Biggest Flirts (11 page)

While I had their attention, I used my drumstick to point at him far away across the field, like a tough boxer talking smack at the press conference before a big match:
You, my friend, are dead meat.

***

I wasn’t sure I’d ever cried at school before. My decision never to have a boyfriend had come early, so nothing much had bothered me even during middle school when everything bothered everybody and girls broke down because a stranger insulted their sandals.

And now, as a senior, I’d been alternating between swallowing tears and outright sobbing for hours, since I’d beat Will and all the other drums in the challenge to become drum captain.

“This is so frustrating,” Kaye said. “Why do you get upset when you do well? It makes no sense!”

She and Harper and I stood in the hall outside Mr. Frank’s classroom before study hall. Kaye kept Sawyer and other curious boys at bay with the glare of a student council vice president. I ached to talk to Sawyer about what I’d done too. He understood my problem with responsibility a lot better than Harper and Kaye. But he and they did not get each other at
all
. I couldn’t talk to the three of them at the same time.

“I’m not upset for doing well,” I grumbled. “I always do well on drums. I’m a good drummer. I just don’t want to come in first, because first chair is drum captain and has to be in charge.”

“If you didn’t want to be drum captain,” Harper puzzled, “and Will was drum captain before, why’d you challenge him?”

“Because he’s furious with me for breaking him and Angelica up, and I didn’t want to stand next to him every day for the rest of marching season. I challenged him and intended to get third.”

“Get
third
,” Kaye repeated. “Like, you can decide ahead of time what your rank will be.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Will should have played perfectly and snagged drum captain again, like he did last week when
he
challenged
me
. Travis is good, but he has trouble with the roll at the beginning of the bridge, so he should have placed second. Jimmy doesn’t quite understand the syncopation in the chorus, so he should have placed behind Travis. Actually, he did. The drum line goes downhill from there. All I had to do was throw a couple of minor things and I could have slid in perfectly between Travis and Jimmy at third chair. That way I wouldn’t have to slum with the freshmen at the bottom of the section, but I wouldn’t have to stand next to Will anymore.”

Kaye and Harper shared a look. Harper said, “We know you’ve thrown challenges before, but I had no idea you were approaching this with the precision of a brain surgeon. Is this how you always try out?”

“Yes.”

“So what happened?” Kaye asked flatly. I could tell she was exasperated with me, but she was humoring me. For now.

“I was upset about the whole thing with Will”—I paused to sniffle—“and I forgot to mess up. Now he’s even madder at me for taking drum captain away from him. But I didn’t want it!”

“That’s ridiculous,” Kaye said firmly. “You’ve told us some doozies before. You’ve been irresponsible and a goofball. But trying to throw a challenge when you love band borders on insane. I can’t believe you! You’re so smart, Tia. You’re so smart that you can pull off looking like an imbecile, just because you don’t want to be in charge? You’re going to let a guy be in charge so you don’t have to take responsibility?”

I had stood there through Kaye’s lecture, taking it. I was used to her talking to me like my mom. I didn’t mind most of the time, since my mom was gone. It wasn’t as if I was getting it twice.

But by the end of Kaye’s speech, I was ticked off. She wasn’t even through, but I was done listening.

I straightened to my full height, feeling like Godzilla rising out of the Gulf of Mexico to tower over Greater Tampa Bay, and pointed down at her. “You’re
vice
president of the student council,” I said. “Your boyfriend is
president
of the student council. Is that because you ran for president and he beat you? No, it’s because you ran for vice president in the first place. And how did that happen? Either he decided he was going to take the front seat while you took the back, and he informed you of his decision, or
you
decided to take the back seat, so he wouldn’t be mad at you.”

Kaye’s mouth crumpled in a little frown, and her dark eyes blazed. “And how is that worse than what
you’re
doing, trying to make sure Will is in charge instead of you?”

“It’s worse because
I’m
not giving
you
a damn lecture!”

She stomped off. All I could see was her hair twists bopping down the hall. I had tunnel vision, which happened to me when I got really angry, about once a year.

“Breathe,” Harper said.

I’d forgotten she was standing there. Looking around the hall, I saw that I’d attracted everyone’s attention, which I was getting really good at lately. Sawyer leaned against the lockers, watching me, waiting to listen to me when I was ready.

Will stood talking with Brody and some other guys from the football team. I was glad Brody had reached out to Will, because otherwise Will probably didn’t have a friend in the school. He watched me too, his face stony. When he saw me looking in his direction, he turned away.

I didn’t blame him. I’d taken him down in the most public way possible—on purpose, he thought. For the millionth time that morning, I remembered pointing at him with my drumstick yesterday, in front of the whole band. A lot of my problems would be solved if I stopped trying so hard to be funny. I took a long breath. “Do you hate me too?” I asked Harper.

“No. Kaye doesn’t hate you either.”

“We’ve never had a fight like that before.”

Harper shifted the strap of her camera bag to her other shoulder. “You never told her she was wrong quite so firmly before.”

“Do you think I was right, to tell her that?”

