Most Likely to Succeed (7 page)

“You’re right,” Tia said. “Most likely they were discussing the Higgs boson and the standard model of particle physics. It only
looked
like he was hitting on her.”

Tia was what my mother referred to as “highly excitable.” She had a reputation for stirring up trouble. Aidan
might have been passing pertinent information along to Angelica about the student council’s upcoming doughnut sale or something. He wasn’t the type to hit on girls. But what did I know? He’d never had the chance before. Maybe he would become our school’s playboy now that he’d decided our relationship was temporarily over.

And his choice of Angelica struck me. In the student council’s incorrect tally of the Superlatives votes, Angelica had won Most Academic along with Xavier. In the newer, correct tally Ms. Yates had
claimed
we weren’t letting out of the bag, Angelica had won Most Likely to Succeed with Aidan. Maybe he wanted to date the girl whom the school had paired him with. He obviously had no use for
me
now that he knew I hadn’t really won the title. And now that he had my mother’s recommendation letter.

I said, “I guess we won’t be on a break after all, then. We’ve broken up permanently, because there’s no way I can out-nerd that girl.”

“You got that right,” Harper said at the same time Tia said,
“Es la verdad.”

As I uttered this realization, I honestly expected Sawyer to smooth his fingertips across my back. Maybe I would poke him in the ribs in retaliation. Maybe not. But he’d embraced me in a full-bird hug when Aidan handed down his initial
decree. Seemed like my letting Aidan go deserved at least
some
touch from Sawyer. He didn’t move, though. He kept staring at the computer screen.

“Now
that’s
a handsome bloke,” he said. The photo was of him in the pelican costume—actually, it could have been
anyone
in the pelican costume, but I assumed it was Sawyer—looking very studious and contrite as he sat in Principal Chen’s office with his legs crossed at the knees, reading
Crime and Punishment
. Perfect.

Suddenly I felt a flash of panic that I hadn’t started my Dostoyevsky paper, which was due to Mr. Frank on Monday. My mother had reminded me this afternoon that the title of valedictorian probably hinged on everyone’s AP English grade because Mr. Frank was a stickler. But getting up from Harper’s bed to make a few outline notes when I was trying desperately to flirt with the class criminal was something Angelica would do,
not
something I would do.

Not anymore.

I called, “Are you really using that picture for Most Likely to Go to Jail?”

“Yes,” Harper said. “Kennedy complained. He said I hadn’t really taken Sawyer’s photo for his title in the yearbook if his face wasn’t showing. But we were on deadline. Kennedy had to let it through. And we’re not using this next
one for Most Likely to Succeed, but we’re putting it in one of the front collages.” She clicked to a picture of Aidan and me grinning behind Ms. Chen’s desk—we’d fought over who would sit in the chair that day too, and finally pushed it out of the way—with Sawyer behind us, only one huge cartoon eye of the pelican popping up over Aidan’s shoulder. Sawyer had photobombed us on purpose.

“That’s classic,” Tia cackled.

“You were in the
way
,” I said quietly, actually poking Sawyer in the ribs this time. I turned toward him.

When he faced me, we were already so close that I could feel his breath across my lips. His deep blue eyes were serious.

And then he turned forward again without touching me or flirting back at all, like I was some freshman majorette he found more annoying than sexy.

I took the hint. We stayed on Harper’s bed for another half hour as she led us through an overview of the senior class. I laughed with Harper and Tia. Sawyer laughed with Harper and Tia. Sawyer and I didn’t laugh together.

“Enough,” Harper finally said. “Even
I
get tired of photography after eighteen hours.” She turned off the computer and led the way out of her bedroom, through the narrow hall to the living room.

We filed behind her. I was the last one out, behind
Sawyer. It wasn’t often that I was this close to him when we were standing up and he wasn’t dressed as a pelican. I was eye level with his shoulder blades. I got a great view of the white-blond, baby-fine hairs at his nape. And I was disappointed he didn’t take this opportunity to turn around and grab me playfully. Maybe it was all in my head, but I got the impression he was dissing me by doing nothing.

