He laughed. “Is that a real award?”
“No, we don’t give awards that would make girls cry. I’ll probably get Tallest.” That wasn’t a real one either.
He cocked his head at me. “Funniest?”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s like getting voted Miss Congeniality in a beauty pageant. It’s a consolation prize.”
A line appeared between his brows. He rubbed his thumb gently across my lips. “Sexiest.”
“You obviously haven’t surveyed the whole senior class.”
“I don’t have to.”
Staring into his eyes, which crinkled at the corners as he smiled, I knew he was handing me a line. And I loved this pirate pickup of his. I let my gaze fall to his lips, willing him to kiss me.
“Hi there, new guy!” Aidan said as he burst out the door. He crossed the porch in two steps and held out his hand for Will to shake. “Aidan O’Neill, student council president.”
I made a noise. It went something like “blugh” and was loud enough for Aidan to hear. I knew this because he looked at me with the same expression he gave me when I made fun of his penny loafers. He was Kaye’s boyfriend, so I tried to put up with him. But we’d been assigned as partners on a chemistry paper last year, and any semblance of friendship we might have had was ruined when he tried to correct me incorrectly during my part of the presentation. I’d told him to be right or sit down. The only thing that made Aidan madder than someone challenging him was someone challenging him in public.
“Blugh” wasn’t a sufficient warning for Will not to talk to him, apparently. Aidan sat down on Will’s other side and launched into an overview of our school’s wonders that Minnesota probably had never heard of, such as pep rallies and doughnut sales.
“Time for everybody to get lost,” Brody called. “My mom will be home from the Rays game in a few minutes.”
“Thanks for hosting,” I told him.
“Always a pleasure. Looks like this time you may have more pleasure than you can handle, though.” He nodded toward the stairs, where Sawyer was waving at me.
Sawyer held up his thumb and pointer together, which meant, I have weed. Want to toke up?
I shook my head in a small enough motion that Will didn’t notice, I hoped. Translation: No, I’m taking Will home if I can swing it.
Sawyer raised one eyebrow and lowered the other, making a mad scientist face. It meant, You’d rather go home with this guy than get high with me? You have finally lost your marbles.
I raised both eyebrows: We have an agreement. We stick together unless something better comes along. This is something better.
He flared his nostrils—Well, I never!—and turned away. He might give me a hard time about it when I saw him next, but Sawyer and I never really got mad at each other, because why would you get mad at yourself?
I turned to rescue Will from Aidan and saw to my horror that Aidan was disappearing back into the house. Will stared right at me with a grim expression, as if he’d witnessed the entire silent conversation between Sawyer and me, understood it, and didn’t like it. “Don’t let me keep you,” he said flatly.
Damn Sawyer! We would laugh about this later if I wasn’t so hot for the boy sitting next to me. This was not funny.
Heart thumping, I tried to save my night with Will. There wasn’t any time to waste. If word that Brody was closing down the party got inside to Kaye and Harper before I left, they would try to stop me from hooking up with the new guy. They might have sent him back to meet me, but they wouldn’t want me leaving with him. They didn’t approve of Sawyer, either, but at least they knew him. Will was a wild card. They would find this frightening. I found him perfect.
I slid my hand onto his knee and said, “I’d rather go with you. Could you walk me home?”
And then some.
2
“FLORIDA ISN’T AGREEING WITH YOU so far?” I asked Will, swinging his hand as we strolled down the sidewalk toward my neighborhood, old houses lining the street, palm trees and live oaks overhead.
“It’s too soon to judge,” he said. “So far it seems hot and weird.”
“Are you sure that’s Florida and not me?”
The warm notes of his chuckle sent tingles racing up my arm. “You’re not weird. That’s weird.” He nodded toward the crazy monster face carved into the stump by Mrs. Spitzer’s house.
“That’s not weird either,” I said. “That’s artistic. Just ask the Chamber of Commerce. We have a large number of creative people in town, but that doesn’t make us any stranger than a town in Minneso—”
We both stopped short. An enormous white bird, about a yard tall from feet to beak, stood in the center of the sidewalk in front of us.
Will arched his brows, waiting for me to take back my protest that Florida wasn’t weird.
“That is a snowy egret,” I said self-righteously. “They are very common. In Minnesota you have moose wandering the streets.”
“You’re mixing us up with an old fictional TV show about Alaska. Get behind me. I’ll protect you.” He nobly placed himself between me and the egret as we edged into the street to go around it, then hopped up on the sidewalk again. Will kept looking back at the bird, though, like he thought it would stalk us. “Honestly, more than the weirdness, it’s the heat that’s getting to me. Right now in Duluth it’s probably in the fifties.”
I shook my head. “If I lived there, I would lose so many parkas at parties.”
“Parkas!” He gave me a quizzical smile. “You don’t really have an autumn here, do you?”
“Define ‘autumn.’ ”
“The leaves turn colors.”
“No, we don’t have that.”
“Hmm. It doesn’t even get cool?”
“Define ‘cool.’ ”
“Below freezing.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s cool ?” I exclaimed. “We would call out the National Guard for that. But it has gotten below freezing here before.”
“When?”
I waved away the question, because I didn’t know the answer. “There’s probably a plaque commemorating the event on the foundation of the Historical Society building. Turn here.” We walked up my street. Even if the power to the streetlights had gone out and the moon and the stars had been blocked by clouds, I would have known when we approached my house from the sound of the crispy magnolia leaves strewn across the sidewalk. Several years’ worth.