Biggest Flirts (Superlatives #1)(45)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“I am,” he agreed. “But so are you. You’re afraid to make plans because they might get broken. What would having a boyfriend prevent you from doing? Seems to me you don’t want to do anything at all.”

I glared at him. “You’re probably right about getting arrested. We’d better move on before the current owner of this house suspects we’re casing the joint and chases us off with a chainsaw.”

Will ignored that. Stubbornly he asked, “Why aren’t you applying to college or . . . anything? Why won’t you even try out for drum corps? You don’t talk about any plans after high school, like your life is going to stop. But every one of your close friends is leaving town after graduation.”

“Sawyer isn’t.” As soon as these words left my lips, I regretted them. Will wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t true, but the truth hurt, and lashing out was my natural response.

“I’ll bet he does leave,” Will said.

I wondered what he saw in Sawyer that made him think so. There was a lot more to Sawyer than most people knew. He seemed to grow deeper all the time. And since he’d convinced me yesterday that he was interested in someone . . . maybe Will was right. Sawyer would follow a girl elsewhere. I couldn’t picture most of our class hanging around town. Not just anybody could get elected Mr. and Ms. Least Likely to Leave the Tampa/St. Petersburg Metropolitan Area.

Will reached over to me. I stiffened, expecting him to take my hand again. Instead, he tugged his art pad out from my hands and tucked it back into the glove compartment where it was safe. He didn’t trust me with his work anymore.

He ran his fingers through the shorn back of his hair. “Remember when you told me that Izzy insulted you, and you haven’t seen her since?”

I nodded.

“Does Izzy know you’re mad at her?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” I really didn’t care. “Why?”

“When you’ve got a beef with somebody,” he said, “you don’t act mad. Not right away. You avoid confrontation. It only comes out later, when you make cutting comments. Izzy’s lived with you, so she understands that about you. But if you haven’t been by her shop, she probably doesn’t even know you’re angry. She’s busy with her job and her kids, but she’s wondering why you’ve gone missing. She thinks you’re just busy too.”

Letting that hypothesis hang in the air, he started the car.

I was shocked into silence. It made me uncomfortable that he understood so much about me, so quickly. We were already driving through the town’s main drag, past the shop where Izzy worked, before I managed to stammer, “I’m—I’m sorry, Will. I’m sorry about unloading all of that on you. I have a chip on my shoulder.”

“What you have is not a chip,” he said.

As he prepared to turn onto the street leading into my neighborhood, he looked right. His earring glinted under a streetlight. Feeling miserable, I wished I could take back the last half hour of spilling my guts. I tried to balance the evening a little by asking him a personal question, something I’d been curious about since our first night together. “Why did you pierce your ear? Is it a Minnesota thing?”

He huffed out the smallest laugh. “It’s a drum line thing.”

“Some kind of sick initiation for the Marching Wrath of God? I love it! We should totally do that to the damn freshmen.”

“No,” he said, “we won the state championship.”

“What?” I exclaimed. I was impressed with his band, and frustrated all over again about everything our second-rate town was putting him through. Our band made great marks at contests, but we didn’t win.

“A tattoo would have been better,” he said, “but you can’t get ink in Minnesota until you turn eighteen.”

“You mean, everybody on the drum line got an ear pierced?” I couldn’t imagine everybody on our drum line doing anything, especially not as an organized group.

“Yeah.”

“What about the girls?”

“They both had their ears pierced already, but they got another piercing in one ear. Carol—” As the memory came back to him, he cracked up. “They loomed over her with the gun, and she passed out. The first thing she said when she came to was, ‘Drum line forever!’ ” He laughed again, then looked sidelong at me. “I guess you had to be there.”

“It sounds like you guys had a lot of fun together.”

“We did.” He smiled into space and fingered the stud in his ear.

And with a rush, I realized how much he’d lost when he’d moved here. Not just the position of drum major, the office of student council president, the status of Most Academic, but a group of close friends. Like a second family.

Will put his hand down and glanced at me. “Is wearing a stud uncool in Florida? I thought I might quit wearing it, but then I would have a hole in my ear. Somehow that seems worse.”

“I see what you’re saying,” I told him, because I really did. “And I have never met anyone who took his earlobe so seriously.”

He cracked another smile. “I’m a serious guy.”

A week and a half ago, I would have agreed with him wholeheartedly. Now I was beginning to wonder. I’d thought Sawyer was growing deeper the longer I knew him, but Will seemed fathomless.

I told him truthfully, “Your earring is the first thing I liked about you.”

“For all the wrong reasons.” He pulled to a stop in front of my house and looked across the car at me in the dim light. “You were completely wrong about me.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I may be the first person who’s been absolutely right.”

13

I FELT SO TERRIBLE ABOUT my pity party Wednesday night that I was determined to make it up to Will when we went out Thursday. I’d been wrong when I’d made fun of him for thinking the Tampa area was a hockey mecca. There was a rink not far from town. I laced up skates and let him half teach me, half drag me around the oval. But I wished I could have sat there, without being a weirdo, and watched him skate. He made it look easy, even natural. The cold breeze ruffled his short hair as he sped around the rink without me. Best of all, it was cold as Minnesota in the building. While I shivered in a sweater, he grinned in his T-shirt and looked genuinely happy.

Friday we drove a few towns south to a tourist spot full of neon lights and corn dogs for their sunset celebration. The long pier was full of couples embracing each other, acting like they couldn’t wait for the day to end and the dark to start their night of romance. More than once I caught Will glancing at girls and guys our age making out. Now that our relationship was fake-official, flirting wasn’t as easy as it used to be. An awkwardness still hung between us after I’d gone all TMI Wednesday night.