Wicked Restless (Harper Boys #2)

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o part
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Ginger Scott

N
ormally
, I don’t care what clothes I wear when I leave for school in the early morning. I spend my days with people I don’t really know. Most of my freshman year of high school was on a college campus—my curse for being
smart
.

I say “curse” because unlike my older brother, Owen, I don’t have normal friends. I don’t get to go to high school dances or hang out at football games. Not that Owen ever did, but he could have if he wanted to. I get to go to what’s called the Excel Program. I’m the lucky one learning physics and advanced calculus. The trade-off is I’ll probably be accepted into any college I want, get any job I want, and find the entire process to be easy.

The curse—I’m alone.

My friends were Owen’s friends: always three years older; always inviting me to things out of pity; always keeping me out of trouble, but just out of its reach. Protecting me. That was the line. My life was on the periphery. I heard it from Owen since the day I started grade school, and my mother echoed those words whenever I would protest I couldn’t go to the party with Owen or hang out in the woods with him and his friends.

“He’s only protecting you,” she’d say.

Protecting me.

Choking me.

When Owen graduated, so did his friends. My small sliver of a social life evaporated piece by piece as people went off to college or to find jobs in some town that wasn’t small. Then my mom sold our house to help pay for my grandfather’s care, and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a vacant unit on one side and neighbors in their sixties on the other.

Sophomore year is shaping up to be more isolating. My only friend my age, a guy I barely tolerated named Matt who I met during a torturous year when both of our mothers decided putting us in Boy Scouts was a good idea, moved to Guam. Not the next town over. Not California. Not any place I could convince my mother was safe enough for me to visit—
escape to.
The fucker moved to Guam.

I used to go to Matt’s house and spend hours playing video games. We didn’t talk when we played, which is what made my friendship with Matt work. Now, I go to school, then come home. I study and have dinner with my mom and her boyfriend, Dwayne Chessman, a man we’ve known for years. He teaches at the high school—the one I don’t get to go to because I’m
so smart.

In the evening, I walk to the rink in the middle of Old Town, to a place called the Ice Palace, and I skate until my feet have blisters. I sprint and stop so many times I wear paths in the ice—so deep, they need to fill them with water when I leave. This is the only place I can go to feel something. On weekends, there are enough guys there to get a game going, but during the week, when I can come, it’s usually only me. I’ve always skated, but when my brother Owen left, I became obsessed with hockey. Seems the skills I lack at throwing a ball are made up for in my ability to move a puck. That, and I’m incredibly fast. It’s not the competition. I couldn’t give a shit about winning something. For me, it’s the rawness, the hunt—chasing something, taking something from someone, hurting them to get it, and not caring how they look lying on the ice in my wake. I don’t operate under those morals anywhere else. But I think, maybe, there’s a dark part of me that needs it. And I
need
to keep it on the ice.

Usually, though, I’m alone out there. So instead, I push myself until I can barely breathe, sometimes until my chest burns and I vomit. I push until Gary, who cleans up the joint, is coughing under his breath, leaning on the exit as he taps on his watch—his subtle hint to me to get my ass off the ice so he can go home.

My feet are sore today, but that’s the last thing I’m going to remember. This is the day so many things are going to change—the day I start caring about what I wear when I leave my apartment in the morning. Illinois passed a law that every high school student needs to take PE, even the smart students who don’t go to a real high school. I protested at first, dreading the bus ride I’d have to endure, the awkward blue uniform, and my assured complete-lack-of-allies for dodgeball. But those anxieties are escaping me now. The second I broke through the athletic department door, I saw her sitting against the wall of the PE office, her legs outstretched, the blue fabric of her perfect dress tucked underneath her knees. The vision of her hits me harder as my eyes scan their way up. Her hair is the color of mahogany, and it twists in spirals, like a tornado rushing down her shoulders and spine; a dark storm against her cream skin.

I sit opposite her, sliding down against the wall, stretching my legs out until the soles of my shoes tap the bottom of hers. I do this on purpose. I want to see her eyes. Her gaze comes up quickly, and she pulls her feet in fast, careful to tuck the bottom of her dress underneath more tightly, hiding her modesty. Her eyes are gray, a dark gray, like charcoal.

