Most Likely to Succeed (3 page)

I didn’t pursue it. I was more interested in what he was really doing here. “The deadline for early admission to Columbia is a month and a half away,” I pointed out.

“I didn’t want to wait until the last minute. I’m way more responsible than that.”

Again, I knew he was accusing me of something. I just wasn’t sure what. Saving the homecoming dance made me
more
responsible than him, not less.

I slid my book bag onto the counter to remind him this was my house.

It worked. He sat back on the stool and seemed to really look at me for the first time. “It’s just that I don’t have a ticket to Columbia without this letter.” His tone had changed. Usually he spoke with the bravado of a politician, even when we
were alone. But occasionally he dropped the act and let me see the boy underneath.

“I know,” I said quietly, my automatic reaction to Aidan’s half apologies.

“Your ticket to Columbia is living right here in the house with you,” he said. “It makes me nervous that I don’t have a letter in hand.”

I nodded. That I could understand. When I had an English paper due, I didn’t even leave it in my locker in case that part of the school caught on fire. I carted the paper around with me until I handed it in. Academic paranoia was one of the many things that had bonded Aidan and me over the years.

And now that I’d half-accepted his half apology, his attitude was back. He popped a last bite of cookie into his mouth and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “Want to go upstairs to your room?”

The last thing I wanted right now was to make out with him. His apology hadn’t been
that
convincing.

He raised his eyebrows, confident I’d say yes, only impatient for my answer. His calm assurance was exactly what I’d fallen so hard for in ninth grade. Now it grated on my nerves.

But I figured I was only shell shocked from the council meeting, and Ms. Yates’s dismissal of me in the lunchroom, and the false closeness I felt with Sawyer. I would get over
my negative feelings about Aidan soon enough. I didn’t want to make things worse between us by telling him the truth.

So I gave him a very good excuse for not taking him upstairs to my bedroom. I looked pointedly at my mother’s office door, then back at him. “Are you crazy?”

“She’s busy.”

“My dad’s probably upstairs.”

“He’ll leave us alone. Your parents love me.” He leaned over the counter and whispered, “I have a condom.”

My jaw dropped. He wanted to have
sex
? Making out in the middle of our argument might have had some healing properties. Having sex sounded downright repugnant. After all, we’d only done it three times total, on special nights, when we were getting along.

And why take the big risk with my parents home? Now, suddenly? Weird.

“No thanks.” I slid a cookie from one of the cooling racks beside the oven and took a bite.

“Why not?” he asked. “You’ve always jumped at the chance before.”

Forcing myself to match his calm, I chewed and swallowed, even though the cookie had gone dry in my mouth. Only then did I say, “
Jumped
at the chance? I don’t
think
so.”

He glared at me. “It’s Sawyer, isn’t it?”

My heart pounded. I would have denied it, except that I was such an awful liar.

Instead, I used Aidan’s own bait-and-switch tactic, easing out of trouble. With another glance at my mother’s door to make sure it was still closed, I lowered my voice and said, “You think I’m cheating on you with Sawyer, and that’s the only reason he and I happened to agree with each other in the student council meeting today? No. We agreed because we and the rest of the student council were right, and you were wrong.”

Aidan shook his head. “You’d be too scared to cheat on me with Sawyer. But you’re taken in by his act. You’re as dumb as every other girl at our school.”

The door to my mother’s office burst open. She wore her business suit from her morning at work. She probably hadn’t taken it off while baking cookies because she planned to wear it to pick up Barrett at the airport. As she phrased it, she might be off duty sometimes, but she was always president of the bank.

And she wore a big smile, because Barrett was coming home. Or Aidan was here. Or both.

She turned to me. “Hi, sweetie.” She air-kissed my forehead so her perfect plum lipstick wouldn’t rub off. Then she glanced at the cookie in my hand. “For shame. Those are for
Barrett.” No matter that she’d served Aidan the same cookies herself.

She turned back to Aidan. “I think you’ll be happy with this, and so will Columbia.” She slid an envelope printed with her Columbia alumni club logo in front of him.

Aidan swiped the letter off the counter so fast that it never stopped moving. He raked back his barstool and stood. “Thank you, Mrs. Gordon.”

I cringed. My mother hadn’t changed her name to Gordon when she married my dad. She was still Sylvia Beale, BA, MBA, President and CEO. I’d heard her chew out people who insisted on calling her Mrs. Gordon as if women had no choice in naming themselves. But Aidan called her Mrs. Gordon, no matter how many times I warned him.

