Biggest Flirts (Superlatives #1)(30)
Author: Jennifer Echols

I said, “Just let me lock up.”

9

ONCE I’D GIVEN IN TO Sawyer Friday night, it didn’t make sense to turn him down Saturday night or Sunday night. That’s why, when Will and I sat on a bench in the school courtyard Monday morning, waiting for Harper to finish photographing Mr. and Ms. Least Likely to Leave the Tampa/St. Petersburg Metropolitan Area, it was like he and I had traded personalities. I was a little hungover, so I wasn’t my usual laugh riot. And Will must have had a banner weekend with old Angelica. He was in a great mood, regaling me with all his ideas for the picture being taken in front of us.

“Chain them to the palm trees,” he said. “Build a box and pour concrete around their feet.”

“Have them get married at seventeen,” I suggested. “Find the guy a factory job with lots of overtime and give them so many kids that he keeps the factory job and takes all the overtime he’s offered so he can feed everybody.”

Will frowned at me. “Who are you talking about?”

“My dad.” I pressed my fingertips to my throbbing temple.

“Did something happen? What’s wrong?” His brow furrowed, and he took a closer look at me, his gaze lingering on my mouth. Which made me look at his mouth. Which made me mad.

“Yes, something happened,” I snapped. “You broke up with me Friday. You can’t decide to be friends with me again today. Go over there.” I pointed to a bench on the opposite end of the courtyard. I’d spoken loudly enough that Harper looked up from her camera and raised her eyebrows. I shook my head at her.

I thought Will would be offended all over again. Maybe I wanted him to be offended. It was kind of a letdown that he gamely crossed the courtyard and sat where I pointed. Then he called through his cupped hands, “Do we have to stay in the courtyard? We could take them to the beach and bury them up to their necks in sand.”

He grinned at me, but his smile faded as I glared at him. Harper was dismissing Mr. and Ms. Loser. They disappeared back inside the school as Will and I continued to watch each other. I didn’t know what he was thinking. I was thinking that he was the hottest guy I’d ever known, slouched on the bench with one ankle crossed on the other knee, his arms folded defensively, and his pirate earring winking in the sun. I wished he would go back to the frozen tundra and leave me alone.

He called, “You ruined the curve, didn’t you?”

He was talking about the test in our AP calculus class. I shifted uncomfortably. The concrete was awfully hard all of a sudden. “That is an ugly thing to accuse me of.”

Harper looked up from flipping through the images on her camera. “What curve?”

“Tia was the only one who didn’t have her calculus homework this morning,” Will explained. “Ms. Reynolds chewed her out and said she’d heard about Tia from other teachers and she was not going to have a repeat performance of that in her class.”

“Oh my God!” Harper gaped sympathetically at me.

“Then we had a test on what the homework had covered,” Will said. “Ms. Reynolds graded the papers while we were getting a head start on tonight’s homework. In the middle of it she announced, ‘You can all thank a very surprising person for making one hundred on this test and ruining the curve for you.’ She sounded pissed. And at the end of class, when she passed the tests back, Tia shoved hers in her purse before anybody could see it.”

Protectively I tucked my purse closer to my hip on the bench.

“Tia, damn it,” Harper cried. “Was the curve just for your class or for all of them?” She told Will, “We’re used to her ruining the curve in math, but doing it on the second day of school is pretty obnoxious, even for her.”

“Aren’t you in Angelica’s class?” I asked Harper. “Even if I didn’t ruin your curve, Angelica will.” I was making this up. Math wasn’t Angelica’s thing. She was more of a prim-and-proper-English kind of girl whom incorrectly corrected people’s grammar.

Harper gave me a quizzical look over her glasses, knowing I was only trying to get Will’s goat. “Well, hooray. It’s your turn for a yearbook photo.” She held out a hand toward Will and a hand toward me, her fancy camera hanging around her neck. I wanted to tell her that Sawyer had already tried to get Will and me to hold hands, with lackluster results. Instead, I stopped a few feet away from her outstretched hand and eyed Will.

“Look,” Harper said, “I know this title has caused you two some pain, but I have a job to do here. The yearbook is counting on me. I have to take a flirtatious picture of you both. You didn’t win Most Awkward.” She turned to Will. “Since you’re so great at coming up with photo ideas, what’s your brainchild for this one?”

He glanced uncomfortably around the courtyard, into the tops of the palm trees, up at the sky, the same deep color as his eyes. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

“That’s what I suspected,” Harper said in a tone that made it sound like she had suspected the opposite. Her retro glasses were adorable, but when her art was at stake and she got in this no-nonsense mood, the glasses made her look like a stern 1960s librarian. “I’ll give you a hint,” she said. “For this photo, you need to flirt.”

“What does that mean?” I asked uneasily.

She shrugged. “You’re the flirts. You should do what you were doing to get voted Biggest Flirts in the first place. I never actually witnessed it.”

“We were just standing next to each other on the football field,” Will said. “That’s all.”

“Oh, come on, Will. That’s not all we were doing,” I said just to bother him.

It worked. He cut his eyes at me, and his cheeks turned pink. He wasn’t smiling.

“Sorry,” Harper said, “but you can’t just stand next to each other. Not in my yearbook photo. We need some action.”

It was strange, but my headache was going away now that Will seemed hot and bothered. His discomfort was some sort of elixir for me. I bounced a little and clapped. “What kind of action?”

“He could drag you into the bushes,” Harper said. “That’s been done in a lot of yearbooks.”

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “Drag me into the bushes!”

“I’m not dragging you into the bushes,” Will said. “The bushes are prickly.”

“So are you.” I snapped my fingers. “There’s an idea. I’ll drag you into the bushes.”