I don’t know her name, and I’m not sure I’ll like her when she speaks. But I know I’ll never forget her. Her smile, however fast it comes and goes in this moment, coincides with the first full breath I’ve taken in years.

I try to hold her attention, leaving my grin in place, a crooked one, just to let her know I’m sorry I bumped her. Sorry—
not sorry.
I slide the beanie from my head, and I know my hair is probably a mess by the way she lets out a breathy giggle when she sees it. I run my fingers through, but stop quickly. I like the way she giggles, and I don’t care how I look. If my messy hair makes her smile, I’ll wear it that way every day.

“Are you new, too?” she asks. I nodded
yes
at first, but correct her quickly. Her voice had me in a trance.

“No, I’m just…special,” I say.

She sizes my response up for a few seconds, her lip quirked up on one side. “What makes you so special?” she finally asks.

I hold her gaze for a few seconds, liking this feeling of just sitting here looking at her. I stare until she has to look away, her cheeks growing more pink and her eyelashes fluttering as she stares back to her lap, where she’s holding a small pink pass with something written from a parent or teacher. She keeps folding and unfolding the corners, wearing the paper out on the edges. She’s nervous.

“Nothing makes me special. I’m not very special at all,” I say, which only makes her peer back up with a sideways glance. Her lip ticks up again. Her mouth is pink, and tiny, and there are freckles that dot her nose.

“I bet you’re special to someone,” she says, her smile reaching the other side of her mouth now. She’s being nice. No…she’s being sweet. Goddamn is she sweet.

“I have an opening for that job…
someone.
Want it?” I tease. I see her eyes flash wider for a second, and I can tell I made her tense, so I tap my toe against hers again. “I was just kidding. But thanks.”

“Emma Burke…Andrew Harper?” The voice breaks through our silence, startling us both to our feet. Mr. Crest, the PE teacher, is standing with his clipboard, two uniforms wrapped in plastic tucked under his arm. I bet these come in a big box, on a big truck, from a warehouse filled with ugly blue uniforms. Thank god my shorts aren’t as small as hers. Thank god her shorts are that small.

“I’m supposed to give you this,” Emma says, stepping closer to the teacher and handing over her paper slip. He reviews it and stuffs it in his back pocket, then marks something on his clipboard.

“You, this way,” he says in my direction, shoving a bundle of pale blue material at me while jerking his head toward the boys’ locker room. I don’t even care that he’s talking to me like this, like I’m some slacker he plans to fail. I don’t care because she’s still biting her lip, trying not to look right at me for too long.

“I’ll see ya around, Emma,” I say, taking my ugly-ass PE uniform into my arms.

“Bye, Andrew,” she says, only letting her lip go from the grip of her teeth long enough to utter my name. Her voice is just over a whisper, and she’s timid, and sweet, and I love PE. I want to change my schedule to nothing but PE. All day. Every day—as long as I can have this class with her.

I
may have oversold
my enthusiasm for PE. I’ve been taking a bus here for three weeks, and so far, I’ve been the first guy out in dodgeball a dozen times, and forced to stand on the free-throw line in basketball for an hour until I could sink a shot. The only saving grace was the day we played field hockey. Of course, I got a warning from Mr. Crest and a lecture that made me miss my bus after I checked a guy on the field. Apparently, there is no contact in PE field hockey. When I told him they shouldn’t call it hockey then, he sent me to the principal’s office.

The only bonus about today—we don’t have to wear our uniforms. We get a break for the entire week, in fact. It’s the square-dancing unit. For about ten minutes, we’ve been sitting in the gym, our backs flush against the wall outside our locker room, while Mr. Crest struggles with an ancient sound system. Based on the few times he was able to get the speakers to make a sound, I’m pretty sure we’re not missing anything by not hearing this music. He finally turns a microphone on and sets it next to a tiny speaker he plugs into his phone.

“All right, gentlemen. On your feet, and form a line against the wall,” he says. There’s a collective grumble as we stand, but that sound stops as soon as the girls’ locker-room door swings open and a single-file line that matches ours begins to fill the space along the other wall.