Harper raised her eyebrows. “You didn’t have to yell in front of everyone. I’ve never seen you act like this. Will has really thrown you for a loop.”

I looked around the hall again. A few people who’d still been staring at me turned away. I didn’t want to sit under their gaze all through study hall. I definitely didn’t want to spend study hall in the same classroom as Will. “I’m going to clean the band storage room.”

“Uh-oh,” Harper said. “Like last March?”

“Maybe.” I’d gone on a cleaning spree when Violet moved out.

“What are you going to do about Will?” Harper asked.

“I can’t
do
anything.”

She shook her head. “If you don’t try to fix it, it won’t get fixed.”

“I tried to fix it by challenging him on drum. You see how that turned out.”

“I don’t mean cook up some cockamamy scheme,” she scolded me. “Actually talk to him, face to face, and explain how you feel.”

I didn’t think that was possible. I wasn’t sure how I felt myself. And even if I had known, the last person I would have wanted to explain it to was Will.

“Later.” I held up my hand until she gave me a fist bump. Then I told Mr. Frank I was spending study hall in the band room. Over in Ms. Nakamoto’s office, I grinned and sounded perky as I respectfully requested that she loan me a spray bottle of cleaner and a rag.

“Uh-oh,” she said, looking up from her desk. “Like last March?”

“Everybody seems to remember that episode as if it was so horrible,” I said, dropping the upbeat act after a total of ten seconds. “You got your sousaphones scrubbed, remember?”

“What’s happened?” she asked. “Are you upset about the challenge?”

“Yes,” I said, actually relieved that she’d guessed.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Yes,” I repeated with gusto. “I want to undo the challenge and go back to the way we were before, with Will drum captain and me second.”

“No.” So much for talking about it. She found the cleaner and rag on top of a filing cabinet and handed them to me.

The storage room was tall and narrow, snaking back thirty feet underneath the stage and the auditorium, and lit by a single bulb in the ceiling. The ceiling itself was so high that the janitor had to use a special ladder when the bulb went out, which meant it was sometimes dark in here for days, with everybody falling all over each other trying to locate their instruments and drag them out of their cases. It wasn’t much lighter in here even when the bulb worked.

I decided to start with the shady shelf at the back of the room and work my way forward. This involved tugging tubas down and cleaning the dusty wood underneath. Right away I found the trumpet mute that Shelley Stearns had lost and accused the trombone section of stealing last February.

I heard Will’s voice out in the hall, creeping into the storage room and echoing weirdly against the concrete block walls. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Why do you want to retake a yearbook picture in the storage room? It’s dark in there even with the light on.”

Suddenly Will came reeling into the room, shoved from behind. Off balance, he couldn’t catch himself until he’d already tripped over some trumpet cases and hit the wall.

“Enjoy!” came Harper’s voice. The big door slammed.

Will leaped back over the cases and jogged for the door, but the sound of the key turning in the lock outside already echoed through the storage room. He rattled the knob, then pounded the door. “Harper!” he roared. When there was no answer, he called, “Ms. Nakamoto?”

“She’s gone to lunch,” came Harper’s bold little voice through the steel. “I’ll come back to let you out at the end of the period. I hope you don’t have to pee.”

“Damn it, Harper!” Will backed up a pace and rammed the door mightily with one shoulder. It made a terrific noise but didn’t budge.

To stop him before he hurt himself, I spoke up. “It’s my fault. I left the key in the lock. I should have known she’d try something like this.”

He whirled around, squinting in the dim light.

I stepped out from the dark shelves, where he could see me. “She locked us in here together so we’d have to talk about what happened.”

His shoulders sagged. “I hate Florida.”

10

WELL, I HADN’T WANTED TO
talk to him, either, but the idea of five minutes of conversation wih him wasn’t loathsome enough to make me despise the entire state.

“Tia,” he said softly. “Don’t look like that.”

How did he want me to look? Like a girl who didn’t mind being insulted? I tried that, crossing my arms in front of me, which was awkward because I was still holding the filthy rag in one hand and the spray bottle in the other.

He frowned. “What are you doing in here?”

“Cleaning.”

“You?”

“You know, just shut up. If I never bathed, you would have smelled me by now. The sun makes that worse. Another reason for you to hate Florida.”

He put his hands in his hair, looked perplexed, and then took his hands away again, as if he’d forgotten momentarily that his long hair was gone. “
You’ve
ruined
my
life, but you’re going to make me feel like
I’ve
done something wrong.”

I squinted to keep the tears from slipping out of my eyes. I didn’t feel like I was totally to blame for our kiss yesterday, or for us getting elected Biggest Flirts. But I
was
to blame for boasting about knocking him out of drum captain, and then actually doing it. I’d been angry with Will, but I cared about him—way too much—and the last thing I’d wanted was to ruin his life.

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 fucking 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—”

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.”

“Okay,” I said, laughing. I knew he was serious, but I enjoyed hearing him admit to being base and petty every once in a while. It helped to know he wasn’t as superhuman as he looked.