Employees kept the lights out on the restaurant’s back porch so they could do what they wanted without being seen from the alley. I was all the way up the steps before I could make out Sawyer’s shape in the darkness. When he saw me, he put down his beer. I walked into his open arms.
“Things didn’t work out with Will?” he asked, his breath warm in my ear. “You wouldn’t be hugging me otherwise.”
I sighed as I collapsed on the bench beside him. “I broke up with him.”
“Why?” Sawyer asked.
“Violet finally decided to come home, and we went to get her, and . . . I don’t know. I guess I started comparing Will and Ricky.”
“Will is not a shit like Ricky,” Sawyer said. “I am a shit like Ricky.”
This seemed like a new low of self-deprecation, even for Sawyer. I nodded toward his beer. “Starting early, aren’t you? How many of those have you had?”
He didn’t respond to my question but asked, “What happened then?”
“I cleaned my entire house.”
“Oh, poor baby,” he cooed. “You are upset. I’ve got something for you.” He pulled a joint from his pocket. I watched him light it, closing his eyes against the smoke. He took a long toke and handed it to me.
I held it between my fingers and looked at it. This was what I needed: to forget a problem that couldn’t be solved. But my brain was stressed, which put my body in organization mode. It did not want this weed. I needed to take my hit so Sawyer’s pot didn’t burn down and go to waste, but every atom inside me screamed to hand the joint back.
Sawyer snatched it from me. When I looked at him in surprise, he was staring past me. I turned. Will was on the top step.
“That’s exactly what I thought,” Will said. He jogged down the stairs again.
“Go.” Sawyer nodded at Will, urging me to follow him. “Go, go, go.”
I ran after Will, leaping down the last two stairs in my effort to catch him before he reached his car at the end of the alley. Sweating in the hot night, I grabbed his elbow.
He stopped short and whirled to face me. “Don’t. I told you that I was done with you. You’re just like Beverly. When my mom said you came by, I thought maybe my instincts were wrong, but now I see I was right about you the whole time. I left town for five minutes and she was cheating on me. You and I have one little fight—”
“Little?” I broke in. “I put a lot of effort into that fight.”
He raised his voice for some reason. “—and you just move on like nothing happened, and go back to doing drugs and God knows what else with Sawyer De Luca.”
“I was not,” I said emphatically. “I was in the process of politely refusing a joint. Even if I had taken a hit, calling that ‘doing drugs’ makes it sound like I was shooting up heroin.”
“It’s the same,” he said. “You and Beverly are the same. I don’t want you back now that I know what you’re like.” He stalked to the driver’s seat of his car, slammed the door, and roared out of the alley.
I was left standing in a cloud of the Mustang’s exhaust, the smell of frying food, and an utterly empty late summer night.
17
“DON’T YOU LOOK NICE,” MS. NAKAMOTO said as I sat down in the chair facing her desk. She closed the door on the noise of people dragging their instruments out of the storage room for practice.
I supposed I did look nice. I’d set my alarm for school so I had time to iron my dress this morning. I’d fixed my hair and put on makeup. Violet had cooked me a balanced breakfast. I’d gotten my calculus homework finished during class since I wasn’t flirting with Will or even sitting near him. I’d taken great notes in history. I’d generally felt like I was about to lose my grip on my sanity.
And didn’t Ms. Nakamoto sound nice? She’d never spoken so pleasantly to me before, possibly because she was usually yelling at me across a football field to stop screwing around.
“Thank you,” I said politely, as though I was pleased with her comment and my brain had been eaten by zombies.
“That usually means something’s gone wrong in your life,” she said. “Is there a problem you want to tell me about?”
“There is a problem,” I affirmed, “but I don’t want to tell you about it.”
“All right, then,” she said, because she was used to this kind of thing from me. “My news probably isn’t going to help. I called you in to let you know that Will Matthews has challenged you for drum captain.”
“Really!” I crowed. Will was fulfilling his promise. He still cared about me!
Wait a minute. He just wanted his drum captain position back. I amended my previous statement: “Really.”
“It’s not going to happen,” Ms. Nakamoto said. “I told him no.”
“But that’s the rule,” I protested.
“All rules are at my discretion,” she said firmly. “We have four contests coming up this season. We’re not going to ruin the cohesiveness of the drum line by switching leadership every week.”
“I don’t want to be drum captain,” I whined. “I challenged Will, but it was a mistake.”
“Correction: You meant to throw it, like every other challenge, but you made a mistake and played a perfect exercise.”
I was afraid I would get in worse trouble if I copped to this. But I didn’t want to lie to her either, so I sat there blinking.
“You’re crafty, I’ll admit,” Ms. Nakamoto said. “I didn’t get wise to you until Señorita Higgenbotham told me you made a C in her class even though you’re bilingual. And now there’s talk that you’ve scored high enough to be a National Merit Scholar. A faculty member would have to write you a letter of recommendation, and we’re not sure we can do that in good conscience. Why do you sabotage yourself, Tia?”
I uncrossed and recrossed my legs, because that’s what respectable women did when they were in a meeting and wearing a dress. I had seen this on TV. “I don’t want to be in charge and ruin everything.”
“How have you ruined the drum line in the past week? You haven’t.”
Damn it. “Will would be better.”
“I have no reason to think so,” she said. “I was happy you were drum captain, and I wasn’t looking for anyone to replace you when he showed up. You know when you impressed me?”