When we emerged from the hallway, Tia was rummaging through the kitchen, insisting she was hungry again, and Harper was trying to help her find the right junk food. Sawyer put a hand on the armrest of a wing chair and the other on the armrest of the sofa and hopped over both, then plopped onto one end of the sofa, as if he did this four times a day and that was his
place
. My first instinct was to join him on the sofa. The night had been squeaky clean so far, and it would stay that way if we weren’t sitting next to each other.

But I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of chasing him around. I chose the wing chair and didn’t look at him.

Tia was the one who claimed the other end of the sofa, collapsing her entire five-foot-nine frame onto it while clutching a bag of chips. She looked and sounded like a tree falling in the forest. Harper took the other side chair and clicked the remote so the TV turned on to our usual viewing, a bridal gown reality show.

Actually, I didn’t know whether this show was
their
usual viewing. Maybe they only watched it with me whenever we had a sleepover, because it was
my
usual viewing. I’d been planning my wedding to Aidan ever since we started dating. Perhaps a little before. Harper would have a Florida wedding, barefoot on the beach. Tia, if she changed her mind and got married someday, would probably elope. But my wedding would be in New York where I would live and work, and the gown would be the centerpiece. In an old city that embodied intellect and effort and the collective culture of the entire world, my dress would stand out, a white work of art against the somber gray stonework of a church, or a monument, or a bank, wherever Aidan and I decided to hold the ceremony.

This had been my dream for years, more consistent than my fantasy that our next sex together would finally blow my mind. I had recited the slowly evolving details of my dream wedding to Tia and Harper. Suddenly the entire scenario seemed hopelessly naive, an invention of sixth grade instead of ninth.

Now I was in twelfth, and I was hoping against hope that Harper and Tia wouldn’t bring up my obsession in front of Sawyer.

“There’s . . . ,” Harper began as a bride swept across the screen in a classic gown with a slim silhouette. She was about
to say the dress was perfect for me. It was exactly the kind of gown I would have called dibs on the other hundred times we’d watched this show.

Behind the retro glasses she’d settled across her nose when she took out her contacts, her eyes flicked to Sawyer. “. . . a dress that should not be accessorized with pink cowboy boots,” she finished as the bride pulled up the hem and showed off her special brand of quirky.

“That’s a Kaye dress,” Tia said, typically missing our hints at subtlety and restraint. “If you wore that with pink cowboy boots, your mama would shit twice.”

Luckily, the next dress was exquisitely sewn with hundreds of delicate fabric flowers, a Harper dress. Following that was a cleavage-baring number with sheer panels down to the navel in front and the butt crack in back—definitely a dress for Tia, who couldn’t tell sexy from raunchy. The conversation moved far enough from the topic of
me
that I worked up the courage to steal a glance at Sawyer.

He was asleep. His elbow was draped over the armrest, cradling his chin. His eyes were closed, his blond eyelashes casting long shadows down his cheeks.

“Hey,” Tia said, shoving his shoulder. Without opening his eyes, he let out a groan.

“Come on,” Tia said, pulling his arm until he stretched
out across the sofa with his head on her thigh. He never opened his eyes, and the whole process was so seamless that it looked like he’d slept in her lap a million times. Maybe he had. The two of them had been off and on forever. They made my attempts at flirting with him look like something out of kindergarten.

In deference to him, she turned off the lamp on the table next to her. The only light remaining came from the TV hung over the fireplace, and a faint glow from the streetlights outside through the gauzy curtains on the big front window. Now Sawyer and Tia looked like a boyfriend and girlfriend getting cozy.

Watching them with a ball of resentment burning in my stomach, I realized I didn’t have a chance with Sawyer, even if I wanted one. We both pretended I was too good for him. But realistically, why would
he
want a stick-in-the-mud like me? Life-of-the-party girls like Tia were more his speed. Staring at them owning the sofa together, with Tia’s hand lying on his chest, was a great way to finally drive that fact home to my beleaguered, lovelorn brain.

That’s when Tia piped up. “So, Kaye, tell us more about this break you’re taking with Aidan.”

6

“NO!” I WHISPERED HOARSELY AND
a little desperately, nodding toward Sawyer in Tia’s lap.

“He’s asleep,” Tia said in her normal tone.

