Biggest Flirts (Superlatives #1)(41)
Author: Jennifer Echols

He kissed me on the mouth. Easily, languidly, like Sawyer and I had been kissing for the last two years.

He ended by tugging one of my braids, then backing away. Looking deep into my eyes, he said, “Good luck.”

12

MY LESSON WITH BOB AND Roger went on forever. I desperately needed them to learn basic spreadsheet skills so they would stop relying on me, but teaching those two to use a computer for anything more than surfing the Web was like teaching Xavier Pilkington, Most Academic, to play a dance-competition video game. Bob and Roger took a certain amount of pride in not being able to do this, and they wasted my time bragging about how hopeless they were. I got frustrated with them and told them as much, and they folded their arms and told me I was being huffy. I hadn’t run a practice as drum captain yet, but this was what it would be like.

The best part of my evening was getting text messages from Will. After we’d politely said good-bye in band and gone our separate ways, I hadn’t expected him to check up on me. I definitely hadn’t thought he would entertain me with texts like “Sorry you have to work. You should be here. This partay is off da HOOK!” with a photo of his mom scrubbing the ahffen.

I got home so late that my dad had already left for his shift. Then I stayed up later to do some calculus. Ms. Reynolds was totally on my ass about turning in my homework. She had threatened to petition the principal to make me join the math team if I didn’t clean up my act. I was pretty sure this was unconstitutional.

***

“Tia,” Will whispered in my ear. His warm breath tickled my earlobe.

“Mmmm,” I said, enjoying this dream, even if doing my calculus homework on a date with Will did cast me in the part of Angelica.

“Time for school.”

I sat straight up in bed. Morning light streamed through the window blind. Will jumped backward just in time to avoid my head smashing his.

I scowled at him. “Are you real?” He looked real. He was tall and taking up half my room, in the Vikings T-shirt he’d worn the night we first met.

He sounded apologetic as he said, “Harper told me where the key was. You can’t skip. She said you skipped a bunch of days last year, and then, when you got the flu, you had to come to school anyway or you would have flunked. She said whenever you haven’t shown up at school by seven fifteen, everybody knows your dad stayed late at work and didn’t come home to wake you. You don’t wake up when people call your phone, apparently? Or when people bang on the front door.”

“Mmph.” I collapsed on my bed again. Something stuck me in the back of the neck. I pulled my calculus book out from under me and placed it on my tummy. “Why did she send you? She doesn’t love me anymore?”

“She and Kaye said it’s my turn. I hope you don’t mind. I figured it would look like we’re into each other if I came to get you.” He wagged his eyebrows at me. “You know, for Angelica.”

“Oh, we are into each other,” I assured him. “You are seeing my sexy boudoir and sleeping ensemble. Take it all in, lovah.” I flung my arms wide so he had a clear view of my tank top and plaid flannel pants. Then I held out my hand. After he helped me up, I brushed past him, whispering huskily, “Let me grab a shower.”

He looked around the room for my nonexistent clock, then pulled his phone from his pocket and glanced at it. “We don’t have time.”

I winced. “I smell, though. Do I smell?” I leaned down so he had access to the top of my head. “Sorry, I usually ask my dad, but you’ll have to fill in.”

He sniffed my hair. “Yes, but not unpleasantly.”

“Aw, you’re such a romantic.” I yawned and shuffled toward the door. “Just let me brush my teeth, then.”

“You’re going to school in pajamas?”

“It won’t be the first time. Or the last, probably, because production has picked up at the boat plant, and my dad will be taking a lot more shifts in the next few months.” I stopped in the doorway and looked back toward the piles of clothes in my room. “I guess I could put on a bra.”

“If you insist.” He watched me like he was waiting for me to do this in front of him. Finally he said, “I’ll leave you alone to do that.”

He was clanking around in the kitchen as I slipped on a bra under my tank top. With weird green lace sewn around the edges of blue satin cups, it looked like something Violet might have bought at a discount store when she was twelve. I didn’t know where half my clothes had come from or whether they were actually mine. I used to get in huge trouble for touching my sisters’ stuff, but now that they were all gone, whatever they’d left behind had gotten absorbed into my wardrobe. The bra showed under my tank, but I didn’t have time to paw through piles for another. While I was at it, I traded my pajama pants for gym shorts. I would have to dash home and change before work. On the other hand, if I showed up for my shift that afternoon looking like I’d just left the gym, maybe Bob and Roger would stop threatening to promote me.

I ducked into the bathroom to pee and wash my face and brush my teeth. When I opened the door, Will was standing there waiting for me with a plastic cup of orange juice in one hand and a Pop-Tart in the other. Toasted! I hadn’t had a toasted Pop-Tart in years. “Dude! Where’d you find the Pop-Tarts? I lost them.”

“Walk and talk,” he said. As I grabbed my backpack and drumsticks and headed for the front door, he told me, “Kaye had some ideas for where they might be.”

“Where’d you find the toaster?”

“It wasn’t obvious.” He held the door open. Locking it behind us and hiding the key, he said, “Kaye told me it was just you and your dad living here.”

“It is.” We headed up the street to the school fence.

“Why do you have two beds in your room, and someone’s stuff that doesn’t look like your stuff?” Will asked.

“Oh,” I said, laughing at his reference to Violet’s purple taste. “My sister moved out last spring when she chased her boyfriend down south of town.”

“And you hope she’s coming back?”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said. “I mean, do I think her relationship with her boyfriend is dangerously unstable? Yes, but so were my other sisters’ relationships, and they haven’t moved back home. There’s no room for Violet now, really, what with all the stuff in the way. Maybe that’s why my dad keeps downsizing.” I giggled because that was a funny thought, then stopped giggling because it might have been partly true. “Do I act like I hope she’s coming back?”