Solving for Ex (8 page)

The same way he always hugged me. Except today, when he hadn’t.

She linked her arm with his and walked with him to the table and chairs someone—I’d be willing to bet she—had already set up for our second meeting. I heard her blabbing about how she’d been concerned about how some of the team members would approach some question, and shouldn’t we do more trials to time people, and we should probably also do drills for speed, shouldn’t we?

Brendan knew all that. But the way he was looking at her, you’d think he didn’t. He was watching her with all the fascination of someone who was hearing this stuff for the first time. Someone who hadn’t led the team to State last year.

It was like Sofia was preaching the freaking Mathletics gospel, and he was buying every damn word as the God’s honest truth.

I trudged down to the front of the auditorium and settled in the chair next to Brendan. Sofia was in the seat across from him, and kept reaching across to touch him on the forearm.

“You know, I’d never actually thought of it that way before,” Brendan said to something Sofia had just been chattering about. Probably it was as insipid as the tone of her voice.

I was suddenly having trouble getting air into my lungs again. And the auditorium, which had seemed so large when we first walked in, was shrinking around me. This couldn’t be happening now. Could not. And if I could get this one thing done, it wouldn’t happen again, I was sure of it.

“So, Brendan,” I said, steeling myself. “I know that school dances are seriously lame, but sometimes something’s just too good to pass up.” I reached back to swing my bag around, just like I’d practiced a thousand times.

“Are you talking about Sadie?” Sofia piped up. God, I wished this Sadie Hawkins shirt was a mallet so I could beat her over her squeaky little head with it. “Can you believe that Brendan ever thought those things were tired? Don’t worry. I’m making him go with me. I’d never miss a tolo.”

Tears flooded my eyes. No way was this happening. No way had she asked him to Sadie Hawkins before me. No way had she found the one thing I would get the guts to do to tell Brendan how much I liked him and stomp all over it.

I must have looked like I didn’t understand what she was saying, with the blinking and all, because she lowered her head and spoke a little more loudly and slowly, and her smile got just a little bigger. “In California? We called them tolos. Girls asked the guys? Well, anyway. I told Brendan there was no excuse for missing one of the best dances ever—not even studying for math.”

She looked absolutely giddy with her own brilliance. The room spun around me and I wanted to vomit.

Then, I heard the telltale sound of the auditorium door swinging open.

Vincent strolled down the aisle, his arm wrapped around Britt’s waist. She stared up at him like a puppy dog. “So, are we doing this Mathletes thing or what?” he said, grinning. He sidled up to me and nudged his shoulder into mine. “I heard you’re the up-and-coming star.”

“I was just telling Ashley here about tolo, and how fun it is, and how me and Brendan wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Sofia squeaked.

Me and Brendan? Were they a couple now? I studied Brendan. He was shuffling around a bunch of the papers containing competition questions on his desk. If they were together, he was certainly doing a poor job of being excited about it.

“Aw, a tolo?” Vincent said. “I loved those! Too bad guys can’t go without a date.”

By this point, a couple more kids on the team had started to trickle in.

“You’ll take me, right, Ashley? Don’t let the poor new kid be left hanging at home.”

I should have made a joke about how he could have found any girl in the school he wanted to take him. But damn me, I looked up into those warm, soft eyes, and they looked at me the same way they had a week ago on the roof, like I was really beautiful, like I was something to be enchanted with.

And just like that, the shirt I’d envisioned handing across the table to Brendan a hundred times got passed into Vincent’s hands instead. “Why not?” I said shakily. “And I already have a shirt.”

“Aw, sweet!” Vincent said as he unrolled it and read it for everyone. “Do not drink and derive.” The entire little crowd cracked up. Obviously everything that came out of Vincent’s mouth was inherently more hilarious than anything I could have said. Britt stared at me with deadpan, murderous eyes, then mumbled something about the ladies’ room and stalked out through the side door. It was just a stupid Sadie Hawkins—she could cut in on a snowball dance if she wanted to, anyway.

