinned like two grinning fools. Was this flirting? Was I, Brenna Blixen, flirting?
I stressed over our goodbye, but managed to hijack a few more seconds when Saxon walked backwards the same direction I was headed.
“Going this way, Blix?” He crooked his finger at me and smiled at my eye-roll.
“Yep. Crafts.” I knew I should walk away from that crooked finger, but I wanted one more look at the gold flecks in his eyes.
“Oh, good. I have to meet someone over there anyway. I’ll walk you.” He waved to a few guys down the hall and when his arm dropped, he skimmed his hand over my hip. A thousand electric jolts ran straight up my side and left my skin tingling.
“So you really think I’ll never need to know every single chemical in my Cocoa Puffs?” His hand closed over my elbow as he steered me around a herd of chattering girls, and I leaned closer to drag the moment out as long as possible.
“Is that what you eat?” I scrunched my nose in disgust. “That’s a nasty breakfast.”
“What do you have? Half a grapefruit? Isn’t that the official girl breakfast?”
“Not this girl.” I jabbed a thumb in my chest. “I have a bowl of oatmeal.”
His dark eyes gleamed with interest. “What are you, a pioneer?”
“What are you? A third grader? Cocoa Puffs,” I sneered.
He was still laughing when we turned the corner to the art rooms. “Man, I haven’t laughed that hard in a while, Blix. You’re a good sort, for a trailblazer.”
“Yeah, okay, and I hope you enjoy Spongebob with your cereal tomorrow.” I rolled my eyes.
I could feel it the minute his attention dropped from me. It was like he was a dog that had caught the scent of something it wanted, and that was all it could focus on. I looked in the direction his eyes were pointed.
“Kelsie,” he said in a gravelly voice.
I don’t care what my mom said, that butt of hers attracted guys like a magnet. She smiled warmly and gave him a careless hug, her bracelets clicking together softly. “Oh, hey Saxon,” she said, then turned to me. “Brenna! I’m so excited we have crafts together. I hope we start with clay.”
“You know each other?” Saxon’s eyebrows knit together in the center of his forehead.
I looked at his face, and felt infinitesimal cracks begin to pulverize my heart.
As soon as I had that thought I shook my head. My heart! What was I thinking? I didn’t love this guy! More like my ego was getting a beating. Because somehow I knew that he was concerned that I knew Kelsie because he liked to keep girls he flirted with separated. I read it clear as day in his expression.
“Brenna and I went through school together.” Kelsie swung an arm around my waist and squeezed, her rings biting into my side before she let go. “Then she moved to Sweden for a year and now she’s back.”
“Denmark,” I corrected, pasting a smile on my face. “I went to Denmark.”
Saxon looked at me with those almost-black eyes. I was so close I could see every gold fleck, but I took two very deliberate steps back.
“You went to Denmark?” he repeated a little dumbly.
“Yes. Denmark.”
“Class is going to start.” Kelsie breezed by, pulling me by the hand. “Bye Saxon. See you later.”
“Oh, I was going to see if tonight at seven was cool?” His eyes darted to me for a split second and were back on Kelsie so fast I wondered if I had imagined it all.
“That sounds great. Pick me up, okay?” Kelsie yanked me through the door, away from Saxon and into her embrace. She giggled and stamped her feet. “He’s so hot, isn’t he?” she gushed, leaning her head on me.
And I liked her head leaning on me, but I felt a need to tell myself at least that Saxon wasn’t all that. “He’s alright. I think he has a good idea of how hot girls think he is.”
“Yeah.” She giggled and waved her hand around. “But I like him anyway. Ooh, they have glass, Brenna! I can’t wait.”
I followed Kelsie to a display of glass crafts, but I couldn’t really pay much attention to them. Kelsie and Saxon were going out tonight. That was fine. I had known him for almost exactly forty-five minutes. It wasn’t real, what I felt. It was just a crush, an infatuation. Something I could very easily put out of my mind.
I half listened to the lecture on crafts. We would be doing some pottery, working with copper, glass, and macramé. I suppressed a groan. Maybe this had been a mistake. I just had a hard time picturing myself doing any kind of weaving. Most of the class I spent looking over at Kelsie. She was very pretty. And she was artistic. I heard her tell another girl about her beaded necklace and earrings, that she had made them herself. They were a complicated design and it was obvious you needed a good dose of pure talent to make them.
Double Clutch Page 2
