Most Likely to Succeed (19 page)

“My God, Sawyer.”

“What?” he asked.

I didn’t want to say what I was thinking, which was
Holy shit, that is a high GPA, and all this time I thought you were a slacker.
I skipped over that part and asked, “How are your entrance exam scores?”

“High.”

“How high?”

He chuckled. “Higher than yours.”

“Now, wait a minute.” I didn’t want to insult him, but he had to be kidding, because I’d knocked my entrance exams out of the park. “How do you know what I got?”

“I don’t,” he said, “but Ms. Malone told me my scores are the second highest in the school, right behind Tia’s. I actually got higher than Tia on the verbal.”

I stared at him in disbelief.

“What?” he asked again.

I tried to make his crazy face with one eyebrow up and the other down. I couldn’t do it, so I lifted and lowered my brows with my fingertips.

“Don’t do that to your face,” he said.

“Sawyer,” I said, exasperated, “you have grades and scores that high and you want to go to
culinary school
? And you don’t see anything wrong with this picture?”

“Of course not,” he said. “It’s never wrong to pursue something you love.” He twisted one of my curls around his finger.

“But you
don’t
love cooking,” I pointed out. “You don’t bum around the Crab Lab kitchen after hours, inventing new recipes, do you? You happen to be a vegan, but just because you have special dietary preferences doesn’t obligate you to open that kind of restaurant. There may not be a huge population of vegans in the Tampa Bay area, but there are plenty in the world, and they’re not all going to culinary school and opening vegan restaurants. I think you’ve only come up with this idea because you work as a waiter, you know restaurants, and you’re scared you’ll fail at something else.”

“Like what?”

“College. Just apply for college. Apply to Columbia.”

He laughed. For once it was an ugly sound. “I would never get in to Columbia.”

“How do you know if you don’t try? It sounds to me like you’d have a good chance. You might get a need-based scholarship. On the essay part of the application, tell them a sob story about your dad and your situation.”

“My
situation
?” He gave me the raised-eyebrow look.

“Yes. And by ‘sob story,’ I guess I mean you should tell them the truth.”

He shook his head. His hair made the softest sound against the pillow. “I don’t have the money for college applications.”

“If your scores are that high, Ms. Malone will find you some money.”

He stared thoughtfully at my face. His eyes traveled down to my breast. He touched me softly.

I shuddered.

He slid his phone from the table on his side of the bed and peered at it, probably checking the time. “We’d better go before we are discovered,” he said in a voice from a cheesy movie. Then he laid his phone aside and rolled so that I was underneath him again.

“Katherine.” He kissed my lips. “Beale Gordon.”

“Yes?”

“This has been the best night of my life.”

“Mine too,” I said. “Sawyer . . .”

“Salvatore De Luca,” he prompted me.

“Salvatore?”

“No,” he laughed. “I’m kidding. My middle name is Charles.”

“Charles?”

“Yeah. That’s why I don’t tell people my middle name.”

“It’s not as bad as Salvatore. Anyway, this has been—”

His phone vibrated on the table. “Hold on.” He slid over and glanced at it.

The next second he leaped up to standing and was fumbling on the floor for his clothes.

“What’s the matter?” I exclaimed.

“Harper texted me.” His voice bounced as he jerked his shorts on. “Somebody at the party heard where we’d gone and told Angelica. Angelica told Aidan. Aidan called your parents. He’s drunk and he just admitted it to everybody.”

“No, no, no,” I chanted, like that was going to help. “Where are you going?”

“Stay here. I don’t want you to see your dad beat the fuck out of me.”

“Sawyer, wait!” But he was already gone, not bothering to keep his shoes off to avoid waking the rest of the B and B. His flip-flops clattered down the stairs, and the front door slammed.

As I pulled my own clothes on, I tried to picture what was happening, and feared the worst. Dad was mild mannered, but he was huge. Sawyer was not huge, but he had a temper. There was no best-case scenario to this.

It wasn’t either of their voices I heard yelling as I ran out the back door of the B and B to the parking lot, though. It was my mother’s. She was yelling at Sawyer.

A cloud of white dust was still settling over the gravel-and-shell driveway. As it cleared, I saw why. Both my mother’s Mercedes
and
Dad’s BMW were parked in the lot. Dad leaned against his car with his arms folded. Sawyer leaned against the Mercedes with his arms folded. They were like two captains of pirate ships in Tampa Bay, deciding whether to fire that first shot across the other’s bow.