“If he is, you’re going to wake him up.” I was still whispering.

“Nothing wakes him up,” Harper offered. “He sleeps like a log.”

“So it’s okay to discuss my personal business in front of him? I don’t
think
so. Any second he’s going to jump up and startle us. ‘Ha-ha, I’ve been listening to you the whole time.’ ”

Tia shook her head. “He’s always worked such long hours at the Crab Lab, and now the mascot job takes a lot out of him. It’s harder than you’d think, so physical, bouncing around in the heat with that heavy costume on.”

“I
know
,” I said haughtily, offended that Tia would imply she understood more about Sawyer’s mascot job than I did.
I
was the one who stood next to him at games.

“Anyway,” Harper spoke up, “I don’t think he’d tell anybody your personal business.”

“I think he would,” I said flatly.

“What exactly is your problem with him?” Tia asked, sounding miffed. “You act like he’s a criminal.”

“He did get voted Most Likely to Go to Jail,” I reminded her.

In the dusky room I saw Harper raise her eyebrows at me. She and I knew he hadn’t actually won this title, since he’d won Perfect Couple with me. The real winner of Most Likely to Go to Jail was our school pothead, Jason Price.

“Sawyer and I are pretty good friends,” Tia said, which was the understatement of the century, “and I can tell he’s dead serious about cleaning up his act. He’s always been black and white, all or nothing. When he went vegan last spring, that was it. He never looked back. So if he’s saying no alcohol and pot now, I can guarantee he hasn’t fallen off the wagon. You haven’t seen anything to think he has, have you?”

The fact that she asked this question made me think she wasn’t quite as sure about Sawyer as she claimed. “I haven’t,”
I admitted. “But Tia, you talk like he’s been clean for years. He passed out at school only
three weeks
ago. And I just . . .”

“You just what?” Tia insisted.

Her usually bright face drew into frown lines. She shifted, moving her arm down Sawyer’s body as if protecting him. He didn’t move, didn’t even stir or flutter his eyelids, as far as I could tell in the near dark. I couldn’t see Harper’s eyes because her glasses reflected the bridal gowns on TV, but she sat up cross-legged in her chair, attentive to my answer.

Without anyone coming out and saying it, I knew we weren’t really talking about Sawyer’s reform. They wanted to know why I didn’t go after him, now that Aidan was—temporarily, at least—out of the picture.

“Sawyer’s never been serious with girls,” I said. “But he’s been
with
a
lot
of them. He’s got this whole secret underlife. Cheerleaders tell stories about him fooling around with girls I never even knew he’d gone out with.”

“Why are they doing that?” Tia asked. “They’re assholes.”

“But what if the stories are true?”

“So? He’s not in a steady relationship with anybody. He’s not cheating. Why does fooling around with a lot of girls detract from his moral character?” Now she was talking about herself. We were back to the argument we’d had a million times, in which I expressed concern that she wasn’t
being very picky about whom she slept with, and she told me to stuff it.

I shouldn’t have done it, but I took the bait. “When’s the last time
you
had sex with him?” I asked. “It probably hasn’t been a month.”

“Do we want to go here?” Harper asked. “I do not want to go here.”

Tia’s mouth set in a hard line. “Define sex,” she said.

Damn Tia. Now I was thinking about all the ways Tia and Sawyer might have played around with each other in the past few years. They’d probably done things that I’d never tried in three years with Aidan, and that Aidan would have said were too dirty anyway.

“There’s no fighting during girls’ sleepover night,” Harper declared.

“Seriously,” Tia kept on anyway, “because there’s different kinds of sex.”

“Now you’re baiting her,” Harper scolded Tia. “Just tell her what she wants to know.”

Tia scowled at me, then opened her free hand. “Okay. The last time I did
anything
with him was about a month ago, before Will and I got together.”

“Well, after you and Will had been
together
,” I corrected her, “but before you actually went on a date.” I happened to
have heard about some of the things she’d been seen doing with Sawyer one weekend
after
she’d already made out with Will.

Tia grimaced and rubbed her brow like I was giving her a headache. “The past is past. I don’t see why this matters.”

I couldn’t believe I was doing it, but I laid my biggest fear down flat on the table for them to peer at. “Because if Sawyer slept around before, he’ll do it again.”