And she always gave him a pass. Her grin didn’t falter as he walked toward the back door.

At the last second he remembered me. “See you after the game, Kaye,” he threw over his shoulder.

“Yep, see ya,” I said, already turning to toss the rest of my cookie in the trash. I’d lost my appetite. I heard the door close behind him.

When I straightened, my mother was watching me with her hands on her hips. “What’s wrong between you two?” she demanded.

I sighed, and kept sighing, like I’d been holding my breath since study hall. “The gym roof got damaged by the storm. Aidan decided to cancel the homecoming dance instead of relocating it, without consulting the rest of the student council. I wanted to move it. So did everybody else. We nearly had a mutiny in the meeting. The upshot is, I have to figure out how to fix the dance now, and he’s furious with me for speaking up.”

“I would be too,” my mother said. “You led a
mutiny
?”

“He wasn’t following parliamentary procedure.” I felt sheepish for the first time.

My mother closed her eyes and shook her head. “Parliamentary procedure! It’s high school, Katherine. It’s a high school dance. Your job is to get
out
of high school, holding your student council office in front of you like a key that opens the door to Columbia. Nobody cares what you actually
do
as vice president.”

“I care,” I protested. “The parliamentarian cares.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Who’s the parliamentarian?”

“Sawyer,” I mumbled.

“The blond boy who works as a waiter at the Crab Lab?” my mother asked. “The one whose father went to prison?”

Now I really regretted piping up at the dinner table on the first day of tenth grade and gleefully dishing to my mother
about the school’s new bad boy who’d already managed to get suspended. I shifted gears. “Will cares—Tia’s boyfriend. Practically everybody at the meeting was on my side.”

“What about Ms. Yates?”

“She sided with Aidan because she doesn’t want to get off her butt.”

“It’s hard to hide attitude,” my mother said. “Yours won’t earn you much of a teacher recommendation, which was supposedly the reason you ran for vice president in the first place.” She crossed the kitchen, took down a plastic container, and started transferring the cookies from the cooling racks so I couldn’t eat any more. “You may care about the dance today. The real test is, who will care in twenty years, or five years, or even a year from now whether you held this one dance in high school? The answer is, nobody.”

A year from now I would be a college freshman in New York. That
did
make a Florida high school homecoming dance sound insignificant. Trouble was, I couldn’t picture what I’d be doing on a Friday afternoon in mid-September on the campus of Columbia. But I could picture the dark dance I was supposed to have two weeks from tonight in the high school gym, with a boy’s hand creeping down my hip. And in my mind, my dance partner wasn’t Aidan anymore.

My mother was still talking. “You need to be smarter
about picking your battles. This dance isn’t worth the trouble. When we agreed you should increase your extracurriculars for college admissions, I never intended for you to get involved in a time-consuming activity that would distract you from your studies. Cheerleading is bad enough. If, on top of that, you’re taking on the responsibility of moving an entire dance, I can only imagine what’s going to happen to your AP English grade, and there goes valedictorian. Don’t you have a paper to write on
Crime and Punishment
this weekend?”

These last words I heard as an echo down the hall. I’d left the kitchen while her back was turned. I tiptoed up the stairs and through the master bedroom to the smaller front porch on the second story, which we referred to as Dad’s “office.” Most days he wrote his books and articles here, where he could see his dock through the palm trees, and his sailboat, and the lagoon that served as his escape route to the Gulf of Mexico.

“Hey, my Kaye,” he said without looking up from his laptop. He sat in his cushioned lounge chair, sunglasses on, iced tea beside him. Barefoot, he wore board shorts and a holey Columbia T-shirt that he might have owned since college. He would still be wearing this when my parents left for the airport tonight. My mother would look him up and down with distaste and tell him to change. In response, he would put on flip-flops.

“Hi,” I huffed, plopping into the other chair.

He examined me over the top of his sunglasses. “Why so glum?”

I told him in a rush how Aidan had canceled the dance and my mother had told me I should have shut up and let Aidan run over me.

As soon as I said “Mom,” Dad started making a noise—
rrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnt
—like I was a big loser on a game show. “You know I don’t like that kind of talk between my ladies,” he said.

“You asked,” I said bitterly.

He stuck out his bottom lip in sympathy. “Come on now. Your mom just wants to make sure you don’t bite off more than you can chew.”

