I said calmly, “I see. And your marching band was called the Marching Wrath of God?”
“Please tell me this band isn’t the Marching Pelicans.” He sounded horrified.
“Yes,” I said with gusto. We weren’t really. We were called the Pride of Pinellas County. “It’s weird, but no weirder than lutefisk.” Another score, courtesy of lessons on state trivia in Mr. Tomlin’s third-grade class.
“Oh!” Will gaped at me in outrage. “No lutefisk jokes. That is low.”
“Just preparing you for when school starts.” Sawyer would be at the top of the list for making lutefisk jokes.
“The Tampa Bay Rays have a good name,” Will said contemplatively. “Stingrays kill somebody every once in a while, right?”
“Well, they used to have a manta ray on the logo, but now the Rays are supposed to be sun rays,” I informed him. “Like that’s dangerous.”
He took off his hat, wiped his brow with his forearm, and put his hat back on. “Depends on whether you’re from Minnesota.”
I laughed heartily at this. “I could be wrong. Maybe they’re just a bunch of guys named Ray. Plumbers.”
“And their logo is an exposed butt crack.”
I pointed at him with one drumstick. “Perfect! We should clue Sawyer in. That would make a great look for the team mascot.”
Will squinted at me over the top of his sunglasses. “Sawyer?”
“Yeah. He’s the school mascot, our dangerous pelican.”
“Sawyer, your boyfriend?” He gave me what I imagined was a steely glare through his shades.
I’d made clear last night that I didn’t have a boyfriend. And I thought I’d made clear—as clear as I could make a relationship when it was admittedly a bit cloudy to begin with—that if I did acquire a boyfriend, Sawyer wouldn’t be it.
But in Will’s voice I’d heard that same bitterness from a few minutes earlier. He pressed his lips tightly together. I was doomed to stand next to this guy for the rest of the year, and he was making sure that I knew at every turn how jealous he felt.
I didn’t want a guy acting like a boyfriend any more than I wanted the real thing. But as we watched each other, tingles spread across my chest as if he was kissing my neck.
An electronic beep interrupted us. “Hold on,” he said, raising one finger. Obviously he thought it was important that we come right back to this stare-down when he finished his other business. He pulled his phone from his pocket and glanced casually at the screen. As soon as he saw it, though, his jaw dropped. He tapped the phone with his thumb again.
“Fuck!” he shouted in a sharp crack that bounced against the bleachers. He turned toward the goalpost, reared back, and hurled his phone—quite an athletic feat, considering he was still wearing his snare drum.
“Oh, God,” I exclaimed, “what’s the matter?”
Travis said, “Nice arm,” and Jimmy agreed, “Forty, fifty yarder.”
Will pointed at them with both drumsticks. Afraid he was going to launch into a tirade and get in trouble with Ms. Nakamoto, I put a hand on his chest to stop him.
Too late. Everyone in the band had turned around to gape at him. The ones who hadn’t heard his curse whispered questions to the people standing next to them about what he’d said. And Ms. Nakamoto had definitely heard him.
“Hey!” she hollered, hurrying over from a row of trombones. She must have forgotten Will’s name, because if she’d known it, instead of “Hey!” she would have shouted an outraged Mr. Matthews! She hustled right up to the front of his snare drum and frowned at him, hands on her hips, whistle swinging on a cord. She was at least a foot shorter than him. “Is that how you talked during band practice where you came from?”
“No.” He should have said “No, ma’am,” but I didn’t think that was how people talked in Minnesota either, and he hadn’t been here long enough to know better. I hoped she wouldn’t hold it against him.
“Do you think that’s appropriate language for the drum captain?” she demanded. “Do you think you’re a good role model for freshmen when you lose your cool like that? Because I can give the responsibility right back to Ms. Cruz if you can’t handle it.”
“Let’s not be hasty,” I spoke up.
“I’m really sorry,” Will told her. On top of his drum, he gripped his sticks so tightly that his knuckles turned white. “I got this . . . this . . .”
“Upsetting message on your phone, when phones aren’t allowed in band practice?” she prompted him.
Officially we had a rule against phones, but Ms. Nakamoto didn’t normally enforce it because a lot of band camp was spent hurrying up and waiting for something to happen. She wouldn’t have come down on him like this if he hadn’t hollered the F-word an hour after becoming drum captain.
But I could save him. Placing one hand on his back, I leaned forward and said quietly to Ms. Nakamoto, “We’ll just go for a short walk, okay? Will moved here yesterday all the way from Minnesota. It’s a big adjustment, and things aren’t going smoothly.” I assumed from his reaction to the message that this was the understatement of the century.
Ms. Nakamoto turned her frown on me, then pursed her lips. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses, but I hoped I’d caught her off guard with my offer of help, which was probably a first for me in three years of high school band.
She muttered something and turned away. Not wasting any time lest she change her mind, I gave Will a little push in the direction of his phone.
“While you’re over there, see if you can find some change I dropped at practice last year,” Jimmy said.
Will turned to him angrily, his drum knocking against mine. He was beyond caring, obviously, and anything was liable to set him off now. The bad-boy hockey player I’d seen in him hadn’t been entirely my imagination.
I whispered to Jimmy, “Shut up. You don’t want me back in charge, do you?” I put my arm around Will’s waist—the way he’d touched me at the party the night before—and steered him downfield.
4
WHILE MS. NAKAMOTO WENT BACK to issuing orders through her microphone, and the giggles of the clarinets faded behind us, Will and I walked toward the goalpost and ditched our drums. I spotted his phone in the grass and pointed it out to him. He didn’t move any closer but instead stared at it in distaste, his nostrils flared like he didn’t want to touch it. I plucked it out of the grass for him. It wasn’t his phone, though. It was one half of its plastic cover, emblazoned with a logo of a sunset behind evergreen trees and the words MINNESOTA WILD.