My mother was the one shooting from the hip, reciting to Sawyer a lot of his poor qualities that she’d listed for me in the past couple of weeks. “Hey,” I said, which only drew some of the fire from him to me. I could see there was no way out of this now, though. I would never be able to go out with him again, if he even wanted to.

Help came from an unexpected place. Harper appeared from a trail through the trees, the same one Sawyer and I had followed to get here from Tia’s house. “Hi, there!” she called as if my mother didn’t sound murderous. “I beg your pardon. I’m so sorry. My mom’s not here right now, but we have a rule at the B and B that we don’t raise our voices because it might disturb the guests if they’re sleeping.” She nodded toward the second story of the Victorian towering over us. “Come on inside.” She stepped away to unlock the front door of her own tiny house.

Nobody budged. Everyone glared at everyone else.

“Come on in,” Harper repeated, daring to encircle my mother’s waist with her arm and push her along toward the door. “Everyone’s welcome inside, where you can continue to discipline your daughter and . . .” Harper was not the best at making small talk, which is why it had been a good idea for her to stop working at the B and B in the first place. “. . . castigate Sawyer,” she finished.

Sawyer elbowed her.

“I said
castigate
,” she told him.

“You see,” my mother said straight to me as I followed Dad through the door, “this is what happens when you date trash. We all start acting like trash.”

Sawyer dropped into one of the side chairs around the coffee table. He’d been ready to defend himself physically against Dad, but he was no match verbally for my mother.

“Gosh,” Harper protested at the same time Dad started, “Sylvia—”

“No,” I told my mother, “this is what happens when I finally stand up for something I want. You say you’re training me to be a strong woman. But really,
you
want to be a strong woman with a weak daughter you can push around.”

My mother stared at me in stunned silence.

“I refuse to be grounded anymore,” I said. “I won’t let you tell me who I can date. If you want to take away my car, fine.
Kick me out of the house and I’ll get a job and a place of my own. I’ll take the bus to Tampa and try out as a professional cheerleader.”

Harper raised her hand. “I don’t think those jobs pay very much—”

“Listen,” Dad said to me. “Your mother came here to give you a piece of her mind. Which she did.” He turned to my mother. “I
followed
you here to tell this young man that as far as I’m concerned, he can ask Kaye out if he wants. He should consider me an ally, and I will work on you.” He held out his hand to her. “Come on, I’ll take you out for a drink.”

She looked at him. Her expression was somewhere between a glare and a smile.

He wiggled his fingers. “Come on, I’m loaded. I just sold another article.”

She took his hand, but she refused to look at anybody as he led her toward the door.

Dad patted Harper on the head as he passed her. “Sorry, honey.”

“That’s okay, Mr. Gordon,” she said. “Glad to be of service.”

He touched the tip of my nose. “Be home by two. And don’t go looking for an apartment just yet.” He opened the door for my mother and closed it behind them.

I collapsed into Harper’s arms. “I am so sorry!”

“No, don’t be sorry! It’s all worked out!” She called over my shoulder, “Sawyer, it’s all worked out. Are you okay?”

Sawyer was silent.

Frightened, I walked over to stand directly in front of his chair. He glared up at me. He wasn’t expressionless, as when he was furious. He had a look even madder than that. His anger showed in every line on his face. I’d never seen this expression before, but I knew it when I saw it.

“He’s not okay.” I reached down and cupped his cheek in my hand. “Baby, I don’t blame you for feeling that way, but it doesn’t matter now.”

“It doesn’t
matter
?” he exclaimed.

“Let’s go back over to the party,” Harper suggested brightly, “and forget all this.”

“Let’s do.” I held out my hand to pull Sawyer up.

But I knew from the way he looked at me that it had not, in fact, all worked out.

16

HARPER WENT AHEAD, AND I
held Sawyer’s hand, but the three of us didn’t say much as we followed the path back to Tia’s house. We were passing through several backyards after midnight, and every adult in Florida owned a gun.

When we arrived, though, Brody and Noah were playing a very slow, sore game of hoops in the driveway. Brody took one look at Sawyer and said, “Oh God, what’s wrong? Don’t let him go in there.” But Sawyer had already broken away from me and disappeared inside.

“Why not?” Harper asked Brody.

“Aidan is plastered, and Will is in rare form.”

