Most Likely to Succeed (5 page)

“Right.” After all my pining after Sawyer tonight, I still needed to make up with Aidan. The thought made me a little ill.

“I hear you and Aidan had a problem in the student coun
cil meeting today,” she said. “Good thing you’re sleeping over with me. We’ll talk through what happened. Or help you forget about him, whichever.”

“Yeah.” I did look forward to spending the night at Harper’s tiny cottage where she lived with her mom, behind their huge Victorian bed-and-breakfast. Harper and Tia and I didn’t have much time left together. We’d be going to different colleges next August. And if Tia and Will both got into drum corps like they wanted, we wouldn’t see much of her past June.

But tonight I would get to hear about Tia’s night in marching band with Will, her polar opposite. I would hear more about the mysterious experiments Harper and Brody had been performing on each other. If I couldn’t pry the details out of Harper, Tia would. And they would ask about Aidan and me, kissing and making up and then exploding again in the student council drama . . . but they would be reserved with their questions. I could tell their enthusiasm about my relationship with Aidan had waned over the years. Kind of like Aidan’s own enthusiasm, and mine.

That was normal when two people had been dating for all of high school. Aidan and I had something good together and, moreover, long term and stable. Hardly anybody else in
our school could say that. It didn’t make sense for us to break up just because we’d been dating forever and there might be someone better around the corner—like Sawyer, of all people. That kind of search would drive a person crazy.

Harper leaned toward me to whisper, “There will be a surprise waiting for you when you come over.”

“Oooh, what is it?” I couldn’t imagine. Her parents’ divorce was finally going forward, which she said was good. But her mom had a hard time keeping the B and B afloat. There was definitely not any redecorating going on.

Harper looked around the van again before she said, “Sawyer.”

I felt the blood rush to my face and goose bumps break out on my arms in the air-conditioned van. “What do you mean, Sawyer?”

“You know,” Harper said, “he and his dad have been living in a rental house on the same street as my granddad.”

“No, I didn’t know.” It made sense that Sawyer lived near our little downtown, which enabled him to get drunk outside the Crab Lab, then walk to our friends’ parties and then home without getting behind the wheel and killing anyone. But I’d never given a lot of thought to where home was for him. He just appeared.

“He had a big fight with his dad a few nights ago,” she
said, “and he left. He stayed with my granddad at first. They know each other because Sawyer cuts my granddad’s grass. Anyway—”

“How could Sawyer
leave
?” I’d had some huge fights with my mother before, but it had never crossed my mind to sleep at someone else’s house because of it.

“He and his dad don’t get along, apparently, and this was the last straw. Unfortunately for Sawyer, my granddad has finally rejoined society and gotten a girlfriend. I told you about Chantel. My granddad says Sawyer is cramping his style. Granddad talked to my mom about it, because they’re actually speaking again. It just so happens that my mom has been looking for someone to help with breakfast at the B and B, since I refuse to do it anymore.”

“I’m so proud of you for standing up for yourself.” Harper was introverted. Serving breakfast and associating with her mom’s guests at the B and B—different ones every week—had been a special kind of torture for her, like a cat in a room full of toddlers.

“Me too. But I’ve felt awful that it left my mom in the lurch. Along comes Sawyer, who’s willing to work just a couple of hours a day as long as it doesn’t interfere with his evenings waiting tables at the Crab Lab. And he needs a place to stay.”

“Sawyer is serving breakfast at your B and B?” I asked incredulously.

Harper nodded. “He does a great job, much better than I ever did. After he’s fed everybody, he actually sits down and talks to them if he has time before school, whereas I made up any excuse to hide in the kitchen. He can be very charming to the elderly and people he doesn’t know. You’d be shocked.”

“Wait a minute.” The full meaning of what she was saying finally hit me. “Sawyer is
living
at your B and B?”

She laughed nervously. “Actually, no. We don’t have an empty room. It’s too soon after Labor Day. But one of the rooms will be empty Monday, and he’ll move over there. Mom says he can stay through hurricane season, until business picks up again around Christmas. Right now he’s staying at our house.”

I gaped at her. “The house where you
live
?” Harper’s place was a two-bedroom. When she and Tia and I had sleepovers there, one of us had to take the couch in the living room.

