Most Likely to Succeed (11 page)

Ahead of me, Sawyer stepped into the hallway and closed a door behind him. When he saw me, he froze with his hand on the doorknob, his face flushing bright pink.

I looked up at the nameplate on the door and saw why he felt caught.
MS. MALONE, SCHOOL COUNSELOR.

But Sawyer was always quick to recover. The next second he didn’t look self-conscious anymore. His hands were on my shoulders. “Wow, what’s the matter?”

I flung myself into his arms.

9

AS SOON AS HIS ARMS
encircled me, I was trying to pull away again. Nobody but us was in the hall right now. I could hear Ms. Chen’s morning announcements echoing through an open door. But a teacher was likely to peek out at us any second, see us embracing, and send us straight to the principal’s office. Plus, surveillance cameras frowned from the corners of the ceiling, keeping everyone safe from school shooters and public displays of affection.

Sawyer didn’t let go of me. He held my head to his chest, saying, “Shhh. Tell me what’s wrong, and we’ll fix it.”

I laughed and then coughed at the idea of Sawyer, with all his real problems, being able to solve any of my ridiculous ones. After a gargantuan sniffle, I said shakily, “I forgot to write my paper for Mr. Frank.”

He held me at arm’s length and looked into my eyes. “That’s a major grade.” Before I could cry again, he ordered me, “Stop. You mean you forgot to make your paper perfect, or you forgot to write it at all? How many words do you have?”

“None.” I was about to lose it.

“Stop,” he said again. “But you have your thesis statement and your notes and your outline, right? We did that in class.”

I nodded.

“That’s your blueprint. All you need to do is fill in the blanks. You have hours to get that done. We don’t go to Mr. Frank’s class until second-to-last period. You can write it on your computer and e-mail it to him while he’s taking roll.”

“But Sawyer,” I wailed, “I have class until then. I’m doing class during class.”

“You’ve got study hall,” he pointed out, “and lunch.”

“I was going to talk to Ms. Chen about the homecoming dance during lunch,” I said.

He shook me gently. “Kaye. Listen to me. You’ve got to let go of that shit and prioritize. Save your grade today. Do homecoming tomorrow.” He released my arms and rubbed where he’d squeezed me. “There’s lots of downtime during class, too. Even when teachers are talking, you can be working on your paper.”

“What if one of them calls on me and I get in trouble?”

“To save your GPA, it’s worth it,” he declared. “And if things really get hairy, take your computer to the bathroom.”

“This isn’t going to work,” I whispered.

He gave me an exasperated look. “Do you know how much homework I’ve done at the very last second in the bathroom? You can do this, Kaye. You just have to believe it. Isn’t your dad a famous writer?”

“He’s not famous,” I mumbled.

“But he works on deadline,” Sawyer pointed out. “Just because you didn’t obsess over this paper doesn’t mean it won’t be any good. Even if it does turn out to be shit, you’ll get a fifty just for turning it in, which is way better for your average than a zero.”

“Right.” With a grade of fifty rather than a zero, I’d get a B for this grading period and lose hope of making valedictorian. But there was always salutatorian. That might be good enough for admission to Columbia, with my alumni parents backing me.

But nothing would save me in the eyes of my mother.

“Whatever you’re thinking right now,” Sawyer said, “snap out of it. Let me tell you what needs to go through your head for the next five hours, until you turn this paper in.” He tapped one finger. “Dostoyevsky.”

“Dostoyevsky,” I repeated.

He tapped another finger. “Raskolnikov.”

“Raskolnikov,” I said.

“Alyona Ivanovna, Porfiry Petrovich, Sonia Marmeladov. Got that? Now, what’s going through your head? Hint: The answer should be Dostoyevsky.”

“I’m tardy for history,” I sobbed, “and I don’t have an excuse.”

Sawyer gave me his crazy face with one eyebrow up, clearly at the end of his patience. “I’ll write you in on the one Ms. Malone gave me.”

“That’s forgery!”

Shaking his head, he grabbed my hand and knocked on Ms. Malone’s door. When we heard “Come in,” he pulled me inside.

“Back so soon?” Ms. Malone asked from behind her desk. She saw me and said, “Oh, hi there.”

“Ms. Malone,” Sawyer said, “this is Kaye Gordon.”

Ms. Malone came around her desk to shake my hand. “We were just talking about you.” Too late she realized this was not the right thing to say. Her eyes darted to Sawyer, who was blushing intensely all over again.

