Taking Flight (15 page)

“But no one will say that stuff to my face anymore, at least,” Cammie continued. “Not the cheerleader who was on the Homecoming court with her quarterback boyfriend last year.”

I stared at her as she yanked at a patch of grass almost angrily, and I felt strangely at peace. I understood her, and I knew instinctively that I did, and that I understood her better than her brother and her parents and her classmates. And there was something really,
really
nice about understanding someone in a way everyone else had yet to.

“Sucks that we can’t do them all over again, huh?” I asked her, shooting her a wry smile. Past her, Aerosmith pawed at the ground near the tree he’d been tied to. I looked away from her and around at the clearing, and then up at the sky above us. It was bright blue today. It made me feel like things were going to be okay here. Like
I
was
going to be okay. “I like it here, Cammie. We should come here more often, okay?”

She opened her hand and let the grass flutter back to the ground at her side. “Even if you have to ride a horse to get here?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Yeah.”

Chapter Ten

“No cell phones or any kind of electronic devices, guys, and keep your eyes on your own paper. You have until the end of the class period. Go ahead and turn ‘em over.”

I flipped the sheet of paper on my desk onto its front side and immediately felt a sense of relief. Multiple choice. I scanned the first question: “
Determine the tangential speed of a wheel in circular motion given that its radius is .5m and the time it takes to complete a rotation is 2 seconds.”

I stared. Then I reread the question and stared some more.

I spent a lot of time doing that over the course of the period. Some of the questions had ridiculous answer choices I could eliminate, and others were actually solvable, but I knew right away that I hadn’t studied enough to do well.

Maddie finished the test really early, and she was the only student our teacher allowed to leave the class after turning it in. I’m not sure if the special treatment was due to the fact that her dad was the school principal or if it was just because she was really smart and only planned on going the library anyway, but either way, she gathered her things, murmured a sincere “Good luck” to me, and then left the class with almost an hour to go until lunch.

And so, I stared. There were five or six questions I wound up feeling really confident about out of the fifteen on the test and about three more I was split fifty-fifty on, but the rest felt like complete guesses. I didn’t feel well about how I’d done after I’d finished, but it helped that after Cammie turned in her test, she looked nervous too. I knew she’d do well, so maybe I’d also done better than I thought.

As I handed my paper over, an idea struck me, and I murmured, “Do you mind if I go ahead and leave now? It’s an emergency.”

I received a knowing look in response, and then, “Go ahead. Send Mr. Marshall my regards.”

“Thanks.” I grabbed my stuff, left the room, and then immediately headed for the library. I was curious as to what exactly Maddie did in there every day, and I knew spending time with her had to beat sitting in my Physics class for another twenty minutes.

As I entered, a woman in her late sixties behind the front desk immediately zeroed in on me and croaked, “Sign in here, please.”

There was a small, open area nearby, filled with lounge chairs surrounding a table covered in magazines, and Maddie looked over at us from her spot in one of the chairs. “Oh, Ms. Harris, she’s with me.” She beckoned me over and I sat down beside her, looking around at the rest of the library as Ms. Harris let us be.

Shelves of books lined the room, and there appeared to be several other lounge sections just like ours. The center of the room was filled with computer desks. There were a few students there using the computers, but otherwise, the room was mostly empty.

“So you’re friends with the librarian,” I observed, smirking over at Maddie. She had a thick book in her hands that looked almost as big as her head.

“It’s one more friend you don’t have,” she teased, shifting in her chair to face me. “What are you doing here?”

“I just wanted to see what all the hype was about. You stay in here every day instead of eating, so I figured it had to be amazing.”

She forced a laugh. “So how do you think you did on the test?”

“Not too hot. If I bombed it I might have to go back to Home Ec,” I admitted. “I can’t make up, like, a forty on a test with only two tests to do it.”

“You could. We’d just have to study together a
lot
.”

“Every day,” I agreed, nodding. That made her laugh loudly enough to get hushed by Ms. Harris. I raised an eyebrow at her. “Uh oh. I think you may be fighting with your friend.”

“Shut up,” she hissed, smacking my arm, but she had a grin on her face. “You’re gonna get me banned.”

