Most Likely to Succeed (13 page)

True—Sawyer was a terrific waiter, as long as he wasn’t mad at the customers.

“That’s how I played the pelican,” he said. “The other people trying out were just bopping around in this big padded suit, walking funny. I made the pelican into a character, a student at our school who gets no respect but who’s a lot smarter than the teachers give him credit for. After I got the suit on, the first thing I did was walk behind the judges and try to look over their shoulders at everyone’s scores.”

I laughed. “That could have backfired.” Principal Chen had her panties in a wad most of the time, and the football coach wasn’t exactly open-minded, either.

“I knew that,” Sawyer said, “but I figured I had to do
something
. I mean, all else being equal, would
you
pick me for
anything
over Chelsea?”

“No.” But as soon as I said this, I felt the blood rush to my face, as it did so often when I was around Sawyer. I’d thought of several things I would pick Sawyer for over absolutely anybody, and all of them required sitting very close to him in the dark, just like this.

To cover up my embarrassment, I asked quickly, “How did this make you into a vegan?”

“Oh.” He nodded. “It was when I was watching the pelicans. I felt like I was borrowing something from them. Like I was
one
with the pelicans, or something? I know that sounds stupid.”

It didn’t sound stupid, exactly, but it sounded like something Sawyer was making up to see if I would believe it, teasing me. I said carefully, so he couldn’t tell whether I was buying it, “But people don’t eat pelicans, do they?”

“Not unless they’re desperate. I guess I was also thinking of a deer hunt I went on before I left Georgia. I’ve regretted it every day.” He turned to look out the window at the interstate, lights and palm trees flashing past at even intervals. I could tell, though, that in his mind, he was lost in a dark Georgia forest.

I found his hand and covered it with mine. This was hard for me, making the first move. I’d never gone out of my way to touch Aidan like this. He hadn’t ever tried to comfort
me
, either, which was probably why my three years with him seemed so sterile when I looked back at them now.

Sawyer turned away from the window. He took my hand in his and rubbed his thumb over my palm, watching me.

“What do you eat, as a vegan?” I asked. “Besides gallons of salad.”

“Cereal, mostly.”

“Dry? Vegans can’t have milk or anything that comes from an animal, right?”

“Right.”

I shook my head, disapproving. “Where do you get your calcium and vitamins and protein?”

“I guess I don’t.”

It occurred to me that, except for salad at lunch, I’d never actually seen Sawyer eat anything. “What did you eat before the 5K on Labor Day, when you nearly passed out?”

“Nothing.”

I slid my hand out of his and poked him angrily in the leg. “You can’t run three miles on nothing, Sawyer.”

“Ow. I found that out, thanks.”

“What did you eat the day you passed out at school?”

He shrugged. “I had a Bloody Mary for breakfast.”

“With
vodka
in it?”

“And tomato juice, which is full of antioxidants.” He cut his eyes sideways at me. “I know, I know. That’s the day I realized I might have a problem.”

Normally I would have interjected a sarcastic comment here:
Oh,
that’s
when you realized you had a problem?
Sawyer’s problems had been obvious to me and everybody else the entire time he’d lived here. Some other guys in our class drank, but most of them didn’t make alcohol their favorite hobby.

I amazed myself by not saying a word. It took a lot of self-control, but I simply moved my hand low on his back and slid my arm around his waist.

He set his head down on my shoulder.

We sat that way for a while. This was a serious step past holding hands. It would have attracted attention in the van if any of the cheerleaders had been awake to see. But they’d bedded down, propping pillows against each other and the walls of the van. The silence seemed heavy, like a question mark.

My skin burned underneath Sawyer’s cheek, and my face felt flushed everywhere his soft hair brushed against it. I wondered if this truce signaled that we’d reached a different level of our relationship. I wondered if I wanted it to. I took a long breath through my nose, easily enough that he might not notice, and exhaled, trying to relax. I wanted to enjoy the sensation of him cuddling against me. I might not get it again.

I’d thought he’d fallen asleep, but he finally spoke. “You think being a vegan is stupid.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I think you’re not doing it right. Starvation, dry cereal, and alcohol do not equal a diet of any kind. My God, at least have some hummus.”

He chuckled—a sound I loved.