“Yeah.”

She’d told me all of this so calmly that I sensed I was protesting too much again. I asked logically and rationally, “Doesn’t that weird you out?”

“Not really. He basically comes in, grumbles, and wanders away again. He’s a lot like my granddad.”

“But your whole reason for telling your mom you didn’t want to help at the B and B anymore was that you’re not a people person,” I reminded her. “You need your personal space. You invite friends over occasionally, sure, but people hanging out too long drives you nuts.”

“I don’t have to entertain him,” Harper explained. “He doesn’t say much. It’s like he’s not there.” She looked past me out the dark window, searching for a reason that would make better sense to me. Finally she settled on “I feel safer while he’s over.”

“Safer from whom? Your dad? I thought the divorce was finally going through. You think he’ll come back?”

“Probably not,” she said vaguely. “I just don’t mind Sawyer being there.”

“Doesn’t Brody mind?” Brody didn’t strike me as the jealous type. He was way too confident for that. But bad boy Sawyer living with Brody’s girlfriend? That was different.

“Sawyer called Brody to tell him,” she said. “And anyway, it’s only for a few more nights. Next week he’ll move over to the B and B, and it’ll be like we’re neighbors, that’s all. We were neighbors before.”

“Now you’ll be neighbors who eat breakfast together every morning,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, I’ve thought about that, but Sawyer put it best.
He said a lot of people in the same class at school might feel uncomfortable moving in together, so to speak, but he and I have gotten all that out of the way and have nothing left to feel uncomfortable about, because he’s already slipped me the tongue.” She laughed.

She stopped laughing when she saw the way I was looking at her. “I told you about that,” she reminded me. “Two weeks ago, when I thought Brody was getting back together with Grace. Sawyer was doing me a favor.”

“He sure was.” Brody and Harper’s relationship had worked out now, but they’d had a rocky start, complete with Harper and Sawyer trying to make Brody jealous—and succeeding. When I’d heard about this, I’d burned with jealousy myself. Sawyer never offered himself up when Aidan and I had trouble—which, lately, was all the time.

“Why didn’t you tell me before now that Sawyer moved in?” I complained. These were big changes in Harper’s home life, and they’d been going on for half a week. I couldn’t imagine why I’d been left out of the best friends call tree.

“Because.” Harper lowered her voice and bent toward me again for privacy from the cheerleading van, a.k.a. the school’s rumor mill. “Ever since you figured out that you and Sawyer were really the ones elected Perfect Couple That Never Was, you’ve acted strange about him.”

Before I could protest—
Strange, how?
—she went on. “I didn’t want this to be a big deal. It’s
not
a big deal. He’ll just be there when you come over. Of course Tia won’t care, since the two of them are such good friends. I figured you wouldn’t mind either, now that you know why he’s there. And I wouldn’t want to give him the impression he’s not welcome, when he doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”

Harper wasn’t one to throw her weight around or scold, but I was almost sure she was giving me a warning look.

The next second I grabbed her shoulder to keep her from tumbling into the aisle as the van hit the on-ramp for the interstate too fast and we lurched around the curve. My stomach spun with the van. I’d just realized Harper’s warning not to kick Sawyer when he was down had come too late.

As the van straightened and Harper was no longer in danger of sailing across it, I took my hands off her and slapped them over my mouth. I opened them to tell her, “Sawyer got mad at me and went to ride on the band bus because I told him he didn’t have any plans after graduation and he’d be living in a box under the interstate.”

Harper gaped at me. “Kaye!” When even
she
acted outraged, I knew I was in trouble. “Why did you say that?”

“I didn’t know he was
actually
homeless! It seemed like a clever reaction to . . . He was . . .” I tried to remember exactly
what he’d been doing to me when I insulted him. My most distinct impression was of him running his fingers through my hair, whispering in my ear, and making chills rush down my arms. That’s what I’d pushed him away for.

“He teases you and bugs you,” Harper said gently. “But he’s a real person.”

“I know that,” I said, careful not to snap at Harper, who never deserved it.

It was a night of firsts. As soon as we arrived at school, I would have to tell Sawyer I was sorry.

