Biggest Flirts (Superlatives #1)(2)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“Yeah,” Will said. “We had misgivings about a place called the Crab Lab, like there would be formaldehyde involved. If there was, we couldn’t taste it.”

“The Crab Lab may sound unappetizing, but it’s an unwritten rule that names of stores in a tourist town have to alliterate or rhyme. What else are you going to call a seafood joint? Lobster Mobster? Hey, that’s actually pretty good.” I doubled over, cracking up at my own joke. “The slogan would be, ‘We’ll break your legs.’ Get it? Because you crack open lobster legs? No, wait, that’s crab.”

He watched me with a bemused smile, as if waiting for me to pull a prescription bottle out of my purse and announce that I’d missed my meds.

I tried again. “Calamari . . . Cash and Carry? I set myself up badly there. Okay, so Crab Lab is a stupid name. I’m pretty attached to the place, though.”

“Do you eat there a lot?”

“You could say that. I just quit serving there. Did this jerk who was making fun of you happen to have white-blond hair?”

“That’s him.”

“That’s Sawyer,” I said. “Don’t take it personally. He would pick on a newborn baby if he could think of a good enough joke. You’ll be seeing lots more of Sawyer when school starts.”

“The way my summer’s been going, that doesn’t surprise me at all.” Will stared at the beer can in his hand. He took a breath to say something else.

Just then the marching band drum major, DeMarcus, arrived to a chorus of “Heeeey!” from everybody on the porch. He’d spent the past month with his grandparents in New York. A few of us gave Angelica, the majorette DeMarcus was leading by the hand, a less enthusiastic “Hey.” The lukewarm greeting probably wasn’t fair. It’s just that we remembered what a tattletale she’d been in ninth grade. She’d probably changed, but nobody gave her the benefit of the doubt. As she walked through, some people turned their heads away as if they thought she might jot down their names and report back to their parents.

I stood as DeMarcus spread his arms to hug me. He said, “Harper told me you were back here sitting on the beer. I’m like, ‘Are you sure? Tia is in charge of something? That’s a first.’ But I guess since it’s beer, it’s fitting.”

“Those New Yorkers really honed your sense of humor.” I sat down to pull out a can for him. Obviously it hadn’t occurred to him that, unless a miracle saved me, I was drum captain. Starting tomorrow, the first day of band camp, I would be in charge of one of the largest sections and (in our own opinion) the most important section of the band. I’d spent the whole summer pretending that my doomsday of responsibility wasn’t going to happen. I had one night left to live in that fantasy world.

As I handed the beer up to DeMarcus, Angelica asked close to his shoulder, “Do you have to?”

“One,” he promised her. “I just spent ten hours in the airport with my mother.”

Will chuckled at that. I thought maybe I should introduce him to DeMarcus. But I doubted my edgy pirate wanted to meet my band geek friend. Will made no move to introduce himself.

As DeMarcus opened his beer and took a sip, I noticed old Angelica giving Will the eye. Oh, no, girlfriend. I lasered her with an exaggerated glare so scary that she actually startled and stepped backward when she saw me. I bit my lip to keep from laughing.

With a glance at Will, DeMarcus asked me, “Where’s Sawyer?”

Damn it! Sawyer and I hung out a lot, but we weren’t dating. I didn’t want to give Will the impression that I was taken. “Sawyer’s working,” I told DeMarcus dismissively. “He’s coming later.”

“I’m sure I’ll hear him when he gets here,” DeMarcus said. True. Sawyer often brought the boisterous college dropout waiters he’d already gotten drunk with on the back porch of the Crab Lab. Or firecrackers. Or both.

As DeMarcus moved along the bench to say hi to everybody else, with Angelica in tow, Will spoke in my ear. “Sounds like you know Sawyer pretty well. Is he your boyfriend?”

“Um.” My relationship with Sawyer was more like the friendship you’d fall into when there was nobody more interesting in prison. Everybody at school knew he wasn’t my boyfriend. We tended to stick together at parties because we were the first ones to get there and the last ones to leave. I wasn’t sure how to explain this to an outsider without sounding like a drunk floozy . . . because, to be honest, I was something of a drunk floozy. Not that this had bothered me until I pictured myself sharing that information with a handsome stranger.

I said carefully, “We’ve been out, but we’re not together now.” Changing the subject so fast that Will and I both risked neck injury, I asked, “What city are you from? Minneapolis?”

“No.”

“St. Paul?”

“No, Duluth.”

“Never heard of it.”

“I know.” He raised the unopened beer can to his forehead again. Perspiration was beading at his hairline and dripping toward his ear. I felt sorry for him. Wait until it got hot tomorrow.

“What’s Duluth like?” I asked.

“Well, it’s on Lake Superior.”

“Uh-huh. Minnesota’s the Land of a Thousand Lakes, isn’t it?” I asked. Little had Mr. Tomlin known when he interrogated us on state trivia in third grade that I would later find it useful for picking up a Minnesotan.

“Ten Thousand Lakes,” Will corrected me with a grin.

“Wow, that’s a lot of lakes. You must have been completely surrounded. Did you swim to school?”

He shook his head no. “Too cold to swim.”

I couldn’t imagine this. Too cold to swim? Such a shame. “What did you do up there, then?” I ran my eyes over his muscular arms. Will didn’t have the physique of a naturally strong and sinewy boy such as Sawyer, but of an athlete who actively worked out. I guessed, “Do you play football?”

His mouth cocked to one side. He was aware I’d paid him a compliment about his body. “Hockey,” he said.

A hockey player! The bad boy of athletes who elbowed his opponent in the jaw just for spite and spent half the period in the penalty box. I loved it!

But my reverence for him in my mind didn’t make it to my mouth. I had to turn it into a joke. “Ha!” I exclaimed. “Good luck with that around here. We’re not exactly a hockey mecca.”