Biggest Flirts (Superlatives #1)(33)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Will stood talking with Brody and some other guys from the football team. I was glad Brody had reached out to Will, because otherwise Will probably didn’t have a friend in the school. He watched me too, his face stony. When he saw me looking in his direction, he turned away.

I didn’t blame him. I’d taken him down in the most public way possible—on purpose, he thought. For the millionth time that morning, I remembered pointing at him with my drumstick yesterday, in front of the whole band. A lot of my problems would be solved if I stopped trying so hard to be funny. I took a long breath. “Do you hate me too?” I asked Harper.

“No. Kaye doesn’t hate you either.”

“We’ve never had a fight like that before.”

Harper shifted the strap of her camera bag to her other shoulder. “You never told her she was wrong quite so firmly before.”

“Do you think I was right, to tell her that?”

Harper raised her eyebrows. “You didn’t have to yell in front of everyone. I’ve never seen you act like this. Will has really thrown you for a loop.”

I looked around the hall again. A few people who’d still been staring at me turned away. I didn’t want to sit under their gaze all through study hall. I definitely didn’t want to spend study hall in the same classroom as Will. “I’m going to clean the band storage room.”

“Uh-oh,” Harper said. “Like last March?”

“Maybe.” I’d gone on a cleaning spree when Violet moved out.

“What are you going to do about Will?” Harper asked.

“I can’t do anything.”

She shook her head. “If you don’t try to fix it, it won’t get fixed.”

“I tried to fix it by challenging him on drum. You see how that turned out.”

“I don’t mean cook up some cockamamy scheme,” she scolded me. “Actually talk to him, face to face, and explain how you feel.”

I didn’t think that was possible. I wasn’t sure how I felt myself. And even if I had known, the last person I would have wanted to explain it to was Will.

“Later.” I held up my hand until she gave me a fist bump. Then I told Mr. Frank I was spending study hall in the band room. Over in Ms. Nakamoto’s office, I grinned and sounded perky as I respectfully requested that she loan me a spray bottle of cleaner and a rag.

“Uh-oh,” she said, looking up from her desk. “Like last March?”

“Everybody seems to remember that episode as if it was so horrible,” I said, dropping the upbeat act after a total of ten seconds. “You got your sousaphones scrubbed, remember?”

“What’s happened?” she asked. “Are you upset about the challenge?”

“Yes,” I said, actually relieved that she’d guessed.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Yes,” I repeated with gusto. “I want to undo the challenge and go back to the way we were before, with Will drum captain and me second.”

“No.” So much for talking about it. She found the cleaner and rag on top of a filing cabinet and handed them to me.

The storage room was tall and narrow, snaking back thirty feet underneath the stage and the auditorium, and lit by a single bulb in the ceiling. The ceiling itself was so high that the janitor had to use a special ladder when the bulb went out, which meant it was sometimes dark in here for days, with everybody falling all over each other trying to locate their instruments and drag them out of their cases. It wasn’t much lighter in here even when the bulb worked.

I decided to start with the shady shelf at the back of the room and work my way forward. This involved tugging tubas down and cleaning the dusty wood underneath. Right away I found the trumpet mute that Shelley Stearns had lost and accused the trombone section of stealing last February.

I heard Will’s voice out in the hall, creeping into the storage room and echoing weirdly against the concrete block walls. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Why do you want to retake a yearbook picture in the storage room? It’s dark in there even with the light on.”

Suddenly Will came reeling into the room, shoved from behind. Off balance, he couldn’t catch himself until he’d already tripped over some trumpet cases and hit the wall.

“Enjoy!” came Harper’s voice. The big door slammed.

Will leaped back over the cases and jogged for the door, but the sound of the key turning in the lock outside already echoed through the storage room. He rattled the knob, then pounded the door. “Harper!” he roared. When there was no answer, he called, “Ms. Nakamoto?”

“She’s gone to lunch,” came Harper’s bold little voice through the steel. “I’ll come back to let you out at the end of the period. I hope you don’t have to pee.”

“Damn it, Harper!” Will backed up a pace and rammed the door mightily with one shoulder. It made a terrific noise but didn’t budge.

To stop him before he hurt himself, I spoke up. “It’s my fault. I left the key in the lock. I should have known she’d try something like this.”

He whirled around, squinting in the dim light.

I stepped out from the dark shelves, where he could see me. “She locked us in here together so we’d have to talk about what happened.”

His shoulders sagged. “I hate Florida.”

10

WELL, I HADN’T WANTED TO talk to him, either, but the idea of five minutes of conversation wih him wasn’t loathsome enough to make me despise the entire state.

“Tia,” he said softly. “Don’t look like that.”

How did he want me to look? Like a girl who didn’t mind being insulted? I tried that, crossing my arms in front of me, which was awkward because I was still holding the filthy rag in one hand and the spray bottle in the other.

He frowned. “What are you doing in here?”

“Cleaning.”

“You?”

“You know, just shut up. If I never bathed, you would have smelled me by now. The sun makes that worse. Another reason for you to hate Florida.”

He put his hands in his hair, looked perplexed, and then took his hands away again, as if he’d forgotten momentarily that his long hair was gone. “You’ve ruined my life, but you’re going to make me feel like I’ve done something wrong.”

I squinted to keep the tears from slipping out of my eyes. I didn’t feel like I was totally to blame for our kiss yesterday, or for us getting elected Biggest Flirts. But I was to blame for boasting about knocking him out of drum captain, and then actually doing it. I’d been angry with Will, but I cared about him—way too much—and the last thing I’d wanted was to ruin his life.