Biggest Flirts (Superlatives #1)(24)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“You worry me.”

“I just get kind of dizzy sometimes,” he said. “I feel like a dork.”

“You are a dork,” I said, “but not because of that.”

He started toward me. I recognized his headlock stance by now.

“Mr. Matthews,” I warned him in Ms. Nakamoto’s voice.

“Kaye Gordon and Aidan O’Neill.” DeMarcus’s monotone had continued through the microphone all this time, but he caught my attention only when he mentioned my friend. “Most Likely to Succeed.”

That was perfect! Or it would have been, if I’d liked Aidan. At any rate, I could tell Kaye was happy about it. She curtseyed, grinned, and gave everyone a two-handed wave like she’d just landed a perfect vault and won the Olympics for the US gymnastics team. I cheered and clapped for her along with everyone else.

One of my hands was jerked down from clapping by something large and fuzzy. I was being attacked by a killer stuffed animal. Glancing behind me, I saw it was Sawyer the Pelican. I stopped fighting him and relaxed my arm before he pulled it out of its socket.

Wrong move. He’d caught Will’s arm too. I realized right before it happened that Sawyer was trying to make us hold hands.

I jerked my hand away and cried, “Stop!” because yelling in the middle of announcements was a great idea when I didn’t want people staring at me anymore. At the same time, Will jerked his hand away, uttering an outraged “Hey!” His face was as red as a sunburn.

“Come on,” I said to Sawyer’s enormous bird head, which I assumed had an ear hole in it somewhere so he could hear me. “Will’s already in trouble with the boss lady.”

“Sawyer De Luca,” DeMarcus droned.

Distracted from Will and me, thankfully, Sawyer put his weird, furry pelican hands up to his huge beak like he could hardly stand the suspense of what title he’d been given. Most School Spirit, of course. But if that had been his title, a girl would have been named along with him. He must have won an award we didn’t give to girls because it would make them cry.

“Most Likely to Go to Jail,” DeMarcus called.

“Oh!” I exclaimed. That was low. The title had seemed funny to me when it was a joke. It wasn’t amusing anymore when the winner’s dad had actually gone to jail.

I stopped feeling sorry for Sawyer when he grabbed both my drumsticks. I sighed in frustration and put my hands on my hips. I didn’t want to be part of his act. Maybe another day, but not right now, when I felt so mortified that I was partially responsible for mortifying Will. “Give them to me,” I told Sawyer.

He shook his huge head. His googly eyes gazed at me, but staring angrily at him did no good because I wasn’t sure which part of the head he was actually looking out of.

Will stepped forward to intervene. “Back off, bird.”

Good. If Will was defending me, he couldn’t be too resentful.

Sawyer put one hand over his beak, like he was horrified, and used the other wing—with my drumsticks in that hand—to cover his bird crotch.

“I said back off,” Will said, laughing, “not jack off.”

Will was laughing! Now I felt even more relieved—until Sawyer put my drumsticks into his enormous bird beak.

“Oh, Sawyer,” I sighed. Almost as if he’d anticipated being named Most Likely to Go to Jail, he’d been stealing things all period and slipping them into his beak—sunscreen, hats, cheerleader pompons so voluminous they didn’t quite fit and hung over the edges of his mouth like he’d tried to swallow an octopus. When his victims finally convinced him to give their stuff back, he shoved his wing into his mouth, fished around in there, pulled out the possessions in question, and wiped them on his ample tail like they were covered in bird saliva before handing them back, pretend-wet. I didn’t want this to happen to my new Vic Firth sticks. After purchasing them last spring and promptly losing them, I’d found them Tuesday night under my bed and brought them to practice. Will had been impressed. But everyone seemed powerless in the face of Sawyer’s act, and I was no exception.

Apparently, Will was an exception. He leaped forward and put both hands around Sawyer’s padded neck to choke him. This was a pretty funny sight because normally Will was taller than Sawyer, but Sawyer in the costume was taller than everyone. Will growled, “Cough them up, pelican.” Sawyer shook his head stubbornly.

Will let him go. “Have you drunk any water since you’ve been out here? You’ve got to be dying in that getup.”

Sawyer picked up the empty bottle Will had thrown down and tipped it up over his beak.

“That’s awesome,” I said. “Pantomiming hydration. Seriously, Sawyer, you’ve got to take your head off for water breaks.”

“Harper Davis and Brody Larson,” DeMarcus intoned.

DeMarcus had been reading on and on as Will and I argued with the world’s largest bird, but at this announcement, Will looked at me in confusion. Sawyer scratched his bird head.

I’d given Will a few possible titles for Harper. And I’d told him Brody might be voted Most Athletic because of his football skills, or Most Likely to Die on a Dare because of the time he jumped from the top of the inflatable water slide on Fifth-Grade Play Day and had to go to the hospital. But Brody and Harper were so different from each other that I couldn’t think of a single thing they both might have won. I could tell from Will’s expression and Sawyer’s pantomime that they were thinking this too.

“Perfect Couple That Never Was,” DeMarcus said.

“What?” I exclaimed. “How bizarre.” It was so strange for Harper to get paired romantically with a guy she probably had nothing in common with and hardly knew—especially when that guy already had a girlfriend, and Harper had a boyfriend.

“Almost as bizarre as the two of us getting voted Biggest Flirts.” Will looked over at me, and the big grin he’d been wearing slowly faded.

I don’t know what he saw in my face that made him regret his joke. I didn’t have a crush on him, exactly. To me, a crush implied that I wished we would get together someday. I didn’t wish this for Will and me. The only way we would ever hook up again was if we both got plastered at a party—which happened to me often enough, and likely never happened to Will.

But I did admire him. Long for him. Enjoy teasing him more than I’d ever enjoyed telling another uptight guy dirty jokes. He must have detected this with his Super X-Ray Tall Girl Vision, because his eyes shifted away. He opened his mouth to say something to get us out of this awkward conversation, but he must not have been able to think of anything and closed his mouth again.