Most Likely to Succeed (2 page)

After years with him, however, I was finally coming to understand he wasn’t as sure of himself as he wanted people to believe. He was so quick to anger. He couldn’t take being challenged. But as I watched him work the room like a pro, with the freshman reps timidly returning his broad smile, I remembered exactly what I’d seen in him back then.

Sawyer looked bored already.

“We’re entering the busiest season for the council,” Aidan was saying, “and we desperately need volunteers to make these projects happen. Our vice president, Ms. Gordon, will now report on the homecoming court elections coming up a week from Monday, and the float for the court in the homecoming parade.”

“And the dance,” I called.

“There’s not going to be a homecoming dance,” he told me over his shoulder. “I’ll explain later. Go ahead and fill them in about the homecoming court—”

Several reps gasped, “What?” while others murmured, “What did he say?” I spoke for everyone by uttering an outraged “What do you mean, there’s not going to be a dance?”

“Ms. Yates”—he nodded to where she sat in the back of the room, and she nodded in turn—“informed me before the meeting that the school is closing the gym for repairs. The storm last week damaged the roof. It’s not safe for occupancy. That’s bad news for us, but of course it’s even worse news for the basketball teams. The school needs time to repair the gym before their season starts.”

Will raised his hand.

Ignoring Will, Aidan kept talking. “All of us need to get
out there in the halls and reassure the basketball teams and their fans that our school is behind them.”

I frowned at the back of Aidan’s head. He used this bait-and-switch method all the time, getting out of a sticky argument by distracting people (including me) with a different argument altogether. Basketball season was six weeks away. The homecoming dance didn’t have to die so easily. But hosting the event would be harder now, and Aidan didn’t want to bother.

I did.

“Help,” I pleaded with Sawyer under my breath.

Aidan had already moved on, introducing my talk about the election committee.

Out in the crowd Will called, “Excuse me.” An interruption like this hadn’t happened in any council meeting I’d attended, ever. “Wait a minute. My class wants the dance.”

I couldn’t see Aidan’s face from this angle, but he drew his shoulders back and stood up straighter. He was about to give Will a snarky put-down.

Sawyer watched me, blond brows knitted. He didn’t understand what I wanted.

“Complain about something in the book again,” I whispered, nodding at
Robert’s Rules of Order
. “Ms. Yates
hasn’t stopped Aidan from railroading the meeting. She obviously doesn’t want the dance either, but they can’t fight the book.”

Everyone jumped as Sawyer banged the gavel. “The council recognizes Mr. Matthews, senior from Mr. Frank’s class. Stand up, sir.”

We’d never had reps rise to speak before. I was pretty sure the rules of order didn’t say anything about this. But it was a good move on Sawyer’s part. At Will’s full height he had a few inches on Aidan, and when he crossed his muscular arms on his chest, his body practically shouted that nobody better try to budge him.

Before Aidan could protest, Will said in his strangely rounded accent, “I haven’t lived here long, but I get the impression that the homecoming dance is a huge deal at this school. Everyone in Mr. Frank’s class has been talking about it and looking forward to it. We can’t simply cancel at the first sign of trouble.”

“We just did,” Aidan snapped. “Now sit down while I’m talking.”

Sawyer banged the gavel. I should have gotten used to it by now, but I jumped in my seat again.

Aidan visibly flinched. He turned on Sawyer and snatched the gavel away. Holding it up, he seethed, “Don’t do that
again, De Luca. You’re not in charge here. I’m the president.”

“Then act like it,” I said.

Aidan turned his angry gaze on me. I stared right back at him, determined not to chicken out. Will and Sawyer and I were right about this. Aidan was wrong.

As I watched, Aidan’s expression changed from fury to something different: disappointment. I’d betrayed him. We’d had a long talk last week about why we couldn’t get along lately. He understood I disagreed with him sometimes, but he wanted us to settle our differences in private, presenting a united front to the school as the president and his vice president.

Now I’d broken his rule. No matter what the council decided, he wouldn’t forgive me for defying him in public.

And I didn’t care. Keeping the peace wasn’t worth letting him act like a dictator.

“We don’t have
time
to debate this in a half-hour meeting,” he repeated. “There’s nothing to debate. The decision has been made. The school already canceled the dance because we don’t have a location for it.”

“We’ll move it,” I said.

“It’s only two weeks away,” he said.

I shrugged. “You put me in charge of the dance committee. It’s our job to give it a shot.”

Aidan’s voice rose. He’d forgotten we’d agreed not to argue in public. “You’re only pitching a fit about this because you’re still mad about—”

“Give me that,” Sawyer interrupted, holding out his hand for the gavel.

“No,” Aidan said, moving the gavel above his head.