When I see Emma, I start counting. She’s in the middle, and I make it to fourteen before the row of girls streaming through the door ends. I count two more times to be sure, then I count my line.

Seventeen.

Three people away.

Our number fourteen is a guy whose pants are rolled up at the bottom. And the dude isn’t wearing socks. He isn’t worthy of Emma. But he notices her. I watched him count. And I watched him clench his fist in a silent
yes
when he figured it out. There is no way I am letting this asshole swing her around the gym to shitty music for forty-five minutes.

“Dude,” I say, leaning forward, watching to make sure Mr. Crest is still facing the front. “Psssst! Dude!”

Fucker’s ignoring me.

“Come on, man. Hey!” He finally looks my way. He’s wearing a button-down shirt. The collar is wrinkled. “Hey, trade me spots.”

“Fuck off,” he shrugs.

I blink at him, a little stunned that he was so quick to shut me down. Owen would have punched him, or saved this memory for later and made him suffer through ridicule—or he’d just date the guy’s girlfriend. I glance back down to his shoes, and his hairy ankles. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a girlfriend.

I look at my row again, making sure I didn’t mess up on my first count. I’m still seventeen. I glance back at sockless dude, and he’s tucking his shirt in and smoothing his hair out on the sides. I can’t believe he’s going to touch Emma’s arm.

Our line moves forward, and couples are pairing off and finding spots on the gym floor marked with tape. When I’m about ten people away, I count again, relieved that at least I have a shy girl who looks just as uncomfortable with this lesson as I do.

The music is mostly fiddle, and there’s a male singer giving directions—spinning, two steps in, two steps out, around the barn and
ain’t she pretty.
I laugh a little under my breath. It’s my turn to pair off when I glance back up and meet Emma’s eyes. I don’t show my surprise, and I ignore the grunts in protest of the a-hole two people away from me.
Dude, socks. If you just wore socks, this wouldn’t have happened.

Maybe it would have, though. Maybe…maybe Emma was counting too.

I guide her to our tape marks in the far corner, and while everyone else has unlinked arms, I keep my hold on hers—our elbows locked together—the soft tickle of her skin along mine is possibly the best thing that has happened in my life to date.

I lean over and whisper in her ear while we wait for the remaining couples to find their spot. “The dude doesn’t wear socks.”

She laughs the most perfect, quiet, careful laugh, then glances over her shoulder as sockless guy walks by with his partner.

“Yeah, thanks for saving me from
that,”
she giggles.

I nod and smile, but while we sit down in our square formation I also feel a little smug.
You had to trade spots with three people, Emma. This wasn’t just about the socks.

We’re both leaning back on our hands now, listening to Mr. Crest read through a packet on basic square-dancing moves. I don’t think anyone is
really
listening though. The guy across from me has slipped his phone from his pocket, and he’s playing a game, the girl next to him is mouthing something to her friend across the room, and I’m staring at the small fraction of an inch of space between my pinky finger and Emma’s.

With every word Mr. Crest says, I slide it a millimeter more, until finally the tip of my finger is resting against hers. I glance up at her at the feeling of our touch, and she’s still staring at our teachers,
listening.
She also lets a smirk take over one side of her mouth.

“All right, on your feet. Let’s give this one a try,” Mr. Crest says.

I stand at the same time Emma does, and when I reach for her arm and loop it through mine, she doesn’t flinch. It’s like that’s where her arm belongs.

I spend the next hour noticing things. I notice she wears pink Converse, and they look perfect next to my black ones that are twice the size. I notice her black leggings tuck into her shoes, and her legs are long with perfect curves for every muscle. I memorize where the tip of her hair stops when she brushes it over one shoulder—grazing her shoulder blades in the back and the small swell of her breasts in the front.

When I get to look into her eyes, I memorize everything they hold. The gray is caught somewhere between silver and black, and the longer I look, the more convinced I am she’s the perfect storm and I’m lost at sea.

I spend so much time looking at the details, I’m surprised when the bell rings to signal the end of class. When she unhooks her arm from mine, she lets her fingertips slide along my skin, and I memorize that, too.