Biggest Flirts (Superlatives #1)(13)
Author: Jennifer Echols

He smiled with one corner of his mouth. “I’m sorry too. We’ve insulted each other a lot for two people who hardly know each other.”

“We’ve also made out a lot for two people who hardly know each other. It all evens out. But we’ve got to find a way to make peace. Otherwise it’s going to be a long year of standing next to each other. Almost as long as the last thirty minutes.”

He gave me a bigger smile. “Agreed. Don’t mention lutefisk again, okay?”

“I promise. I will also bathe from now on, or stand downwind of you.” I tossed my hat onto the grass and pulled the hair bands off the ends of both braids, which probably looked like old rope on a shipwreck by now. I bent over to shake my hair out, then turned right side up again and started one French braid down my back by feel.

He watched me without speaking. When I finished, he said, “As long as you’re tidying up, your shirt’s buttoned wrong.”

I looked down. Sure enough, one side hung longer than the other. “You did that,” I accused him.

“What are you saying? That you want me to fix it?”

“If you dare.”

He glanced over at Ms. Nakamoto, then at DeMarcus. He unbuttoned my top button and put it through the proper hole, then fixed the next button, periodically looking up to make sure he wasn’t about to get expelled for molesting me one button at a time. He never rubbed me “accidentally” or undid more buttons than necessary at once, but the very act of letting him do this in public was enough to make chills race down my arms.

“I think we’re sending each other mixed messages,” he said.

“I think I’ve sent you a very clear message,” I corrected him, “and you’re choosing not to receive it.”

His hands paused on the bottom button. “You mean you do like what I’m doing right now, but you don’t want to date me.”

“Date anybody,” I fine-tuned that statement. “See? You do get it.”

Ms. Nakamoto called through her microphone, “Mr. Matthews, take your hands off Ms. Cruz.”

The whole band said with one voice, “Oooooh.”

Will put up his hands like a criminal. This time, despite my shades, I could tell he was blushing.

Jimmy called from the next towel over, “At least Ms. Nakamoto knows your name now.” Travis gave him a high five.

Will and I sat in companionable silence while the band lost interest in us. Ms. Nakamoto was making the trumpets into a square, which seemed fitting, knowing our trumpets. DeMarcus got into a shouting match with a trombone. A very stupid heron, even bigger than the egret from last night, landed near the tubas, and they followed it around. Out on the road past the stadium, a car cruised by with its windows open, blasting an old salsa tune by Tito Puente. Will absentmindedly picked up his drumsticks and tapped out the complex rhythm, which he’d probably never heard before, striking the ground and his shoe in turn to create different tones, occasionally flipping a stick into the air and catching it without looking.

I hadn’t thrown that challenge after all. He really was a better drummer than me.

“Can I ask you something?” His voice startled me out of the lull of the hot morning.

We were trying to be nice to each other, so I refrained from saying, You just did. And I braced for him to probe me about my aversion to dating. He didn’t seem to want to let that go.

“There was a girl at the party last night named Angelica.” He pointed across the field at her with a drumstick. “I saw her this morning. She’s a majorette.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“Shut up. I know you’re making fun of me. She was with the drum major last night, but some of the cymbals told me they broke up afterward.”

Wow. DeMarcus and Angelica had dated since the beginning of the summer. They’d texted each other constantly for the month DeMarcus had been in New York. I knew this because he would occasionally mention it online. And she’d broken up with him the first night he got back? I bet it was because he’d drunk a beer at Brody’s party.

I could have told Will, Better than her breaking up with him on the day he moves across the country, eh? Instead I said diplomatically, “I hadn’t heard that.”

“My question is, were they really serious? Because if it was casual, I might ask her out. If they were serious, I wouldn’t move in. I don’t want people to hate me. Not my first week, anyway.”

I had no skin in this game. But I wondered if he was playing me, to get back at me for turning him down last night, and saying what I’d said about his ex-girlfriend this morning. It didn’t make sense that he would really be interested in both Angelica and me. The gap between the two of us could not be accounted for by the normal boundaries of taste.

So maybe he didn’t really like me.

I told him the truth. I owed him that much, after the trials I’d put him through in the past twelve hours. “As far as I know, it was casual.”

“Good,” he said, and then, “Thanks.”

We uttered hardly a word to each other for the rest of the time we sat together. The silence was as awkward as it had been before we made up, but this time it was because Will had designs on Angelica. I wasn’t sure why that would turn him cold to me. For my part, I wasn’t jealous, only disappointed that he had such poor taste in women besides me.

In the last hour of practice, gloriously, we got up, and the whole band played the opening number that we’d been marching through with only a drum tap all morning. I worked out my stress by playing a perfect rhythm, my beat fitting with the quad and bass and cymbal parts like pieces of a puzzle. During the pauses between run-throughs, I showed Will some of the tricks the snares had done at contests in the past, reaching over to play on each other’s drums during some passages, and tossing our sticks in the air, which was only effective visually if the freshmen didn’t drop them. Will taught me some even better tricks he knew from back home. We devised a plan to try some of these ideas in future practices and determine how well the worst players could handle them.

We’d joked around before, but now we were building solid mutual respect. Now we were friends.

Or so I thought. Then Ms. Nakamoto let us go for the morning, and Will didn’t even give me a proper good-bye. “See you at practice tonight,” he called over his shoulder as he made a beeline across the field to catch Angelica. Not wanting to witness their young love, I followed at a slower pace, saying hi to some girls in color guard and playfully threatening to bulldoze right over a mellophone player, snare drum first.