“Congrats on being Most Likely to Succeed,” we heard him say. “Can I borrow some money?”
“Tia asked first,” Kaye said. They walked toward Aidan, who sat on his front bumper, glowering at them, like he was annoyed with Kaye or Sawyer or both.
Join the club. I turned back to Will. “Sorry about that. You were saying? Angelica doesn’t want my junk in your trunk?”
He gave me the lopsided smile I loved. “Look, from the time I left the field to the time I made it back to my car, four people called me a dog. Everybody thinks I’ve been flirting with you but dating Angelica.”
“You have been flirting with me but dating Angelica.”
“No.” He shook his head emphatically. “I asked her to lunch on Monday. I wanted her to show me around town—you know, like I asked you to lunch first—”
I nodded with my eyebrows raised, acting like I was only politely interested, not hanging on every word about what he’d done (or not done) with Angelica.
“—but she didn’t seem to know anything about this town, even though she said she’s lived here all her life. I brought her back to band practice that evening, and except at other practices, I didn’t see her again until the party last night.”
“Where you placed your hand on her bare tummy,” I reminded him.
He pointed at me. He looked strange doing this without a drumstick in his hand. “I sat down by myself, under a tree, because I had started to feel sick from the heat.”
So my instincts hadn’t been wrong. I wanted to find Chelsea right then and vindicate myself for being concerned about his health last night. “Were you in shade when you first sat down? And then the sun moved?”
“Yes! I’m not stupid.”
“Why didn’t you go in the water to cool off?” Really, he was going to die here before he made it back to Minnesota.
“It was sunny in the water. So, Angelica sat down with me. We talked for a while, and then I lay down and closed my eyes, just hoping I’d feel better if I rested for a little bit. The next thing I knew, you were waking me up.”
“With your hand on her bare tummy,” I repeated.
“She must have pulled my arm around her,” he said.
I gave him a slow, assessing look, letting him know I was not born yesterday.
“I don’t care whether you believe me or not,” he said lightly. “You won’t go out with me, remember?”
Tingles spread across my face and chest, and I stepped a little closer to him. He hadn’t given up on me in favor of Angelica after all. But something didn’t make sense. “No, you hung out with her for the rest of the night.”
“Because I’ve been following you around like a puppy all week. It’s embarrassing.”
“Oh.” In my defense, I really had assumed he was dating Angelica. But now I saw what I’d been putting him through. I was his best friend in town, yet I’d made it clear I didn’t want to hang out with him any more than necessary. That had to be a blow to the new guy’s ego.
“I shouldn’t have hung out with her, either,” he said, “because she assumed what everybody else assumed, that she and I would go out a second time. She confronted me down on the field just now and told me she wasn’t going to date me again if I kept flirting with you. On Monday, when she asked me about you, I said we stand right next to each other throughout band practice, and we’re friends. Just friends. I guess that made sense to her then.”
I guessed not, judging from the way she’d glared across the field at me. “Right,” I said.
“But this label changes everything,” he said. “The whole senior class is basically telling her that I’m a liar. Now they’ll be watching you and me. It’s like being accused of a crime. Even if you’re proven innocent, people always suspect you when a wallet goes missing.”
I was one hundred percent sure that this analogy had nothing to do with Will’s real life. Of course this nice boy (in his own mind, at least) would never be accused of stealing a wallet. And of course he hadn’t meant to flirt with me. He had no feelings for me. It was all a big misunderstanding.
“I finally asked her out on a date,” he said. “Tonight. And that means you can’t keep your drum in my car anymore.”
Suddenly the sun was bothering me. I wished he would move over and make room for me in the shade of his trunk. “It kind of sounds like you wouldn’t have asked her out again if we hadn’t been elected to this stupid title.”
“This stupid title is all anybody here knows about me,” he said. “I’m the ass**le who took Angelica out and flirted with you. Well, now I’m not going to flirt with you, and I’m going to make it up to her.”
“What for?” I burst out. “Is this another one of those things you need to prove to your parents so they’ll let you out of the nest? You’re supposed to be elected Most Academic and have a steady girlfriend?”
“That’s enough,” he said sharply, just as he had when I’d jabbed at him about his Minnesota ex on Monday.
I felt my face turn beet red. The sun was burning a hole through the back of my neck.
He stood, turned around, and dragged my backpack out of his trunk. “Look,” he said more gently, “this is a record for me. I’ve lost three girls in one week. It’s too much.” He tried to slip the backpack onto my back for me. I kept my arms stubbornly by my sides. He pried one arm up and then the other, which would have looked suspiciously like flirting if anybody in the parking lot had been watching. Then he attempted to hand me my purse. I wouldn’t take it. He plopped it onto my drum. The snares rattled. The noise echoed against the wall of the stadium.
“All this is really heavy,” I whined. Seriously, the drum weighed twenty pounds. My purse on top of it weighed a lot too. I rarely cleaned it out, and God only knew what was in there. My backpack actually had books in it today. On a whim I’d thought it might be fun to do something unusual this weekend: homework. I poked out my bottom lip, fluttered my eyelashes, and asked Will, “Could you give me a ride over to the band room?”
He just stared at me without laughing this time, without twisting his mouth to keep from laughing. The joke was over. “See you Monday.”
Fine. I whirled around—he dodged at the last second so I didn’t whack him in the gut with the drum—and I walked through the parking lot, picking spaces to pass through that cars had already pulled out of, because the drum and I were too wide to edge through the path between two parked cars. We would have taken off some paint.