“That was my sister Izzy!” I said with more enthusiasm than I’d felt about her in three or four years.
He pointed at me. “I thought . . . well, I did and I didn’t. You look a lot alike, but you’re completely different.”
I nodded. Izzy wasn’t funny.
“Are you two close? You’ve never mentioned her.”
“We used to be, a long time ago. I have three older sisters, and all of us were close when they lived at home. They’ve moved out, though. And I had an argument with Izzy at the beginning of the summer. I stopped in the shop and asked if she needed help taking care of her kids on my nights off from the Crab Lab—”
“Kids?” Will asked. “How old is she?”
“Twenty-two.” I glossed over his real question, which was How old was she the first time she got pregnant? Because the answer was Younger than me. “Anyway,” I said, “she laughed at me. Admittedly, I’m the last person in the world anybody would want to take care of their kids, but if I offer to help, I don’t want to be laughed at.”
He frowned. “And then what?”
“And then nothing. I haven’t seen her since then.”
“Even though you worked just down the street from her all summer?” When I nodded, he said, “Wow, that’s some chip on your shoulder.”
Yeah, I guessed it was.
The bell rang to start first period. As it clanged, instead of facing the front, he reached across my desk to cover my hand with his. “Have a good senior year, Tia.”
“Awww!” I said, a bit mortified that I seemed so pitiful and needed this boost, but also touched that he would think of lifting me up this way, when he was the one who’d moved clear across the country and had to start over. “You too.”
As he turned around, Ms. Reynolds was already passing out write-in ballots for the Senior Superlatives elections. Mostly I filled in the names of my friends according to the titles I figured they wanted, until I got to Most Academic. There I jotted my own name on the female side, because I knew I wouldn’t get it, and I didn’t want old Angelica to have it.
At the last second I felt bad about this. The little egghead deserved (and probably coveted) that title. If the tally was close, my throwaway vote could have denied her dream, all because I was bitter about her boyfriend, whom I myself had turned down. But by the time I made a move to snatch back my ballot, Will had put it on the bottom and passed the stack to the guy in front of him.
His was on top, completely blank. I’d tried to tutor him on who was who in the senior class, but not everybody remembered stuff the first time they heard it like I did. I doubted he knew anybody’s full name except mine.
We didn’t get another chance to talk during class. As I’d suspected, he was one of those people who actually did calculus during calculus. But I also had AP history and AP English and study hall/lunch with him. Angelica didn’t. I hung out with him during those periods so that he had a friend.
In my classes without him, and while traveling the halls, I heard girls talking about how hot he was, and how stuck up. It didn’t help that he had a Yankee accent people couldn’t quite place, like an elderly snowbird. When I heard them talking behind his back, I tried to help him out by explaining that he was from Minnesota. This elicited moans of “Minnesoooooooda!” which did nothing for his popularity.
It also didn’t help that he had his eyes on his phone all the time. And since Angelica didn’t have her eyes on hers, I figured he wasn’t anxiously awaiting her texts. He was probably obsessively checking his friends’ photos for more evidence of his ex gallivanting with his so-called best friend. But he’d told me about that disaster in confidence. It wasn’t my info to share. And if he hadn’t shared it with Angelica, I didn’t know what it would do to their relationship when she found out that she was the rebound girl. I didn’t like him dating her, but I wasn’t going to sabotage it—at least, in a way that he would know about—and make my own relationship with him worse.
I knew about his ex and how lost and lonely he was, because I’d stood next to him in band camp. But he dropped plenty of other hints that he wasn’t the prick everyone made him out to be. There was the dancing, for one thing. He might have seemed serious, but he was often dancing. Not flailing like a freshman at a teen club, mind you, but understatedly boogying to his own beat. It was the drummer in him. Anytime music came on—rap spilling out of a car outside the school, or pop blasting over the loudspeakers in the gym for a girls’ PE class—he was part of it somehow. It might be his head or his toe or just one pointer finger tapping on his thigh, but he was beating out the music as if it was his own.
There was his shyness, for another thing. When someone approached and spoke to him—someone besides me—his lips parted, but he stayed silent. A stricken look entered his blue eyes, and it took him five seconds longer than it would have taken most people without a speech impediment to come up with an answer. He wasn’t stuck up. He just had a hard time meeting new people. Transferring to a new school must have been his nightmare. I was more sure than ever that, driven by fury at his ex, he’d been bluesing for a hookup when he bravely walked into Brody’s party the first night.
Kaye and Harper tried to talk to him in the halls and commented to me later how hard he was to draw out. I felt like I needed to defend him more than ever. But I couldn’t, not to them, because they’d think I still liked him despite not wanting a boyfriend, and then they would never leave me alone. The worst thing in the world would be for those two to decide to “help me through it.” I couldn’t stand to obsess about Will any more than I already did.
It pained me to know that my friends didn’t like him. I’d tried and failed to help him fit in. But a sneaky part of me enjoyed knowing things about him that they didn’t. I doubted his ex had noticed his fingers drumming on his desk to any little beat. Surely if she had, she would have waited for him to come home to Minnesota next May and never let him go. Angelica might have noticed, but I couldn’t picture her appreciating his love for a beat the way I did. Only I understood him, and in some small way, in a tiny warped corner of my mind, that made him mine.
6
“YOU’VE BEEN LYING TO ME,” Will said in my ear. A chill shot down my neck in the blazing afternoon.
I straightened and stared at him. We’d both been retrieving our drums from the trunk of his car. His 1970s Mustang gave away, yet again, that this uptight boy had a wild streak. Years of Minnesota winters had rusted the wheel wells like he’d been driving through acid, which was why he’d been able to afford the car, and why his parents had wanted him to leave it behind.