“What do you do in here anyway?” I looked around again. “Don’t you run out of ways to pass the time?”

“Well, there’s always homework,” she said. “I do that first. Then, if there’s time left over, I’ll read. I only have to kill a half-hour.”

“What are you reading?”

She colored slightly, which only made me more curious. Then, grudgingly, she showed me the massive book in her hands. “It’s not what it looks like.”

“The M encyclopedia,” I read aloud, and then looked to her judgmentally. “Ew. And I thought Cammie’s reading habits were bad.”

“I’m only reading it because we’re studying the Mongols in my history class right now, so I looked up their entry for some background info.”

“Dig the hole deeper, girl.” I waved my hand in a circle, gesturing for her to keep going.

She rolled her eyes at me, still smiling. “Whatever. How is Cammie bad, then?”

“Oh, she likes that guy with the romance novels. Ryan Hansen?”

Maddie raised her hand to her mouth to smother a laugh, and we got another suspicious glare from Ms. Harris. I was a little confused; I didn’t find it
that
funny, but Maddie seemed to really think that what I’d said was hilarious. “There’s no way. That’s the guy that did-?”

“
A Lifetime of Karma
or something like that, yeah.”

She shook her head emphatically. “No way.”

“Right? So cheesy.”

“No, I seriously mean ‘no way’,” she insisted. “She told you she’s into that crap?”

“She has the posters up on her walls.”

Maddie raised both eyebrows at me, then exhaled loudly and shook her head, going back to her book. “Wow. Okay.”

“Anyway.” I shifted, hoping she wasn’t truly planning on going back to reading while I was sitting right here. “I was thinking we could hang out tonight. Are your parents gonna be home?”

“Right after school, yeah,” she told me. “But not later tonight. They go out to dinner together every Friday.” She looked over at me. “We could kill some time together right after school, maybe go take a drive to a restaurant and then come back at a time when my parents won’t be home?”

That sounded a lot like a date, but I’d take it over nothing. “Okay.”

“Are you gonna be allowed to come alone this time?”

“Hopefully,” I sighed. “If I can’t come alone, I won’t meet you.”

“That’s probably better,” Maddie admitted. “I really don’t wanna deal with Cammie being mopey third wheel again.”

I frowned a little, instinctively reacting negatively to her description of Cammie. I felt slightly protective of Cammie after what she’d told me earlier this week. I couldn’t help but think a lot of her peers had inaccurate impressions of her, Maddie included. “Okay.”

The bell rang minutes later, signaling the start of lunch, and so I left Maddie in the library and headed down to the cafeteria, where I met Fiona and Nate at our usual table.

As we sat down to eat, Fiona eyed me curiously, in a way that made me feel distinctively uncomfortable. “Hey, Lauren, can I ask you a question?” she asked, and when she had my attention, she finished, “What’s your last name?”

“Hey, that’s right,” Nate jumped in. “We never even got your full name.”

“I never got yours, either,” I said, and he grinned.

“Nate Davis. Fiona’s last name is Lawson.” They both looked at me expectantly, though Fiona seemed much more interested than Nate.

“Lennox,” I told them. Fiona’s eyebrows shot up, and then she sat back in her seat, going strangely silent.

“Cool,” Nate said. “Lauren Lennox. Has a certain flare to it. So anyway, are you going to the Homecoming dance next Friday night?”

“Probably not,” I said.

“Maybe you should,” he told me. “Your roommate’s winning Queen.”

“How do you know that for sure?”

Fiona finally spoke again, there. “Cammie and Peter are
that
couple. They’ll probably snag the cutest couple superlative this year too, if she hasn’t cheated on him before then.”

“Cheated?” I echoed dumbly. “That doesn’t seem like Cammie.”

“Well, she’s done it before,” Nate said, shrugging.

I sat in silence with them for a moment. That couldn’t be right. “Are you sure she would do something like that? Maybe they’re just rumors.”

“Nah, they got in this big fight about it in the middle of the hallway last year,” Nate recalled. “It was a big deal. But it was a long time ago so I guess the dude’s over it by now. Not sure how, but I guess it’s hard to let go of a hot cheerleader.” He caught the look Fiona shot him and backtracked. “If you’re into that, I mean.”