“Mr. President,” Sawyer said in a lower, reasonable tone, like talking to a hysterical child, “you’re not allowed to debate the issue.”

“Of course I am. I’m the president!”

“Exactly.
Robert’s Rules of Order
states that your responsibilities are to run the meeting and give everyone the opportunity to speak. If you want to express your opinion, you need to vacate the chair.”

“I’m not
in
the chair,” Aidan snapped. “
You’re
in the chair.”

“I mean,” Sawyer said, rolling his eyes, “you need to step down as president while we discuss this matter, and let Kaye preside over the meeting.”

“I’m not stepping down.”

“Then you need to shut up.”

“Sawyer,” Ms. Yates said sharply. I couldn’t see her behind Will, who was still standing, but her thin voice cut like a knife through the grumbling and shushing in the classroom. “You’re being disruptive.”

“On the contrary, Ms. Yates,” Sawyer called back, “the president is being disruptive, trying to bend the entire council to his will. Ms. Patel’s study hall elected me to represent them. The student council approved me as parliamentarian. It’s my duty to make sure we follow the procedure set down in the council bylaws. Otherwise, a student could sue the school for a violation of rights and due process.”

The room fell silent, waiting for Ms. Yates’s response. Horrible visions flashed through my mind of what would happen next. Ms. Yates might complain to Ms. Chen that Sawyer was disrespectful. They could remove him from student council or, worse, from his position as school mascot. All because he’d helped me when I asked.

Underneath the desk, I put my hand on his knee.

“Sawyer,” Ms. Yates finally said, “you may continue, but don’t tell anybody else to shut up.”

“So noted.” Sawyer pretended to scribble this reminder to himself. Actually he drew a smiley face in
Robert’s Rules of Order
. “Aidan, if you’re really running the meeting, let Will bring up the idea of saving the dance, then put it to a vote.”

Aidan glared at Sawyer. Suddenly he whacked the
gavel so hard on the block on Ms. Yates’s desk that even Sawyer jumped.

Sawyer didn’t take that kind of challenge sitting down. I gripped his knee harder, signaling him to stay in his seat. If he could swallow this last insult from Aidan, he and I had won.

2

THE REMAINING TWENTY MINUTES OF
the meeting seemed to take forever. But Aidan followed procedure—at least I figured he did, because Sawyer didn’t speak up again. By the time the bell rang to send us to lunch, the council had agreed that as head of the dance committee, I would now be in charge of relocating the event instead of canceling it.

On top of leading the committee in charge of homecoming court elections.

And
leading the committee in charge of the parade float. I didn’t understand why Aidan opposed the council taking on more projects when he simply passed all the work to me.

As everyone crowded Ms. Yates’s door, Sawyer stood and stretched. Then he leaned over and said in my ear, “We make a good team. Maybe you and I got off on the wrong foot.”

“For two years?” I asked.

He opened his mouth to respond but stopped. Aidan brushed past the desk on his way out the door. He didn’t say a word to me.

Will was the last rep remaining in the empty room. He paused in front of the desk. “Thanks, you guys, for taking my side.”

“Thanks for taking ours,” I said, standing up and gathering my stuff, which was tangled with Sawyer’s stuff. One side of my open binder had gotten caught beneath his books.

“For me, this wasn’t just about the dance,” Will said. “People have been talking about it, and Tia told me what fun it was last year. Of course . . .” He glanced sidelong at Sawyer.

I knew what that look meant. Sawyer and Tia used to fool around periodically, up until she and Will started dating a few weeks ago. The homecoming dance last year had been no different. Too late, Will realized what he’d brought up.

“It
was
fun,” I interjected before Sawyer could make a snide comment that everyone would regret. “Come on.” I ushered them both toward the door.

“I was student council president back in Duluth.” Will followed us into the hall and closed Ms. Yates’s door behind us. Down at the end of the freshman corridor, a teacher frowned at us. Will lowered his voice as he said, “That is,
I was
supposed
to be president this year, before my family moved. I know what the president is supposed to do, and Aidan’s not
doon
it. Sometimes you have to stand up and tell somebody, ‘You’re not
doon
it right.’ ”

I thought Sawyer would make fun of Will’s Norse
doon
. He might have stopped insulting Will behind his back, but he wouldn’t be able to resist a comment to his face. Yet he didn’t say a word about Will’s accent.

Instead, Sawyer grumbled, “If the storm had destroyed the gym completely, the business community would rally around us, give us money, and solve the problem for us. They’d get lots of publicity for hosting our homecoming dance. Nobody’s going to help us just because our roof leaks.”

“Leaking isn’t good PR,” Will agreed. “I signed up for the dance committee and I want to help, but I’m the worst person to think of ideas for where else to hold an event. I still don’t know this town very well.”