His flushed cheeks were the only clue Sawyer was mortified, and he continued smoothly, “Kaye would like to make
an appointment to talk with you about stress management techniques.”

“Yes, I see you’re having a problem there,” Ms. Malone agreed, scanning my tearstained and probably mascara-streaked face. “How about today?”

“Not today,” Sawyer said quickly, “or anytime before homecoming, because that will just stress her out more. How about the Monday after homecoming?”

Ms. Malone stepped behind her desk again and flipped through her calendar. She looked up at me. “Is this period okay?”

I nodded dumbly.

She wrote my appointment time down on a card.

“And can she also have an excuse that says she was here talking to you?” Sawyer asked. “She’s late for history.”

Ms. Malone gave Sawyer the briefest look that let him know she saw right through his ploy.

But she paged through her book of preprinted excuses and filled one out for me. Handing it across her desk, she said, “All right, dear. You come see me sooner if you need to.” She turned to Sawyer. “And you, here, tomorrow.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sawyer put his arm around my shoulders and steered me out the door.

“Thank you,” I breathed as we walked down the hall.

“You’re welcome. I earned my shoulder rub.”

“You did.” I laughed and felt better, even though I had a horrible five hours in front of me, and my face was still wet with tears. “Did Ms. Malone help you? What did she say?”

“Don’t think about that right now. Until one o’clock when you e-mail this paper to Mr. Frank, your only thoughts are Dostoyevsky, Raskolnikov—”

“Okay.” I stopped in the hallway. He stopped too, in surprise. His eyes were full of concern.

I wanted to kiss him—not a show of lust, but of appreciation. I would get us both in hot water, though. I only kissed my finger and placed it on his lips.

He looked shocked for a moment. But as I pulled my hand away, he said solemnly, “I know. I feel that way too.”

And we walked to history together.

* * *

The following Friday, I skipped out of calculus even earlier than I had the previous week for the student council meeting. I waited outside Ms. Yates’s classroom. Sure enough, I’d beaten Sawyer by a hair. I watched him saunter up the hallway, walking more like the jaunty pelican than his usual cool self while he thought nobody was watching. His backpack hung heavy over one shoulder. It probably contained six different library books explaining
Robert’s Rules of Order
. He wore the
madras plaid shirt with the blue stripe that I loved so much. When he looked up at me, his blue eyes were arresting in the blank white hall. He broke into a wide grin.

He’d been kind to me Monday while I was writing my paper, checking on me between classes. During lunch I’d e-mailed him my mostly finished draft. He’d read over it on his phone while I was still typing the end, and he suggested places I could clarify my statements or add more detail. Best of all, he told me my paper wasn’t crap. That kept me going. I didn’t have time to eat lunch, but I typed my closing statement just as the bell rang to go to Mr. Frank’s class, where Sawyer slipped me a candy bar underneath our desktops.

The way he’d treated me, and the way
Aidan
had acted when he found out I’d forgotten to write my paper, made me question my decision not to date Sawyer if he asked. The problem was, he didn’t ask. All week we hung out during lunch and the classes we had together. People certainly saw
something
between us. Tia and Harper, wide-eyed, asked me for updates three times a day. The cheerleaders and my other friends who hadn’t heard about everything that had passed between Sawyer and me demanded to know whether we were hooking up. Several of them told me they’d voted for Sawyer and me as Perfect Couple That Never Was, and they
were disappointed when I was named Most Likely to Succeed with Aidan.

Me too. I hadn’t felt that way when the Superlatives titles were first announced, but hindsight was 20/20.

Maybe I should have taken the plunge and asked
Sawyer
out. But he was holding back with me. That was unlike him. He must have some good reason. And I was enjoying being close to him so much that I was afraid of messing things up if I pushed too fast for a change.

“Hey,” I said as he stopped beside me at Ms. Yates’s door. “I wanted to catch you before the meeting. Were you planning to sit at Ms. Yates’s desk again?”

“I don’t have to,” he said. “I only did that last week to make Aidan mad.”

“Great minds think alike.”

He didn’t laugh. He watched me carefully, as if talking about Aidan was making him as uncomfortable as it was making me.

“I don’t want to argue with him anymore,” I said in a rush. “I’m just not interested. And I think it would help us get along with him if we let him have the desk. We’re trying to get stuff done in student council, and we should pick our battles.”