“People change, Kaye,” Tia said solemnly. “I’ve changed.”

I frowned at her. “You’re not wearing a bra.”

She looked guilty, then pulled out the neck of her T-shirt and peered inside. “I couldn’t find it on the band bus. Nine times out of ten, I’ve changed. I definitely would not run back to Sawyer or to
anybody
when I’ve made a promise to Will. Will is too fucking awesome.”

Sawyer finally stirred—whether because she’d said his name again or she’d said the
F
-word with such gusto, I didn’t know. He rolled onto his side, shifting his head on her thigh. Now that he might be awake-ish, I was even more alarmed at what she said next: “As long as you’re on a break with Aidan anyway, why not experiment, so you won’t spend your entire life since you were fourteen with one guy? I’m sure Sawyer would be glad for you to use him.”

I cut my hand back and forth violently across my throat,
hoping the horrified look on my face told her how serious I was about her shutting up. Even Harper shook her head.

Ignoring Harper, Tia gave me her best
Who, me?
face and put her hands up like she couldn’t imagine what she’d done wrong.

I already felt vulnerable because Aidan had broken up with me and Sawyer seemed to have rejected me. If Sawyer was playing possum and heard this discussion, I would die of embarrassment. Desperate to keep her from saying anything else, I found a notepad printed with the B and B logo, plucked a pen out of the side-table drawer, and wrote her an angry note. “Sawyer wld not b ‘glad 4 me 2 use him,’ WTF. And if I did, Aidan wld never go out w me again.” I tore it off the pad—silently—and reached across the coffee table with it. Harper half stood to grab it, then delivered it to Tia. Harper read it over her shoulder.

Tia snapped her fingers, meaning she wanted my pen. I winced at the noise but handed the pen to Harper, who delivered it. Tia scribbled an answer below my note. This took so long, and I was so afraid of what she’d say, that I had half a mind to look over her shoulder while she was still writing. I was afraid this might rouse Sawyer—with my panicked breathing or the sound of my heart palpitations. Finally she gave the paper to Harper, who read it with a perplexed expression, then handed it to me.

“Aidan wld b
more
likely 2 go out w u again bc he wld see ur not waiting around 4 him & his Higgs boson BULLshit. In the meantime u cld experiment w Sawyer. Tell me u don’t want 2 & ur lying like a dog.” Under this she’d drawn a dog stick figure with its tongue hanging out, lying on what appeared to be several yards of shag.

“Shhh,” Harper said, even though nobody had said anything for several minutes. I listened, though. Underneath the drone of TV brides, I recognized Will’s voice and Brody’s laugh on the other side of the front door.

“We’d better go out there before they ring the doorbell and wake up my mom,” Harper said more quietly than we’d been speaking before, as if my written exchange with Tia had caused a pall to descend over the night.

“They won’t,” Tia said as loudly as ever. “Brody wouldn’t risk her wrath. They’re plotting something.”

“Then we’d better go out there before they execute their plot and get me in enormous trouble,” Harper said.

“I’m curious what they’ll do,” Tia said. “Wait.”

We waited. The only lights were still the flickering color from the TV and the soft glow from the streetlights through the window curtains. The only sound was the whisper of televised voices. Then Will’s voice again, hushed, and Brody’s.

Suddenly the fireplace seemed to explode, making me squeal and Tia jump. Sawyer grunted and rolled all the way over on Tia’s thigh with his back to the room.

Harper peered into the fireplace. She rummaged in the ash and brought out a tennis ball.

“Brilliant,” Tia said. “You’re right, Harper, we have to stop the rogue teens before they cause more harm.” She half rose. Sawyer threw both arms over his head to block out sound and light.

“Kaye, come over here right now.” Tia said it with such authority, and I was so surprised at this, that I obeyed, edging between the sofa and the coffee table. She rolled out from under Sawyer and held his upper body suspended until I sat down where she’d been. She laid Sawyer’s head in my lap.

And then . . . I’m not sure what I’d expected to happen next, but it wasn’t this: Tia and Harper left the room as fast as they could go, closing the front door carefully behind them.