“What made you decide to sober up?” I asked. “Being in the hospital?”

“Being in the hospital made me realize that nobody has my back.” He sat up and leaned against the pillow again. We weren’t touching each other anymore, for the first time since he’d come out of the locker room. He
looked
alone, the only boy in a van full of girls, his blond hair lit by the streetlights behind him like an ironic halo, his features dark and inscrutable.

“My dad was up in Panama City,” he said. “Anybody else’s dad or mom would have rushed home if their kid was hospitalized with heat exhaustion. Not mine. The nurse—DeMarcus’s mom, actually—made me give her my dad’s cell phone number. I told her it wouldn’t do any good. She called him anyway, then came back in the room outraged that he wasn’t coming home. Outraged at
me
.”

“She wasn’t outraged at you,” I said.

“That’s how it felt. Like,
What kind of family are you from?
” He took a long breath, still needing to calm himself down when he talked about this, even though it had happened a month ago. “My brother was in town, but he wouldn’t take time off work to check me out of the hospital when they said I could go home. He needed the hours.”

I nodded.
Needing the hours
was a foreign concept to me. My parents wanted Barrett and me to concentrate on school instead of getting jobs. Both of them had worked
professionally since college. They hadn’t been paid hourly in decades. My understanding of hourly work came solely from Tia talking about her dad. He’d worked at a factory until recently,
needing the hours
and missing her marching band performances. But he would never have stayed at work if she’d been hospitalized. Neither would her sisters, even though she didn’t always get along with them.

The closer I got to Sawyer, the more isolated he seemed.

“Yeah,” he said, “I realized while I was in the hospital that I had a short-term goal, to be a really good school mascot in ninety-degree heat, and I couldn’t meet that goal without making some changes. But I also came to this new understanding of what could happen to me later. The biggest stoner in school is Jason Price, right?”

“I hope.” Actually, I hadn’t seen a lot of Jason lately. He’d gradually dropped out of the advanced-level classes. The last I’d heard, he was trolling business math and remedial English.

“Jason’s parents are both doctors. If he ever gets arrested, they’ll hire lawyers to have him released. Hell, they’ll probably sue the police department for taking their baby in. If I get arrested, my family will leave me there to rot. Nothing will make you clean up your act like your parents abandoning you completely.”

I didn’t realize I’d tilted my head and lowered my shoulders in disbelief until Sawyer imitated me.

“Come on,” I said. “Do you really think that?”

“You would hope my dad learned something during fifteen years of hard time,” Sawyer said. “But he treats me like his family treated him. I try to understand where he’s coming from. He didn’t exactly have every advantage when he was growing up. But not everybody raised in adverse circumstances decides to make a better life for themselves and their kids, like your mom did. A lot of them are hell-bound to repeat the process for the next generation. Somebody has to put their foot down and say, ‘I’m not playing that game.’ That somebody is me.

“I’ve known that for a long time. I felt like an outsider up in Georgia, when my mom was dragging my brother and me around to mooch off one relative and then another. If you’re on the outside looking in, it’s easy to judge and to feel superior. It wasn’t until I was lying in the hospital that I realized what I’d done. Instead of getting away from my relatives, I was becoming them. And if I got arrested at age twenty like my dad, my family would give me exactly as much help as his family gave him. I remember the exact moment it hit me.”

I went very still, hoping that moment hadn’t been some
cruelty I’d paid him, one of those casual insults I’d lobbed at him before I knew the truth.

“You and everybody from school hadn’t gotten to the hospital yet,” Sawyer said. “It was just Will and me in the room. You know, he rode in the ambulance with me.”

I nodded. Sawyer had passed out on the football field. Will had hefted him over one shoulder and carried him all the way up the stadium stairs, into the parking lot to meet the ambulance. I’d just stood there among the other cheerleaders with my hands pressed to my mouth, impressed and terrified. I hadn’t known Will had this he-man superhero side. And up to that point, I’d never seen Sawyer vulnerable. Ever.