The bell rang. Sawyer and I stepped back into safety
against the wall as Ms. Yates’s freshmen streamed into the hall, followed by Ms. Yates, who hurried toward the teachers’ lounge. She obviously couldn’t deal with these meetings without a fresh cup of coffee. Considering the last meeting and Sawyer pulling out the rule book, I didn’t blame her.

After the flood of freshmen had passed, I walked into the room and sat in a desk in the front row. Sawyer slid into the desk behind mine. Goose bumps rose on my skin as he whispered so close that I could feel his breath on my neck. “Will you marry me?”

“Yes,” I said without hesitation, turning to smile at him. “I already told you.”

He glanced up as the first reps walked in. Then he lowered his voice and asked, “Will you go to the prom with me?”

For the first time I really thought about our senior prom with Sawyer as my date. It could actually happen now. He would look dashing in a tux, a combination of handsome elegance and dangerous energy. I wanted to say yes.

Instead I said, “Prom is in April. A lot could happen before then. It’s too soon to tell.”

“Excuses, excuses,” he said dismissively. “Nothing can happen before tonight, though. Will you sit in the van with me on the drive to the game?”

“I have to,” I said, “because I owe you a shoulder rub.”

He raised his eyebrows provocatively as if I’d said something very sexy. That’s what I’d been counting on. Granted, he hadn’t asked me out in the past week, or made anything that could be called a move on me. But we’d also seen each other only in public, usually fleetingly, like touching hands as we passed in the hall. Maybe we just needed some quality time together. We wouldn’t be alone in the cheerleading van, but we’d definitely be stuck next to each other.

And I intended for something to happen.

When the classroom had filled with reps, Aidan swept in to take his proper place on the throne. As he sat down in Ms. Yates’s chair, Sawyer sent him a message by noisily unzipping his backpack and thumping
Robert’s Rules of Order
onto the corner of his desk where Aidan could see it.

Sawyer’s threat worked. Aidan didn’t deviate from the rules. He simply called on the committees to report about the student council’s homecoming responsibilities. That is, he called on
me
to report on the various committees I headed.

I told the classroom that preparations for Monday’s election of the homecoming court were going well. This meant I’d put some junior cheerleaders I trusted in charge. Preparations for the parade float build were also going well, because I’d delegated Will to handle them. He’d designed a gorgeous beach scene that he swore we could pull off with nothing but
wood, chicken wire, and crepe paper, and he’d drafted Tia’s contractor dad to take off work for once and supervise construction. Finally we got around to the dance.

“The dance preparations aren’t progressing as I’d planned,” I admitted. “I did find a potential place to hold it off campus.” No need to bring up that the place was a gay bar. “But when I spoke with Principal Chen on Tuesday about moving the dance, she said we couldn’t hold it off campus for liability reasons. If the dance is an official school function paid for with student dues, it needs to be held here on school grounds unless our lawyers okay a new location, and we don’t have time to call them in.”

“So it’s dead?” Will called from the back of the room. “If we can’t have it here, and we can’t have it elsewhere, it’s dead.”

“It looks dead,” I admitted. “I hoped one of you would have a brilliant idea. Throw me a Hail Mary pass here.” I held up my hands, ready to catch the last-minute idea a rep would toss at me.

Nobody said anything. All eyes were on me, waiting for me to solve this problem myself.

“Well, y’all have my phone number,” I concluded. “Text me over the weekend if you come up with something. If we don’t have a solution by Monday, we won’t have time to get
the word out to students and parents, and the dance will definitely be dead.”

The meeting progressed normally after that. Aidan didn’t make a sarcastic comment about the dance or question why I’d pursued it in the first place. He didn’t have to, because he’d already won.

But when he dismissed the meeting and the reps were filing out to the lunchroom, he walked over and put both hands on my desk, bending close, his face inches from mine. “Will you eat lunch with me today? We need to talk.”

I eyed him. “About student council?”

“Of course,” he said.

“About me resigning as vice president?” I asked. “I refuse to have that discussion again.”

“I don’t want you to resign as vice president,” he said soothingly. “I was angry that night.” This was as much of an apology as I ever got out of Aidan unless he also dropped his suave politician facade. This time he didn’t.

“Will Ms. Yates be there?” I snapped. “I really enjoyed the last time I tried to eat lunch with you two.”

“Just you and me,” he said.