* * *

The senior band bus beat us back. Watching out my window as we pulled to a stop, I saw Sawyer open the door of his truck and heft the bag with his costume into the passenger side. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to apologize at Harper’s house later with Harper and especially Tia there—at least, not the way I wanted.

“See ya soon.” I jumped over Harper into the aisle with my bag and pompons in tow, raced down the steps, and galloped over to Sawyer’s truck just as he was glancing over his shoulder to back out. When he saw me, he gave me that cold, emotionless look again, but he cranked down the window.

“Can I have a minute?” I asked.

He bit his lip and gazed at me like he wasn’t at all sure
I deserved a whole minute. Finally he turned off the engine and raised his eyebrows at me.

“I had no idea you’d moved out until Harper told me in the van,” I said in a rush. “When I mentioned the box, I wasn’t trying to insult you.”

He watched me silently for a moment. “You
were
trying to insult me. Just not about
that
. You were insulting me for not being good enough to get into Columbia.”

“Saw-yer!” A shrill majorette, decked out in skimpy sequins, pushed past me to lean through his window. This was a freshman who didn’t view the head cheerleader and student council vice president with the proper awe. She was young enough to be rude. “I didn’t drop my baton even
once
during halftime. You can’t make fun of me anymore!”

“Oh, I can always make fun of you,” he assured her.

To put as much of herself as possible through his window, she stood on her tiptoes in her knee-high majorette boots, with her sequined ass in the air. I stood there staring at it, feeling like a bellboy lugging my bag and pompons around. Without ceremony I walked one parking place over, unlocked my trunk, and dumped my stuff inside. I didn’t want to interrupt Sawyer when he was busy coming on to his new girlfriend for this particular half hour.

“Kaye,” Aidan said beside me.

I whirled around. “Hey!” I was halfway between guilt that he’d almost caught me talking to Sawyer, and satisfaction that Sawyer could peek in his rearview mirror and see me talking to
Aidan
. Maybe
Sawyer
could find out what jealousy felt like, for once. I hadn’t been so glad to see Aidan in months.

“Do you want to follow me back to my house so I can drop off my car?” I asked. “Or we could go to the beach now. I brought my bag for Harper’s, and I’m sure my car would be safe here overnight.” As I heard my own words, I pictured making out at the beach with Aidan, as we’d planned.

And I didn’t want to.

He shocked me by saying, “I don’t think we should go.”

“Okay,” I said a little too cheerfully. “Why not?”

“I talked to Ms. Yates.”

I nodded. “Again? At the game?” Maybe they’d realized they’d been wrong to protest saving the homecoming dance.

No such luck. “I mean, I talked to her in the lunchroom today,” he said. “She told me about the screwup with the Superlatives elections.”

“Oh.” I felt fresh sweat break out along my hairline. Ms. Yates must have decided Aidan, as student council president, needed to know about the Superlatives problem after all. I wished I’d told him first. I
should
have told him, even if he’d had to keep it a secret from Ms. Yates that he knew.

And now that I’d spent the whole game cuddling with Sawyer, I felt like I’d been caught.

“Being elected Perfect Couple with Sawyer doesn’t mean anything,” I said quickly. “I’m sure it was just a joke. Sawyer probably organized people to vote for him and me, just to make me mad.” I did think this was possible—though if it was true, that was
some
joke, and Sawyer had done more than try to make me mad. He’d tried to get my attention.

“That doesn’t matter,” Aidan said. “The idea of him going after you is so ridiculous anyway. I mean, it’s
Sawyer
.” He wrinkled his nose as he said Sawyer’s name. “I’m more offended that you lied to me about being elected Most Likely to Succeed with me. But that doesn’t matter either. What matters is that you screwed up the election.”

His words hit me like a slap in the face. “
I
didn’t screw up the election,” I protested. “I had nothing to do with it. Ms. Yates wouldn’t let me work on the election staff because I’m part of the senior class. That’s exactly
why
the election got screwed up, if you ask me.”

“But you were still in charge,” Aidan said. “You were supposed to tell the staff what to do, and somehow they didn’t get the message. When that happens in business, someone at the top resigns so confidence in the organization can be restored.”