Then my gaze caught Brendan’s. It was moving between Vincent, the shirt, and me. His expression was a perfect cross between realization, sadness, and—did I see a little embarrassment? He knew that shirt was for him. And he knew I was going to ask him. And he knew what a damn big deal that was. The only question was — what would he have said?

bickerings and jealousies

I busted through the double auditorium doors to the hallways, only then realizing how much I’d loved the little island of Mathletes practice in an otherwise empty sea of velvet-covered auditorium. The hallway was a salmon run, a frenzy of kids not really thinking about where they were going or why. Voices and conversations flowed around me like water, individual words droplets splashing against my skin.

And then a whole spray of them hit me in the face.

“Can you believe that whore Ashley Price is the one who gets to be making out with Vincent on Sadie night?” Britt’s voice was distinctively sharp among the dozens of others around me.

If I could have, I would’ve stopped dead in my tracks. It wasn’t the “making out” or even the “Vincent” that stopped me. It wasn’t even the fact that I’d never wanted to go to Sadie with him in the first place.

It was the words “whore” and “Ashley” in the same sentence. It knocked the wind out of me.

I shouldered my way through the crush of kids to my right, leaned against the wall, turned to the side so that no one could see me and so that I could catch my breath. Even through my gasps, I could hear the rest of what they were saying. “Hanging all over Brendan since the day she got here…then going after the guy we all want? Like he’s more interested in her than he is in us? Like she even stands a chance?”

It had been a long time since I’d had to deal with this kind of shit. Eight months, to be exact. Hadn’t been trash-talked about, not in broad daylight at least, since I left Williamson.

I wasn’t going after Vincent at all. Of course I was stunned a little bit every time he looked at me since I met him weeks ago—those warm eyes and thick lashes were almost too gorgeous to be real. Never mind the fact that they focused on me with interest. I was pretty, just as pretty as some of the other girls, but I didn’t dress as nicely, and didn’t run with the giggly boy-baiting crowds. Never attracted that much attention from any guy.

Until now.

I’d always thought no one cared that much about me being close to Brendan—although even thinking about the girls saying I was hanging on him made me bristle, since I never did that. Even being hopelessly in love with him, I knew the difference between acting like a guy’s best friend and throwing myself at him.

Besides, one of the reasons I’d always loved Brendan was that he didn’t act like the other popular, rich guys around those girls. He didn’t take girls out on fancy dates, and never bought expensive clothes. And he didn’t look like the famous actors in magazines. He was just Brendan. With his warm smile and floppy hair and his slightly skinny frame and broken-in jeans and incredible brain and uncannily complete understanding of me.

And, I reminded myself as I watched him walk out of a classroom and down the hall with Sofia, his interest in the drop-dead gorgeous new girl.

Either way, Brendan was the one I cared about, and Sadie Hawkins with Vincent was not worth the trouble it would apparently cause. He was cute, but not cute enough to elicit the word “whore” being spat at me for the next eight months, and probably another visit to the psych ward. I had to figure out a way to un-ask him. But first, since my pulse was already racing and I was breaking out in a sweat, I had to get the hell out of there.

The rush of students had thinned considerably in the time it had taken me to catch my breath and screw my head on straight. Still, I plowed through the middle of the hallway like that was the only way to get through. Maybe it was. Just ten more steps till I reached the outside air.

Six steps to outside. Two.

And then, echoing off the walls, someone shouted, “Hey! Ashley! Ashley Price!” Even raised, the voice was baritone and rich, soft and strong at the same time. Like velvet. I turned over my shoulder, against my better judgment, which was telling me to just get the hell out of there. Vincent was jogging up to me, his curls swaying against the bottom edge of his perfectly broken-in baseball cap just the slightest bit.

I turned back around and kept going. Outside was a shock of smoky cool brightness. The sun scorched my eyes and my field of vision, and I relied on memory alone to propel myself in the right direction to eventually hit the little car Kristin and Bruce sometimes let me take to school, if Kristin didn’t have much planned.