“Oh, ha!” I sneered. “Funny you should say that. She won’t let me eat Barrett’s cookies, either.”

He rubbed his temple like I was giving him a very familiar headache. “Kaye. Your mom sees her baby only once every few months. She couldn’t sleep last night because she was so excited to see him today. She misses him desperately. And she’ll miss you desperately too. When you go off to Columbia and come home again, she’ll bake
you
cookies and get mad at
me
for eating them. Promise.”

I doubted it.

“And as for Aidan,” Dad went on, “I know you’re spending tonight over at Harper’s, but you’re making some time for Aidan in there somewhere, huh?” He gave me a cocky grin.

“Yeah,” I grumbled.

“The two of you are a little high strung, we could say. You might have let Most Likely to Succeed go to your heads a bit. You need some space for a few hours. But when you see him again tonight, I’ll bet you both feel completely different about each other.”

I didn’t know then how right he was.

3

AN HOUR AND A HALF
later, I drove slowly across the school parking lot, pretending I was concerned about traffic safety, but actually looking hard for Sawyer’s dented old pickup truck among the cars near the boys’ locker room and the school buses. He wasn’t here yet.

Unless he’d ridden with someone else. I’d heard rumors about him being with other girls—usually fooling around with them at parties, not dating them—but honestly, I didn’t know much about his love life. If he was dating someone else, Tia would know, but she might not tell
me
, because I acted like I didn’t care.

And I didn’t. That’s what I told myself as I accelerated toward my ride, the cheerleader van. But as I parked, I was still gazing across the vast lot. I watched under the
HOME OF
THE PELICANS
sign for Sawyer’s beater truck to appear.

“Loser,” I said to myself as I got out of the car. After I stepped up into the van, a quick glance around told me 1) Sawyer wasn’t on it, and 2) Grace and Cathy were early, which was bizarre. They hadn’t used their extra time to bring our cooler and twenty pompons out of the girls’ locker room, though. Rather than disturb them, force them to look up from their cell phones, and listen to their excuses for why they were physically fit to cheer tonight but not to carry pompons sixty feet, I started making trips myself.

And watching for Sawyer’s truck as I walked.

By my fourth trek, some juniors had arrived to help me. They were a lot more responsible than the other senior cheerleaders I’d been saddled with. When we had the van loaded, I chose an empty seat toward the back. Ellen tried to sit with me. I got along fine with Ellen, Cathy, and Grace most of the time. That was the head cheerleader’s job, and the student council vice president’s job: to make friends with everyone. But if I was Snow White, their dwarf names were Shut Up, Hapless, and Drunken. I really could not deal with Ellen’s conversation halfway to Orlando.

I told her I was saving the seat for Harper, which was true. She was the yearbook photographer. She’d planned to snap shots on the marching band’s freshman bus during the
drive to the game, since the yearbook didn’t have enough freshman shots, and on the cheerleader van during the drive back. I didn’t mention to Ellen that Harper wouldn’t be occupying the seat until later. If Ellen sat with me now and complained to me about how her remedial math class was so haaaaaaard, that wouldn’t leave the space open for Sawyer.

I stashed my bag beneath the seat, settled against the window, and scanned the parking lot again for a certain undesirable pickup.
There
he was, finally, making a beeline for us, driving right over curbs like he was in a Humvee. That might explain why his truck sounded the way it did. He parked beside my car, got out, and looked up at the van.

I looked away.

A few seconds later the van door rolled open. My stomach fluttered with butterflies. I would not look. I couldn’t let him know how I was beginning to feel about him. He teased me constantly, which must be why our class had voted that we should get together. But his teasing came with a side of mean, as surely as the fries he served with shrimp at the Crab Lab. He might turn on me if he knew he had the upper hand.

I wished I could switch my fantasies off.

“Hello, ladies.” He stood in the open doorway, waving with two hands like he’d been crowned homecoming king
and was surveying his royal subjects during the parade.

Girls cheered him: “Sawyeeeeeerrrrr!” We were cheerleaders, after all. But some of us were more interested in Sawyer than others. The ones who had a taste for danger.

And then there was me.

He locked eyes with me right away. His eyes were clear and blue and made my heart race.

He moved toward me, then past me, into the back of the van with a huge canvas bag—probably containing his bulky pelican costume. Well, fine. If he wanted to ignore me for once, I could ignore him, too. Or pretend to.