“Doesn’t the Crab Lab also own the event space down the block?” I asked Sawyer. “One of my mother’s assistants had her wedding reception there. Could you sweet-talk the owner into letting us use it for cheap? Better yet, for free?”

“It’s booked that night,” he said.

“That’s two weeks from now,” I pointed out. “You’ve memorized the schedule for the event space down the block?”

“A fortieth class reunion is meeting there after the homecoming game,” he said. “The owner asked me to wait tables. I said no because of the dance. I have an excellent memory for turning down money.”

Sawyer waited tables a lot. While a good portion of our class was at the beach, he often went missing because he was working. Even though he’d helped me in the meeting, I was a little surprised the dance was important enough to him personally that he would take the night off.

And, irrationally, I was jealous. As we stopped in the hall and waited for Will to swing open the door of the lunchroom, I asked Sawyer, “Who are you taking to homecoming?”

He gaped at me. “You!” he exclaimed, like this was the most obvious answer in the world and I had a lot of nerve to joke about it. He stomped into the lunchroom.

Will was left holding the door open for me and blinking at us. He didn’t understand the strange social customs of Florida.

“It would help if you could brainstorm over the weekend,” I told Will, pretending my episode with Sawyer hadn’t happened. “Ask around at lunch and on the band bus tonight. See if you can scare up ideas. Maybe we’ll think of something by the next meeting.”

“Sounds good,” he called after me as I headed across the lunchroom to the teacher section.

Aidan, Ms. Yates, and I had eaten at one end of a faculty table after the last council meeting, discussing projects like the dance. Possibly the one thing worse than spending lunch with Aidan while he was mad at me was spending lunch with Aidan and Ms. Yates, who, judging from the expression on her face, hadn’t liked how the meeting had gone down. But I was the vice president, so I straightened my shoulders and walked over.

They were deep in conversation. Trying not to interrupt them, I looped the strap of my book bag over the back of the chair beside Aidan. They both looked up anyway. I said, “Sorry. I didn’t know we were meeting, or I would have gotten here sooner. I’ll just grab a salad and be right with y—”

Ms. Yates interrupted me. “This is a private talk.”

“Oh” was all I could think of to say. My face tingled with embarrassment as I slipped my bag off the chair and beat a retreat across the lunchroom to the safety of Tia, Harper, and the rest of my friends. By the time I finally sat down with my salad, they were spitting out and shooting down ideas for where to have the dance—led by Will, who repeated how angry he was at Aidan for what he’d been
doon
in the meeting.

I listened and waited for them to come up with something brilliant. For once I stayed silent. I still smarted from Ms. Yates telling me I didn’t belong at the adult table anymore. And I wondered whether I deserved it. Lately I got so
furious
at Aidan, but I was probably going through an immature phase, like cold feet before a wedding. We’d known almost since we started dating that we were destined for each other. All summer we’d been planning to apply to Columbia University together. Whenever Aidan annoyed me, I needed to take a deep breath before I spoke—as my mother reminded me each time I mouthed off to her—and make sure the problem was really with him, not me.

And I knew in my heart that the problem was mine. Since the school year started, I’d been creeping toward a crush on Sawyer like peering cautiously down from a great height. The Superlatives mix-up had put me over the edge.

On the first day of school, the student council had run Superlatives elections for the senior class. We
thought
Harper and our school’s star quarterback, Brody, had been voted Perfect Couple That Never Was. If I’d been in charge of the elections, as in years past, that mistake wouldn’t have been made. Even though I was still the chair of the elections committee, Ms. Yates wouldn’t let me count the votes. Since I was a senior this year, I had a conflict of interest.

But without me to watch over them, the wayward juniors had screwed up the whole election. They said I’d been chosen Most Likely to Succeed with Aidan. That sounded right. He was president. I was vice president.

Here’s what didn’t make sense: In reality I’d been elected Perfect Couple That Never Was with Sawyer.

When I realized the juniors’ mistake, Ms. Yates had made me tell Brody and Harper they didn’t really win the title, since they’d started dating because of it. But I wasn’t allowed to divulge the truth to anyone else. Each person in the class could get a maximum of one Superlatives position, so the single error had created a snowball effect. Almost every title was incorrect. And since Harper had already taken the pictures and sent them to the yearbook printer, Ms. Yates wanted to leave well enough alone. Not even Sawyer was in on this secret.

Definitely
not Aidan.

I was thankful Harper and Brody had been able to work through their problems and keep dating after I told them the truth. They were adorable together, even if part of what made them fun was the fact that they were so obviously mismatched.