“Hey, Ashley!” Geez, this guy didn’t let up. His footsteps scraped after me against the gravel. Reluctantly, I slowed down. Anyone could see, in this instance at least, that he’d literally been chasing me. I reached the first line of cars and slowed until he caught up with me, then tented my hand over my eyes to look at him.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself.”

Wow, his teeth were white. And those lips…

“Well?” Why had he tried so hard to catch up with me if he had nothing to say?

“That’s it. Just…hey. I don’t know.”

I gave him a weird sideways smile, shook my head, and kept walking.

“Hey! Wait up!” Vincent caught up with me again as I hoisted my bag over my shoulder, grunting. He held out his hand. “Let me.”

I rolled my eyes, but my shoulder did ache from the four huge textbooks straining the canvas. I held the strap out to him, and he smiled as he took the bag.

Suddenly, I felt a lot lighter.

Vincent said, “I just thought, you know, since we’re going to the dance together, we could talk. Get to know each other. Or I could at least walk you to your car.”

“Yeah…about that…maybe I should give the other girls their fair shot at you.”

Vincent laughed, almost a snort. “Am I a target?”

“Well, to them you are. And I know you don’t know me that well, but I really am not a fan of putting myself in the path of shooting arrows. Especially when they’re that sharp.”

“What are you so worked up about? It’s just Sadie Hawkins. Just one night.”

“Look, Vincent. It’s not you, okay? You’re…” not Brendan. “You’re great. It’s just that…everyone wants to go out with you. Every girl here wishes that she was the one taking you to Sadie.”

Brendan would have shrugged it off. He would have pretended that wasn’t true. But Vincent just cocked his head a little to the left, smiled, and said, “Yeah. But you’re the one I wanted to say yes to.”

I started to hyperventilate a little. This was no good. Not at all.

“Look, are you having second thoughts?”

“No…I mean yes…”

The look of shock on Vincent’s face would’ve made me giggle if I wasn’t so completely freaked out.

“I mean…no.” I don’t know what came over me then, but something about the way he looked at me made me feel so damn confident that I touched his shoulder. “No, don’t take that the wrong way, just…there’s only one person who knows what I’m about to tell you. Can you keep a secret?”

He stood up straighter, and a serious look swept down over his face. “Absolutely.”

“I left my old school because…well…everyone heard that I slept with some guy.”

“So?”

“Well, ‘some guy’ was the captain of the lacrosse team…”

“…and he had a girlfriend?”

I nodded and swallowed hard. “Yeah. The head cheerleader.”

He leaned back against the wall and raked his hand through his hair, blowing out a low whistle. “Shit, Ashley. How’d you get caught up in that?”

I felt my face screw up, and suddenly Vincent looked serious again. “Did he…you know…force you?”

“No…no! That’s the thing. Nothing happened.”

“Wait. Like…you didn’t sleep with him?”

I shook my head, stared at my shoes, tried to keep the tears from filling my eyes. “Didn’t even bat my eyes at him.”

“Okay, so where did the rumor come from?”

“His girlfriend’s best friend. I wouldn’t help her cheat on a math final.”

“And for that, she got you burned so bad you had to leave the school?”

The tears spilled out now—I watched a couple fall through the air and darken the floor at my feet. “Yeah. Tore my textbooks out of the spine, superglued my locker shut. Slashed my tires. Egged my house. Spray-painted it, too. Stole my homework and used it for toilet paper. Stuffed my clothes in the toilet during gym. Harassed me online. Made a website. Hijacked a billboard.”

“Are you kidding me?” Vincent stood up again. I could barely see him through all the tears pooling in front of my eyes. The lump in my throat blocked any words from coming out, so I just looked him in the eyes and nodded. I think that was the first time he realized I was crying. It must have been, because he stepped forward and wrapped me in his arms.