That made Harper and me speed up. As we hustled inside, I could hear Tia talking with Angelica right beside the door. “Aidan dated Kaye for three years, Angelica. You
can’t expect him to forget that overnight— Oh.” She’d seen me, and she stepped into my path. “Sawyer just came in. He looks awful. What happened?”

I just shook my head, but Harper right behind me said, “Everything we thought, and worse.”

From the next room, I heard Will’s voice rising. Along with Harper and several other people, I peered into one of about six living rooms or dens or libraries on the bottom floor of the vast house.

The first thing I saw was Sawyer, with the same scary look on his face, standing in the opposite doorway.

Second I focused on Will, who was standing over Aidan, pointing down at him. Aidan was
definitely
drunk. There wasn’t any alcohol officially at this party. My class’s usual way around that was to go drink in someone’s parked car, then come back.

I’d known Aidan to imbibe that way. But not like this. His eyelids were heavy, and he seemed to be having a hard time keeping his head high as Will shouted down at him in his Minnesota accent. “How could you do that? So she’s your ex-girlfriend.
You
broke up with
her
. You’re trying to ruin her life, along with Sawyer’s, and you don’t care if you take some of the rest of us down too. We’re just collateral damage. What kind of student council president
are
you?”

“Like Minnesota is the moral center of the universe!” Aidan roared.

Sawyer was gazing at Aidan with pure hatred. And Sawyer had been known to swing a punch in the heat of the moment. Quickly I crossed the room and pushed Sawyer into the next one, which wasn’t as crowded. I whispered, “Do you need to leave? I don’t want you to get in a fight with Aidan.”

“I’m not angry with Aidan,” he said, slowly turning to focus his furious gaze on me. “I don’t have any room left for that, because I’m so angry with you.”

“With me?” I breathed.

He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. Before he’d even opened it all the way, I knew what it was. I saw Tia’s drawing of me lying like a dog.

“I lost that,” I said carefully. “Did you find it stuffed down in the chair at Harper’s?”

He stared at me silently, then shook the note at me. “I was your
experiment
? I asked you something like that the other day, and you lied to me. You said no.”

“You don’t understand,” I said quickly. Lowering my voice to a whisper, I said, “This is just between you and me, but the Superlatives elections got messed up. A lot of the titles are wrong, including yours, and mine. We’re actually the Perfect Couple That Never Was.” In a normal tone—which was
shaking now, because no matter what I told him, he didn’t look any less angry—I said, “That’s why I’ve been curious about you for a while, not just because Aidan broke up with me.”

Sawyer gaped at me. “So I
was
your experiment,” he repeated. “You thought it would be hilarious to fuck around with me, knowing that I’ve had a crush on you since I moved here.”

It was my turn to stare at him with my mouth open until I covered it with my hand. “No, I had no idea about that.”

“Tia told you,” he prompted me.

“No,” I said, “she didn’t.” But if she’d known, that explained why she’d been so keen on throwing me together with Sawyer.

“Harper told you,” he said next.

I shook my head. “Harper keeps secrets.” I wished she didn’t. I really could have used this information a couple of weeks before.

He nodded. “Everything makes sense now. When I talked about following you to New York, you looked at me like I had three heads.”

“Because I never thought about it before, Sawyer!”

“I’ve thought about it for two years,” he said acidly. “And what do I get for my trouble? I’ve made Aidan so jealous that he’ll want to take you back. You’re welcome.”

“No—” I had no intention of dating Aidan again, ever.

“What are you going to do once you graduate from high school,” Sawyer sneered, “and from college, and there’s no preplanned program for you to cycle through? There’s no Most Likely to Succeed for the rest of your life to let you know you’ve succeeded. There’s no office of student council vice president to let you know you’re
almost
in charge, or head cheerleader to let you know you’re the only popular girl anybody trusts to keep the rest of the cheerleaders out of trouble. How will you know how or when to be happy if nobody’s telling you?”

Tears stung my eyes. “That’s not fair.”

He stepped very close to me. “You know what’s not fair, Kaye? I risked everything for you. I could have been arrested. Your mother could still have me evicted and fired from the B and B.” He pointed in the general direction of that awful argument. “She just called me trash, all for the sake of your experiment.”

Now he pointed at me. “I have been playing you straight this whole time. When I told you I loved you, that’s what I meant. I never intended to be your experiment, or your walk on the wild side, or your favorite mistake.” He blinked, appearing for a moment like he had tears in his eyes. “I can’t even look at you.”

