Biggest Flirts (Superlatives #1)(34)
Author: Jennifer Echols

I’d never been a girl who cried or otherwise showed my emotions just to get my way. I did occasionally let an emotion slip, but never to manipulate anyone. I’d noticed, though, that my mood swings really worked on Will. He was a sucker for a sad girl. He actually watched my face in band, and if I looked genuinely hurt at a pretend insult he’d thrown at me, he apologized. Now his voice softened. “Hey.”

I was too far gone already. Cleaning for a few minutes had helped me put my brain on the right track, but now I was back where I’d spent the whole morning, in tears. “I didn’t mean to beat you,” I sobbed. “I know you won’t believe that now, but you thought last Monday that I’d thrown the challenge. I meant to throw it again. I wanted to get third. I didn’t want to stand next to you when you hate me.” Stating the case that plainly, I sounded like a kindergartener, but the truth was simple.

He put out one hand, pulled me toward him, and sat me down on a tuba case. With a big sigh, he sat down next to me. The flagpoles behind us, probably twenty of them wrapped in their flags, slid sideways along the wall and draped the silks over us. I had always thought “silks” was a strange thing to call band flags, because clearly they were made of polyester.

“Okay,” he said, batting the weird orange cloth off us. “You’re not totally to blame for what happened yesterday. You started to kiss me, and I kissed you back. And I agree we were both at fault for getting elected Biggest Flirts. But you are ruining my life. You won’t go out with me, but you’ve made sure nobody else will want to go out with me either.”

I looked into his eyes. He seemed to be admitting again that he was still attracted to me—which meant asking Angelica or anybody else out was just an exercise.

“Why is it so important to you to date right now?” I asked. “You’ve been here a week, and you keep saying you’re booking it to Minnesota the first chance you get. So the drive to find a girlfriend, any girlfriend, in Florida doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.” I felt like the lowest of the low as I said this. I really wanted to know, but Harper’s words from Friday echoed in my head, pointing out that I was selfish when it came to Will.

His nostrils flared a little, like when I’d tried to hand him his phone on the football field, as though he found the thought of Minnesota distasteful. “I did want to go to Minnesota. That was my original plan, and it took me a few days to get used to the idea that it was gone. I don’t want to go back. My girlfriend is screwing my best friend now.”

I nodded sympathetically, thinking of that beautiful girl getting kissed by that blond boy. “You wish you’d never moved.”

“No, not even that,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to go back to the way things were before I moved, now that I know she’s the kind of person who would cheat on me the second I left town. Even if I’d never given her that opportunity, she was still that kind of person.”

“What?” I asked, puzzling this out. “She was a latent cheater? A cheater waiting to happen?”

“Exactly,” he said. “So now, my life here sucks, and I have the knowledge that my life there sucked too. I just didn’t know it at the time. My life would suck anywhere. It’s completely f**king tragic.”

“That’s not true,” I said, a little alarmed. “You’re in a bad spot, Will. Moving is stressful, and you’re only one week out. Your girlfriend cheating on you was awful. You feel bad about that. There would be something wrong with you if you didn’t.”

He gave his head a dismissive shake, telling me I had no idea what he meant. “That’s not all.” He reached down for a flag and rolled the neat hem between his fingers. “I was supposed to be drum major back home.”

“You were?” I could see him as drum major.

“Yes. And student council president.”

I could not see him as student council president. He’d never glad-handed a stranger like Aidan did. “You?”

“Yes,” Will said bitterly. “Thanks.”

“Sorry. I’m so sorry.” I put one hand on his knee so he wouldn’t pull away from me completely. “It’s just that in my experience, that job requires skills you don’t seem to possess, such as talking.”

He nodded. “Right.”

“What do you mean, you were supposed to be?” I asked. “You were going to run for these positions in Minnesota this year?”

“No, I’d already been elected.”

“Oh my God!” My voice echoed against the concrete walls. “Why did your parents make you move, then? Couldn’t they wait another year until you graduated?”

Will sighed. “My dad’s office closed down. If he didn’t transfer to manage the branch office here, he would have been laid off. So, no.”

“Oh.”

“And my mom said since I’d done that stuff at my old school, I could do it at my new school. I believed her. Nothing I’d ever been through told me otherwise. It was only when I got here . . .”

“We already had a drum major and a student council president,” I finished for him.

“Even if DeMarcus hadn’t snagged one office and Aidan the other, I wouldn’t have gotten them. I’m not the man my parents thought I was, or I thought I was. I’m . . . I think I’m . . .”

I held my breath, my mind spinning at what he might say.

“Shy,” he sighed.

I burst into laughter. “Well, you’ve got that one right.”

“It’s not funny,” he said.

I considered him beside me, looming over me, really, when he was sitting so close, his muscular body making the room seem smaller. He had a big personality, too, one that didn’t seem aptly described by the word “shy.” “You’re introverted,” I corrected him.

He shrugged.

“You get your energy from being by yourself,” I guessed. This was Harper’s description of the strange phenomenon I did not understand. “Having to talk to a bunch of people at once, especially people you don’t know, makes you feel drained.”

“Exactly!” he exclaimed, surprised that I had any insight. “I guess I never noticed at home. Here, where I have to start over, it’s debilitating. I fell asleep as myself one night and woke up the next morning as a loser. This is coming at a really bad time for me. My parents are telling me that I can’t follow in my dad’s footsteps. If I’m a terrific manager, all that will get me is threatened with a layoff and transferred across the country. I have to be better than my dad. I have to be perfect at everything. So my parents are like, if you can’t be drum major, be the next best thing. Be drum captain. I thought I’d done that. And then—”