“Why would she do that?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“Like I’d know. But anyway, now she kind of has a reputation for that kind of stuff,” Nate replied simply, but that only left me more confused. “Maybe you should ask her yourself.”

“Maybe,” I echoed, and then ate my lunch silently.

*   *   *

David shut down my plans with Maddie that afternoon, and I was forced to grit my teeth and take it well as he told me, “I know you’re probably not happy with the decision, but like I said: you just need to give it a little time.” He paused, and then decided, “You know what? How about I let you and Cammie go to the football game next Friday alone?”

“It’s not alone if I’m with Cammie,” I pointed out sourly. She was quiet on David’s other side as we walked to his car in school parking lot.

“Cammie will be on the field during the game,” David said. “Aren’t they announcing Homecoming King and Queen afterward too?”

“Yep,” Cammie spoke up, nodding her head. “There’s the game, then they’ll call the whole Homecoming Court onto the field and announce the King and Queen. And then later on is the dance.”

“Tiffany’s taking care of giving you a ride, right?” David asked, and Cammie confirmed with another nod. He looked to me, proud of himself. “There you go. You can do that. I won’t be at the game or the dance.”

“Except I don’t wanna go to a football game
or
to Homecoming,” I argued. “And Cammie’s still playing babysitter.”

“I’ll be on the field,” Cammie echoed. “And I think you won’t regret coming.” She shot me a knowing look, then, while David’s attention was distracted, and I responded with a confused look. I could tell she was trying to tell me something, but I didn’t know what it was.

“Okay,” I gave in uncertainly. “Maybe I’ll go.”

“Good,” David replied, smiling. “I bet you’ll have fun.”

*   *   *

“A lot of us don’t actually go the Homecoming Dance,” Cammie explained later that night, as I was getting ready for bed. I shot her a confused look, and she continued, “I have to be at the football game, since I’m up for Queen, but afterward, there’s supposed to be this party at one of Peter’s friend’s houses.”

“So that’s where all the cool kids are going,” I realized with a laugh. “Okay. Whatever. I didn’t peg you for the partying type, though.”

“I’m a good dancer,” she told me, grinning. Her grin died with my next statement.

“Your parents don’t know very much about you, do they?”

She stared at me for a moment, and then cleared her throat and slid under the covers in her bed. “Why do you say that?” she asked eventually.

“I mean, you’re not some terrible kid, from what I can tell, but you’re not exactly an angel, either. Nate told me today that you’ve cheated on Peter before. Is that part of the reason you work so hard to keep him around?”

She went stony-faced, and I saw her swallow hard. “Why were you guys talking about me and Peter?”

“I don’t know; it just came up.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I mean, what you do in your relationship is your business, but I just didn’t think it seemed like you. And after what you told me before, I thought maybe it was just a rumor.”

She sighed, deeply, and then shook her head. “Not a rumor. It’s a long story. And before you ask, I’m not explaining it. Just… it’s not as simple as it sounds.”

“Okay. I’m satisfied,” I told her honestly. “If you say it wasn’t simple, then it wasn’t.”

She looked over at me gratefully. “Thanks. And, uh… can you not mention that to anyone in my family?”

I shot her a bemused smile. “And you wonder why I think they don’t know you.”

*   *   *

I was due to get my first taste of real farm work the next day, per my new agreement with David. Cammie and I headed out to Aerosmith’s stall, where, much to my disdain, she gave me my first lesson in horse grooming.

“This is a curry comb.” She held up this weird spirally-looking thing that didn’t really look like a comb at all. I stared. “I use this one first. Then after that are the hard brush and the soft brush. Usually when I’m done with those, I’ll brush his mane and his tail. And at some point, I’ll use a horse pick to pick his hooves.”

“You do all of that every week?” I asked, alarmed.

She laughed. “You have to do it every day! Or at least a few times a week. My mom does it for me some days, if she doesn’t have much else to do, but otherwise it’s my daily responsibility. Whenever you see me going out here to ride him, chances are I’m doing all of this beforehand. You also have to clean the hooves again after you ride.”