That hurt worse than anything else he’d said. He’d loved to look at me even when it seemed nobody else did.

He stomped back through the doorway, bullied right through Will’s lecture to Aidan, and parted the crowd around the front door. I tried to push through, but by the time I’d run down the front steps, the taillights of his clunker truck were disappearing down the street.

I turned slowly toward the house. Tia stood in the doorway. Our note with her dog drawing was crumpled in her hand. Sawyer must have shoved it at her on his way out.

* * *

“He’ll be back for work in the morning,” Harper said. “I promise. He never misses work.”

She and Tia and I sat on the low wall of the mermaid fountain with the water flowing between our toes before it cascaded over exquisite antique mosaics. The party was winding down, and so were they, with their elbows on their knees and their chins in their hands.

I was past wound down. I’d cried so hard in the past fifteen minutes that I felt half dead. At least DeMarcus had driven Aidan home to get him away from the alcohol supply secreted in someone’s car, and from Will, and from me.

I wished so hard that Sawyer would reappear in Aidan’s place. To give me a comforting hug, or to drag our awful argument out. Anything, just to have him here with me a little longer.

But I knew he wasn’t coming back.

“Why didn’t you tell me Sawyer’s had a crush on me for two years?” I finally whispered.

“I’ve only known for a couple of weeks,” Harper said. She glanced at Tia for help.

Seeing the look on my face, Tia held up her hands. “He told me a month ago and swore me to secrecy.”

Two years, and a thousand times that he’d called me a name or tried to sit in my lap. All that time he hadn’t been bugging me for a laugh. He’d been flirting, and hoping I’d flirt back, when I was dating Aidan. It must have been torture for Sawyer.

“If it’s any consolation,” Tia said, “he hates me too now. Harper and I never should have tried to push you two together. But he was completely smitten with you, and it was making him miserable. Once I started looking, it seemed to me that you had a crush on him, too, whether you admitted it to yourself or not.”

“I did,” I sniffled.

“You’ll get back together,” Harper said soothingly. “You just need some time.”

“I don’t know,” Tia said. “Kaye’s lost a boyfriend, but Sawyer’s lost a lot more than a girlfriend. He’s lost himself. The first time he ever felt worthwhile was when he won the mascot position. The second time was when you went to find
him at the beach, Kaye. Not that I think you can really understand what low self-esteem feels like, when you’ve grown up with everybody calling you princess.”

Harper kicked water on Tia’s bare leg. “That was the wrong thing to say.”

“She meant it,” I said, “or she’d be apologizing.”

“Well,” Tia muttered. “I’m not saying you should get back together with Sawyer just because you feel sorry for him. He would hate you when he found out, you would resent him, and that would make everything worse in the long run. But if you really love him, you can’t let each other go just because you’re both stubborn.”

“He doesn’t want me back,” I assured her. “You didn’t see the way he was looking at me.”

“We
have
seen the way he looks at you,” Harper interjected. “That’s our whole point.”

I took my feet out of the cold water and lay balanced along the wall. I listened to the burbling fountain, Harper and Tia’s hushed conversation, music blaring from a few rooms away, an argument between Quinn and Noah, and laughter. And I thought:

What if Angelica hadn’t intercepted a note from me to Harper about my crush on Aidan in Ms. Yates’s ninth-grade science class? He would never have guessed I liked him. I’d
hidden it well. And the next week, I would have moved on to someone else. At that age, my crushes had
seemed
crushing, but they weren’t so bad that I couldn’t get over them when another boy caught my eye at the movies on the weekend.

Aidan wouldn’t have asked me out. When Sawyer moved to town two years ago, I would have been available. He would have asked me out instead.

I would have said no.

He would have worked on me.

I would have said yes.

I would have lost my virginity with him instead of Aidan.

“Wait a minute,” Tia protested. “Then who would
I
have lost
my
virginity with?”

I hadn’t realized I was talking out loud.

“I’m confident you would have found someone,” I said.

If I’d dated Sawyer for the last two years—well, there was no way that would have happened. We would have fought and broken up and gotten back together and broken up again. My last two years would have been less like training camp and more like high school. Less like an accounting course and more like a life.

I fell asleep with that wistful dream in my head. I was only vaguely aware that Brody carried me to Harper’s car, and they drove me home.