That ended when Grace squealed, “Sawyer, damn it!” because he’d tickled her as he passed or bumped her with his bag. Her voice cut through me, my usual reaction to girls squealing when Sawyer bothered them. It hurt to be reminded one more time that Sawyer flirted with me
exactly
like he flirted with every other girl at school. I meant nothing to him, and if I ever thought we had the kind of electric connection I’d felt during the meeting today, that was my mistake.

At the same time, I felt the completely illogical temptation to
do something
to pull his attention back to me, before it was too late.

And then, having dumped his bag on top of the pompons—I
heard the swish of the plastic strands—he came back up the aisle and collapsed in the seat beside me.

I felt like I’d won the lottery. Seeing Sawyer from across a football field or a classroom or the van made my heart race. Having him right next to me gave me a sensation like I’d stuck my finger in a light socket. But I needed to calm down. The school convoy would stay parked another fifteen minutes, waiting for stragglers. Maybe he was paying me a brief visit before settling with a girl he liked better for the trip.

“Give me some more room here. I’m hanging in the aisle.” He bumped me to make me scoot toward the window. “What’s the matter?”

“You, being rude.”

“No, what’s
really
the matter?” He gave me his special expression, an intense stare with one eyebrow raised like an evil genius, which cracked me up if I wasn’t careful. “Is Aidan still mad at you?”

“Yes.” I didn’t want to discuss Aidan with Sawyer, though. “And my mother’s mad at me for expending too much energy on extracurriculars, when she’s the one who wanted me to join more stuff in the first place.”

He kept giving me the nutty look. “That is
so weird
.”

“What is?”

“Parents who give a shit what their kids are up to.”

I felt guilty, suddenly, for complaining about my problems. According to rumor and the more reliable account I’d heard from Tia, Sawyer had
actual
problems at home. His mom up in Georgia had kicked him out two years ago, and he’d come to live with his dad, who’d just been let out of prison. His older brother ran the bar at the Crab Lab and had gotten Sawyer a job as a waiter, but there was no love lost between them. Tia had said their fights in the Crab Lab kitchen were legendary.

In short, Sawyer had been taking care of himself for a while. And he’d schooled me for complaining.

The next second, though, he relaxed and moved closer with his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand. The late afternoon sunlight streamed through the window and into his eyes, making him squint, but he didn’t back away. “Seriously, why is your mom on you about that?”

I shrugged. “My brother is coming home from college for the weekend.”

“Already?” Sawyer asked. “Didn’t their school year just start?”

“He was there all summer,” I explained. “Currently he’s flunking out of Brown.”

“
Barrett?
Is
flunking
? He was the valedictorian here.”

“Well, I guess technically he’s not
flunking
,” I admitted. “He’s getting Bs and Cs. To hear my mother tell it, that’s flunking. She made him repeat those classes over the summer and bring his GPA up.”

“I see.” Sawyer’s tone made it clear he didn’t see at all.

“She was already disappointed that he didn’t get into Harvard and had to settle for Brown. His high school GPA was perfect and his test scores were phenomenal, but he didn’t have the extracurriculars to look well rounded. That’s when she got on me about adding some. But I tried out for cheerleader, and she told me that’s not what she had in mind. She’s like, ‘What career will that help you with, professional cheerleader?’ And I was already on student council, but she pushed me to run for office. Now that I’m in charge, she’s like, ‘Why are you expending effort on something other than school?’ It’s frustrating.”

“I can tell,” he said. “Maybe you should concentrate on another kind of extracurricular activity.” He put his arm around me, with his hand in my hair.

Here we went again. He came after me because something about me screamed
target
to him. I knew he was only making fun of me, like he made fun of everybody, and I should stay away from him.

Especially since I had a boyfriend.

My deep, dark secret was this: Lately when Sawyer touched me, my palms got sweaty. And I liked it. My make-out sessions with Aidan weren’t as frequent or intense as they’d been when we first started dating three years ago, but we
did
still have them. And of course, there were the few times we’d gone all the way. But nothing we’d done affected me like Sawyer getting a laugh at my expense.

So I would put up with Sawyer exactly to the point that my ironic patience might start to seem suspicious to onlookers, and they figured out I had a crush on him.

Or, worse:
He
did.

Sawyer stroking my hair definitely was something I wouldn’t tolerate if I didn’t like him. I tried to dodge away from his hand, which hurt because he’d already wound a curl around his finger.