Warmth washed over me, followed by a case of the shivers. I couldn’t believe, after all the teasing I’d suffered at Sawyer’s hands for the past two years, he was in my lap. The night had suddenly come way closer to a wild fantasy I’d only half acknowledged: that we would end up together.

But he
was
asleep. I was convinced now that I felt his
deep, even breaths against my hand. An Oscar-winning actor couldn’t fake it this well. And when Tia had ordered me over, it almost seemed she was calling on me to protect his rest, not to wake him or flirt with him or make Aidan jealous.

In front of the house, somewhere just beyond the door, Harper talked in a low voice. “I’m surprised you’re still up. You got hit pretty hard in the third quarter.”

“Yeah,” Brody responded. “I don’t feel that kind of thing until the next day. You have about eight hours left to use me.”

“Oh,
really
. Use you how?” Harper’s tone was knowing and provocative—like Tia’s was all the time. I’d never heard Harper speak this way before. I recalled what she’d hinted to me in the van about Brody and her exploring each other.

I’d lost my virginity with Aidan not long after Tia had lost hers with Sawyer. Harper hadn’t had sex even now. But suddenly I felt like the naive one, because Harper and Brody were in love, and my time with Aidan hadn’t meant what I thought.

Their voices faded as they wisely walked away from the house, where Harper’s mother wouldn’t overhear. I was left with only the TV wedding preparations and Sawyer’s warmth in my lap.

He rolled farther forward and slipped his hand between my legs, propping himself in that position, like my thigh was
a pillow. I suspected at first he was awake after all—but he never snickered, and if he’d meant to take liberties with me, his hand would have been six inches higher.

I put my hand in his hair, lightly so as not to rouse him, and fingered those baby-fine strands all over again, while I watched all my past goals play out on television like the most mindless reality show.

* * *

I lay stretched out on the sofa, with an actual pillow underneath my head, and covered in Harper’s psychedelic first attempt at quilting. The TV was off and the room was black, but I knew where I was because of the big window on one side of the chimney, glowing faintly. My arm hung down, touching something warm—and when I peered in that direction, it took me a few moments to recognize Sawyer on the floor right next to the sofa, with his back against it, in a sleeping bag that Harper had owned since at least third grade. My hand was on his shoulder.

Harper and Tia must have bedded us down when they came back inside. They sure hadn’t woken me up when they moved me. But they must have woken Sawyer, or he would have landed pretty hard on the floor. And after he’d given me his place on the sofa, he’d stayed as close to me as possible.

I took a satisfied breath, for once wholeheartedly enjoying the tingles in my fingers and the feeling of doing something slightly wrong, and went back to sleep.

* * *

The window was pink with sunrise. A tinny alarm sounded quietly.

“It’s mine,” Sawyer whispered, fumbling with his watch. “Lie back down.”

I was bone tired and sore from my night of cheering. I never complained because I would sound silly compared with football players like Brody getting sacked, and because my mother might use my whining as an excuse to suggest I quit. This morning Sawyer’s order to sleep more was almost as delicious as my light touch on him had been the night before. Gratefully I collapsed on the sofa again and curled into a ball, warming myself in the chilly air conditioning.

Covers rustled. A cozy weight fell across me as he draped the sleeping bag over my quilt.

“Thanks,” I muttered, snuggling lower.

A shadow descended over me. I felt his lips brush my forehead.

I listened as he crossed the room, opened the front door, locked it from the inside, and quietly shut it behind him.

* * *

“Breakfast!” Harper’s mom sang. “If you don’t get it while Sawyer’s cooking it, you don’t get it.” Before I even saw her, she’d walked out the front door, headed for the B and B.

I sat straight up into bright morning sunlight with a horrible realization, which must have been growing in my subconscious while I slept: I’d lost my back-and-forth note with Tia.

I jumped up and shook out the quilt, then the sleeping bag, then my pillow, then Sawyer’s pillow, which he’d tossed into a chair. No note. I looked under the furniture and behind the sofa. Next I scanned the tables. My note could have gotten stuffed into any one of these art books.

“Morning!” Harper said brightly, coming around the corner and blinking behind her glasses. Tia stumbled after her. Tia was not a morning person.