Now I was cycling through the same feelings Harper had when she believed she’d been paired with Brody. She’d seen Brody with new eyes and longed for a relationship with
him because she’d mistakenly thought someone else had told her it could work. The only difference was, this time there was no mistake. I was
not
Most Likely to Succeed along with Aidan.

The senior class said Sawyer and I should be together.

I’d started to think so too.

Which was dumb, because the election was just a stupid vote for yearbook pictures. Aidan and I would attend Columbia together, take a while to establish our banking careers in New York, and then get married. After three years of knowing that was my plan, letting a class election change my mind didn’t say much about my decision-making skills.

Neither did obsessing about Sawyer. On the far end of my table, he attacked his huge salad with the appetite of a seventeen-year-old, half-starved vegan. When he looked up and saw me staring, he tapped his watch, then splayed his hand, wiggling all five fingers. He meant he would meet me at the cheerleading van at five o’clock this afternoon, and we would ride to the game together, exactly as I’d promised (not).

I couldn’t wait.

* * *

I didn’t see Aidan again. Usually he waited in his car for me after cheerleading practice let out at the end of school. Today when I crossed the parking lot, his car was already
gone. Angry as I was with him, his conspicuous absence left me feeling empty. I stepped into the heat of my own car and headed home.

As I drove, I decided I should have expected Aidan wouldn’t check in with me after school. The first couple of years we’d dated, he’d met me at every chance, even if we had only a few minutes together—before school, between classes. But lately he waited for me less and less. And on the rare occasions when he offered me a ride to school, I told him I’d rather take my car in case I decided to go somewhere afterward. I didn’t have specific plans, but riding with him would take some of my power away.

We never stood each other up, though, so I knew I would see him after the game, like we’d said. Normally we might “watch TV” at my house, since my parents were good about leaving us alone. But late tonight they were driving to the airport to pick up my brother, Barrett, who was coming home from college for the weekend. They were likely to return at the wrong time, tromping through the middle of my make-out session with Aidan. So instead, I was spending the night with Harper, and en route, Aidan was taking me to her granddad’s strip of beach to “watch the ocean” for half an hour before dropping me off at her house.

Thinking about Aidan, I pulled my car to a halt at a
stop sign. Enormous water oaks, dripping Spanish moss, extended their arms overhead. The houses along this section of the main road through town were ugly 1970s split-levels facing a parallel street, as if turning their backs on the history of the place. Aidan lived in the house to my right. The yard was a neat, flat expanse of grass, unbroken by a single tree except the ancient oaks lining the edge. Every time I’d passed his house since he got his license in tenth grade, I’d glanced at his driveway to see if his car was home.

This time it wasn’t.

But I would be in that car with him tonight, driving in the other direction down this road, toward the beach. On three occasions at the beach before, we’d gone all the way. Each time I’d fantasized about the next time, dreaming of how it would be better. He would suddenly become a caring lover. He would make sure I enjoyed it as much as he did. We wouldn’t get into a snarky argument afterward about whether I really deserved an A two points higher than his on our last English paper.

I wasn’t fantasizing about that now. With sudden clarity I saw our half hour together tonight. We would fool around. I would feel like a failure, not heady with love like girls were supposed to feel after they went so far with their committed boyfriends of three years.

A wave of nausea broke over me, and I knew why.

I put my forehead against the steering wheel. “Damn it, Sawyer,” I whispered. It was hard to cast Aidan as my hero after finding out the senior class had chosen Sawyer as my perfect guy. And especially after he’d whispered to me in the student council meeting. The setting hadn’t been sexy, yet he’d set my body on fire. I could only imagine what he would talk me into if he ever got me alone.

The car behind me honked.

I drove on.

As I pulled in to my driveway, I saw Aidan was there ahead of me. In fact, he’d taken my parking space. I continued around to the extra pad near the front door, like a guest. After I stopped, I checked my phone to see if he’d sent me a message. Nothing.

Wary, I climbed the steps to the wide front porch and opened the door. The scent of fresh-baked peanut butter cookies wafted out—my mother’s specialty and Barrett’s favorite. I walked through the marble foyer and the formal living room, into the kitchen.

Aidan sat at the kitchen bar with a plate of the cookies and a glass of milk. “Hello,” he called with no enthusiasm.

“Hi there,” I said with an equal lack of emotion. I rounded the bar to the kitchen side and stopped in front of him. “What’cha doing?”

He nodded toward the door to my mother’s office. “I’ve asked you a couple of times to check on your mom’s recommendation letter for me. You keep forgetting. But you told me she was taking this afternoon off since Barrett’s coming home, and I figured I could catch her. Sometimes when you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”

I heard the accusation in his voice. He was angry with me about the student council meeting. I didn’t understand what I hadn’t done right, though.
He
was the one who’d gotten parliamentary procedure wrong.