“Ow!” Collecting myself, I informed him drily, as if he wasn’t holding me captive by a thread, “I don’t like it when people touch my hair.”

He raised his brows. “That’s a completely different statement from ‘Stop touching my hair, Sawyer.’ ”

It certainly was. And now that he’d pointed this out, I was afraid he
did
suspect the truth. Overdoing my reaction now, protesting too much, would just draw attention to the fact that my crush on him was getting more serious. I gave
him my best withering look—I was good at these, if I did say so myself—and grumbled, “I’m sensitive about my hair, Sawyer. I just had a huge fight with Aidan about this.” In fact, that’s where my recent trouble with Aidan had started.

I’d never straightened my hair, but I hadn’t been bold enough to let it pouf twice the size of my head, either. I’d worn it tamed in twists or braids until two weeks ago. Natural hair had been gaining popularity—not so much around small-town Florida, but in the parts of America that mattered, like New York and California and TV. I wanted to try it.

I’d finally found the courage to spend a long Saturday unbinding my hair and nudging my curls to life. My mother had been supportive and helpful at first, working with the twists I couldn’t see in back. Halfway through she’d started complaining that she made enough money to pay someone else to do this.

When we had finished, I liked the way it looked. I couldn’t wait to show Aidan when we went out that night. He’d told me it looked like an Afro. Logically I knew I shouldn’t have taken this as an insult, but he’d
meant
it as an insult. I was wearing my hair the way it grew on its own, more or less, and he told me it was ugly. Or dated. Or at least not what he wanted or expected in girlfriend hair.

“Judging from the part of your fight that I overheard at
the Crab Lab,” Sawyer said, “I think you came down too hard on Aidan about that.” I couldn’t see what he was doing, but it felt like he was looping a bit of my hair around and around his finger, then carefully pulling his finger out, curling iron–style, seeing if my hair would stay that way. It would.

“You?”
I exclaimed. “Are taking up for
Aidan
?” Sawyer made fun of everybody indiscriminately, but later you’d see him having a halfway normal conversation with most people. Not with Aidan. He definitely had it in for Aidan. Probably because Aidan’s life was so put together, and Sawyer’s wasn’t.

“I’m definitely not taking up for him,” Sawyer said, tugging at a curl, eyes on my hair rather than my face. “It would be fine by me if you hated him now, but you’d hate him for the wrong reasons. At the Crab Lab, it seemed like you were dancing around the edge of calling him a racist. I don’t think that’s what he meant. None of the girls at school are doing their hair like yours. It makes a statement. Aidan doesn’t want his girlfriend to make a statement.”

Sawyer was just running his mouth, saying anything he could think of to get a rise out of me. This time it was working.

“That’s not true,” I said. “Aidan
wanted
me to run for vice president of the student council. I make statements in that job constantly.”

“Correction: Aidan doesn’t want his girlfriend to make a statement he hasn’t preapproved. You can’t make a move in student council without him okaying it. If you did, he’d force you to undo it. He’d make you backtrack even if your idea was good, just for spite. That was really clear in the meeting today.” Sawyer paused. His eyes flicked to mine. “I can tell from the look on your face he’s done that to you plenty of times before.”

I glared at him, neither confirming nor denying. The problem with Sawyer was that he moved through the halls of the school with a scorched-earth policy, insulting everyone in his path, but he actually was perceptive about what made people tick. Including me. That’s why his insults were so effective. He understood what buttons to push.

His lips were very near my cheek as he said, “Here’s my theory. You’ve been angry with Aidan for a long time. You knew how he’d react to your hair. That’s exactly why you did it.”

Sawyer had gotten a rise out of me before. But this time he’d taken antagonizing me to a whole new level. I felt my face burning, and it seemed like the space between us was hot with energy. He’d correctly guessed something incredibly personal about me that I’d only half acknowledged myself.

And he acted like he’d only dropped another insult, or made a comment about our team’s chances at the game
tonight. “God, your hair is
so cool
,” he said. “None of the curls are the same diameter. It’s like the track of nuclear particles during fission. It’s a shame you waited so long to wear it this way.”

“It’s hard to maintain,” I said weakly. “It gets dry. It gets squashed when I sleep. Boys mess with my curl pattern. You act like natural hair is this strange, exotic thrill. It’s patronizing.”