“I don’t remember passing out,” Sawyer said, “or throwing up in the parking lot, or being in the ambulance, even though Will says I was conscious for the whole ride. The first thing I remember is, Will’s in the chair next to my hospital bed, making small talk. Whether the Buccaneers will suck less this year, what the Rays’ chances are for a pennant, whether we can sneak past security to watch the Lightning practice. And I’m thinking what a shit I’ve been to this guy, and how little sense it makes for me to treat him that way. I mean, I want to
be
this guy. He has everything I want.”

“Tia?” I breathed.

“No! A future.” Sawyer frowned at me, only now understanding my question about Tia. His face softened.

“And then
you
walked into the hospital room,” he said. “You looked beautiful in red.”

“Ha,” I said. “I came straight from cheerleading practice. I was wearing a Pelicans T-shirt.”

“Yes, you were.” He laid his arm along the back of the seat and put his hand in my hair.

I smiled at the sweet feel of his fingertips rubbing my nape. “You might have sworn off mind-altering substances that day, but it’s not like you’ve changed personalities. You’re still really mean to Kennedy,” I pointed out.

His nostrils flared. “I strongly dislike Kennedy.”

“And Aidan.”

His hand stopped in midair, pulling one of my curls. “I hate Aidan.” He let my curl go. It sprang back into place.

“You haven’t changed as much as you think,” I said. “You’re incredibly smart and responsible about some things, like quitting drinking. On other things, like your diet, and getting along with certain people, you act like you’re from another planet.”

“Oh,” he said, lifting his chin defiantly, “and
you’re
not like that?”

“I’ll bite,” I said. “What am I smart about?”

“Almost everything,” Sawyer declared. “Though, as you pointed out, you don’t believe it. Is there anything you honestly think you’re good at?”

“Being a cheerleader.” I smoothed my hands over my short skirt, then lowered my voice to a whisper. “Not the part where I babysit Grace and Cathy and Ellen.” In a normal tone I said, “The part where I actually cheer and dance. I love dancing. And of
course
this would be what I really enjoy, because my mother makes a comment every time I leave the house for practice. ‘That’s really going to help get you a job as a professional cheerleader.’ ”

“It could be a backup career if your corporate takeover falls through,” Sawyer said.

“You laugh,” I said. “But lately, every time I’m on the field during a game, I’m thinking, ‘I don’t want high school to end.’ It’s partly because I don’t want to leave my friends. But I also don’t look forward to spending the rest of my life sitting in a tiny room, ciphering. That’s what my career is going to be like. That’s what my college experience will be, too.”

“Surely Columbia has cheerleaders,” Sawyer said.

“I never really thought about it,” I admitted. “But their football team sucks. Cheering them on wouldn’t be much fun. The whole school seems focused on academics. They
put classes ahead of sports in a way the entire state of Florida doesn’t really comprehend.”

“What about actually trying out as a professional cheerleader?” he asked. “You could do that while you’re in school. I don’t think it pays much at all. Those girls are trying to get discovered as models. But if you were just doing it for fun . . .”

“My mother would disown me.” I enjoyed saying these words more than I expected. After picturing myself for half a second in a low-cut bra top and shorts the size of panties, I shook my head sadly. “I’ll bet I can’t try out until I’m twenty-one.”

“I’ll bet you’re wrong,” Sawyer said. “Men still make most of the rules in this country. Men aren’t going to prevent an eighteen-year-old from being a professional cheerleader. It’s her God-given right.”

I stared at Sawyer, who watched me with his brows raised. The interstate lights caressed his face and released him, then slowly moved across his face again. I was so accustomed to Aidan talking me out of crazy schemes that I hardly ever came up with them anymore. This one was so nuts that I was having a flashback to eighth grade, before I started dating Aidan, when my friends laughed and called me a live wire. At some point along the way, the life had gone out of me.

And here was Sawyer, calmly encouraging me to do exactly what I wanted.

I fished in my bag for my phone, then looked up the Giants. “The Giants don’t have cheerleaders.” I typed the Jets into the search engine. “The Jets have a cheerleading squad called the Flight Crew. That’s adorbs.” I thumbed through to an information screen and enlarged the tiny print. “I can’t do it. Tryouts are in March. My mother would never let me go up to New York for that. And I won’t be eighteen by the deadline. But I could try out the next year, when I’m already at Columbia.” I took a closer look at photos of the current squad. “They would make me relax my hair.”