As my too-loud notes echoed around the stadium, I felt that high I loved so much. Playing drum stressed me out a little, because there was no room for mistakes, and mistakes were pretty much my modus operandi. But when I was under pressure, I loved to put things in their proper places, like bubbling in the correct answers on a standardized test. Beating a snare drum was the ultimate pastime if you occasionally enjoyed precision in your otherwise scatterbrained life.
But this time there was a catch. I had to be very careful to make a mistake. Otherwise I’d end up right back where I’d started, as drum captain. And because everyone else had already taken a turn without me here to listen, I didn’t know whether to make a bunch of mistakes or just one. In the end I settled for missing the syncopated part that tended to trip people up in the middle. I’d never heard Will play, but something told me my pirate hadn’t missed a note.
Sure enough, a moment after I was done, Ms. Nakamoto made a mark on her clipboard, then read off the new order. Will was first on snare, and the new drum captain. I was second.
My hero! I could have relaxed all summer if I’d known that my knight in shining armor would ride out of nowhere—Minnesota, actually, which amounted to the same thing—to save me from my own success, and my certain failure.
There was a lot of confusion as drummers reordered themselves according to Ms. Nakamoto’s ruling, purposely knocking each other with their drums as they reshuffled. Then they took off their harnesses and set down the heavy drums. Now that the challenge was over, we were just waiting for Ms. Nakamoto or DeMarcus to pull us into the proper position for the first set. We didn’t need to wear our drums for that. Eight snares, four bass drums, three quads, and four pairs of cymbals lay on the grass like the excavated skeleton of a dinosaur. The drummers themselves borrowed space on towels to sit down with the trumpets and trombones near the back of the band, or moved up front and tried to tickle the majorettes.
Normally I would have made the rounds and talked to all my friends whom I hadn’t seen during the summer. But I wasn’t passing up the perfect opportunity to question the mysterious Mr. Matthews on the percussion skills he’d suddenly acquired. I retrieved my towel from my pile of stuff and spread it out on the grass. “Join me?” I asked him.
“Ssssssure.” He eased his big frame down onto half of the towel and leaned back on his elbows, showing off his abs. The guy had a six-pack. Every girl in band—and some of the guys—turned to stare, then faced forward again like they’d just been looking around casually. It wasn’t that six-packs were unusual at our school. Athletics were important. But the chiseled chest was less common in band.
Allowing the uncomfortable silence to stretch on, I smoothed sunscreen across my arms, legs, and face. I held the bottle toward him. “Need some?”
“We’re in the shade,” he said.
True. The high bleachers on the home and away sides provided a lot of shade in the morning and evening, and the ends of the stadium were surrounded by palm trees and live oaks that shaded the grass even more. But because the field sat lower than the surrounding ground, it got no breeze. None. The heat turned the stadium into a hundred-yard pressure cooker and ensured that somebody, sooner or later, was going to die of heat exhaustion. Though the sun wouldn’t make us crispy by the end of practice, skin as white as Will’s would turn an unhealthy pink. The sun was sneaky and would find its way to him.
“Trust me,” I said.
He took the bottle grudgingly and squirted lotion into his palm to spread along one muscular shoulder. “You’re saying I look like I’m from Minnesota.”
“You look like a hockey player from Minnesota,” I clarified. The flutes stared unabashedly at him as his hands moved over his own body, as if he was putting on a peep show. I asked, “Want me to get your back?”
He watched me sidelong for a moment. At least, I thought he did. His mirrored shades were in the way. All I could see was the shadow of his long lashes.
“Sure,” he said again, leaning forward.
I spread sunscreen across his broad back, kneading his shoulders and neck as I went. All the way across the field, the majorettes were looking. Chelsea actually pointed at me. I waved cheekily at her. I wished I could see old Angelica’s face from this distance.
I said softly in Will’s ear, “You don’t seem as surprised to see me here as I am to see you.”
Through my own sunglasses, I couldn’t tell whether a blush crept across his cheeks. His long silence spoke volumes, though. Finally he said, “I told you last night that your friends had sent me to find you and introduce myself to you.”
“Yes, you did,” I acknowledged, “but—”
“When I walked into the party, I said I was new and I played percussion in the marching band. They said, ‘Oooh, you have to meet Tia Cruz, the drum captain.’ ”
I liked the way he imitated Harper and Kaye—not in the high faux-girly voice boys used when they didn’t think very much of girls. The pitch of his voice stayed the same, but he smoothed over the oooh like they’d made me sound delicious, and he’d agreed.
But I was sure he hadn’t mentioned anything to me about drums last night. I would remember. I hadn’t been that drunk. In fact, I’d watched him tapping his fingers to the rhythm of the music and wondered if he was a drummer, but I hadn’t put two and two together. “I thought they sent you to me because you wanted to get drunk and hook up.”
He shifted to face me on the towel. “They would meet a complete stranger at a party and send him to hook up with their drunk friend?”
He had a point. Kaye and Harper were way more protective of me than that. “I guess not,” I admitted. “I was drunk as I was thinking this.” I went back over what had happened last night when I looked up from my bench and saw a pirate. His explanation didn’t make sense. “No,” I insisted. “I thought you wanted a beer. I gave you a beer. You took it.”
“I didn’t drink it.”
I glanced around, suspicious that I had been transported to a parallel universe where high school boys didn’t drink the beer they were given. But there was still only one sun, mostly blocked by a tall palm, and I didn’t detect extra moons or a visible ring around the planet.
As I thought about it, though, I decided I’d seen his true nature from the beginning—if not when he found me on Brody’s back porch, at least by the time he walked me home and acted like a gentleman instead of the scoundrel I was expecting. I’d seen it, but I hadn’t wanted to see it.