Biggest Flirts (Superlatives #1)(35)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Before he could say, A disorganized mess of a girl took that away from me too. IS THERE NO JUSTICE? I broke in with, “I’m sorry.” Again.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “You won fair and square. I was afraid you would. I practiced for hours beforehand, but I still missed a beat when we played the cadence during the challenge, and you didn’t. End of story.”

I thought about him in his room late last night, lying on his bed with his eyes closed, beating out the cadence on a practice pad propped up on his knees—that’s how I practiced, anyway, when I practiced—over and over until he thought his head would explode. I hadn’t practiced at all, since I hadn’t wanted to win. But I had a three-year head start on him, having played this cadence countless times throughout high school. He’d been no match for an experienced drummer so scatterbrained that she forgot herself and won.

“My mom keeps saying if I act the way I acted in Minnesota, I’ll have what I had in Minnesota. If I stay the same person, I’ll have the same great friends. Well, now it turns out my friends there weren’t so great. And no one here cares who I used to be back home. Nobody would believe me anyway.”

“I believe you,” I piped up.

“You actually know me,” he said. “You’ve been forced to stand next to me. I can’t go around the school making people stand next to me for forty hours just so they’ll see what I’m made of. People believe the rumors, believe what the Senior Superlatives title says about me, believe what Sawyer tells them.”

I snorted. “I doubt anybody in their right mind believes anything Sawyer tells them, ever.”

“Well, I’m even less credible than he is, because I’m just the Fucking New Guy. Right?”

I had heard Sawyer refer to Will as the Fucking New Guy. I would have to talk to him about that, because, although the consensus in the school was that Sawyer was full of shit, his nicknames for people did catch on. “Sawyer has a chip on his shoulder,” I explained. “He hasn’t been here very long himself. He used to live with his mom up in Georgia. He only moved here a couple of years ago when his dad got out of jail.”

“That sounds about right,” Will grumbled.

“Now, wait a minute,” I said. “You’re judging him the same way that you don’t want to be judged.”

“Good,” Will said. Normally he backtracked when I pointed out that he was being a hypocrite, but I’d noticed he had a tendency to shut down when Sawyer was mentioned. “Anyway, he’s not the only one talking smack about me. Back home I was just me, Will. Everybody had known me forever. They knew that I try to stay in shape all year so I don’t get killed in hockey, not to show off. I would never take off my shirt unless I thought I was going to pass out from heatstroke, and I would never, ever cheat on my girlfriend. Here I’m a completely different person, and my whole life is changing to match it—all because of this label that I got saddled with.”

“Will, it’s not that bad,” I lied. It was pretty bad.

“Everybody hates me,” he said.

“They do not!” Hate was too personal.

He gave me a stern look. “I’ve overheard you trying to convince your friends that I’m not the stuck-up shit they thought I was.”

He certainly had. “I don’t see why you care so much,” I said. “You have to sit out one year of high school, not doing some of the stuff you thought you were going to do. It’ll be over in another nine months. You’ll go to college and get on with your life and forget all about us.”

“No, that’s exactly it. The person I thought I was—that was the fake. I was successful because everybody had known me since we all started kindergarten. But pluck me out of there and set me down in a new school, and I’m completely unrecognizable. I don’t have Aidan’s charisma or Sawyer’s . . . whatever Sawyer has.”

“Penchant for catastrophe.”

“Yes, that. If the senior class had voted for the Superlatives titles and I’d gotten nothing at all, I would feel better. Nobody had time to notice me. But what do I get voted? Biggest Flirt. With you. Why? Because I want to be around you all the time. You’re the only person here who makes me feel like I’m at home.”

I waved away his compliment, if indeed that’s what it was. “People always tell me I could have a conversation with a rock.”

“Exactly. What am I going to do when I start college? Or I start a new job, where my dad thinks I have to be the star performer on day one or else? There’s not always going to be someone like you there, following me around, giving me someone to joke with, and talking other people out of hating me.”

I resented this. I hadn’t thought of myself as following him around. And giving him someone to joke with sounded like I was his e-reader.

But I wasn’t going to get in a fight with him when he was already upset about not getting along with everyone else. I said, “I don’t think this is a permanent condition, Will. Yeah, you may have a harder time making friends than you thought. But in the week you’ve lived in Florida, you’ve also been angry. You’re mad at your parents for moving. You’re mad at your dad’s company, and now you don’t want to work for The Man. You resent everyone here who holds the positions that were yours in Minnesota. All that anger changes what you are, reserved”—I opened my hands—“and turns it into dour.” I cupped my hands together in a ball to show Will how he’d closed down. Then I put one hand on his knee again.

“You don’t get it,” he said. “You’re saying everybody is looking at me differently in Florida from how they saw me in Minnesota. I’m saying I’m looking at me differently too. I really am not the person I thought I was. When you kissed me for the photo yesterday—”

“Hello, you kissed me!”

He put his hands up in the air like he did when Ms. Nakamoto scolded him through the microphone. “Whatever happened, that wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m not like that. That wasn’t me. I really didn’t want it to be me, because if I cheated on Angelica, I was doing to her exactly what Beverly did to me when I left Minnesota. That was never my intention. I mean, if I’m going to do that to Angelica, I can’t really be angry with Beverly, can I? And I would like to be angry at her for a while longer.”