I jumped as Will played the riff, calling the band to attention again. This time I completely missed echoing him. If I kept this up, Ms. Nakamoto would kick me out of the drum captain position on my own lack of merit. But I had more pride than to leave that way. It was throw a challenge or nothing for me.
I was hopeless.
“Say yes,” he whispered, standing stock still at attention and moving only the corner of his mouth as he spoke. “Get Angelica back for me, and I’ll challenge you. Think how carefree you’ll be as a civilian again.”
“Don’t talk at attention.” I sounded so silly trying to throw my weight around like a drum captain that I almost laughed at myself.
But by the time we’d played through the show a second time and Ms. Nakamoto had sent the band to one end of the field to learn the drill for the pregame show, I’d made up my mind that Will was right. I was lucky there was nothing I could mess up today other than the call to attention. Sometime soon, Ms. Nakamoto was sure to send the drum line to the parking lot to rehearse on our own, and I would spend an hour ordering people around, convincing them to hate me, and generally inviting Armageddon.
“All right,” I told Will calmly as we walked toward the goalpost together, though my stomach was turning flips.
“Great,” he said just as evenly. Most of his face was hidden by his shades and hat. His cheeks and chin shone with sweat. He betrayed no emotion other than disgust at the heat. “But we’re not confiding in anyone that we’ve engineered this. You can’t tell Harper and Kaye. That’s going to get back to Angelica. Kaye will hop over here wanting to know how the plan is going before she remembers she’s not supposed to say that out loud.”
True. Or I would leap to the sidelines, eager to update her on the same thing. Will was observant. I would just tell Kaye and Harper that Will and I were giving dating a trial run, which wasn’t too far from the truth. I didn’t like discussing bad news anyway. Pretending there was no “cockamamy scheme,” as Harper had called my thwarted plan to throw the drum challenge, sounded like the perfect way to deal with my problems.
“Can you go out tonight?” he asked. “Might as well get it over with.”
“No, I have to work late,” I said. “I promised Bob and Roger that I’d train them on the inventory database I set up. I tried writing down the directions, but old people can follow instruction manuals fine until they involve computers, and suddenly their brains explode. I’m going to have to hold their hands and lead them through it.”
Will nodded. “Wednesday night? Or are you busy then, too?” He sounded suspicious, like he was afraid I was making up an excuse about tonight and he expected one for tomorrow. I thought we knew each other pretty well, but obviously he didn’t understand that I tried not to make excuses. If I hadn’t wanted to fake-date him, I would have told him so.
“Tomorrow night,” I agreed, “as soon as I get off work.”
“Great,” he said again, emotionlessly. “What kind of date would you like to go on? We can do anything you want, as long as we’re likely to be seen so the news will get back to Angelica.”
I imitated what he’d said our first night together. “I want you to take me to lunch, and then I can show you around town.”
He turned so suddenly that his drum knocked into mine—a mistake I made all the time when I was talking to people on the field, but he did not. This time I could hear the hurt in his voice as he said quietly, “I want to do this, and help you out, but not if you’re going to take stabs at me.”
I put my hand on his back. His shirt was soaked with sweat. I kept my hand there. “Kidding. I didn’t mean it ugly. I wanted to go on that date you invited me on last week. I just . . .” The band was loud around us, milling into place in two long lines for the football team to run through on game night, but the silence between Will and me was louder.
“I’ll pick you up from the shop when you close,” he finally said. “I’ll take you to dinner, and you can show me around town.” He took my hand off his back and wiped it on his cargo shorts, which were dryer.
“More flirt germs,” I commented.
He gave me my hand back hastily and looked around to see if Ms. Nakamoto had noticed him rubbing my palm close to his crotch. Sometimes our flirting was innocent like this: We weren’t thinking dirty, and we realized how it looked to other people only after the fact.
Sometimes not.
He put the head of his drumstick on my drum and traced loud circles there, making the snares rattle. It was his way of touching me, I thought, without actually touching me and getting in trouble. As the circles he made got smaller, I started to wonder exactly what was going to happen on our fake date, and whether our facade would include feeling each other up like lusty pirates on shore leave. The heat was finally getting to me.
“One more thing, though,” he said, ending his solo on my drum with a loud tap. “I heard you were with Sawyer all last weekend.”
I countered, “I heard you and Angelica studied together at the library, and you licked her copy of Fahrenheit 451.”
“That is a lie,” he deadpanned. “The spine doesn’t count.” He turned to me as if to look into my eyes, which had no effect when we were both wearing shades. “Seriously,” he whispered, “even though we’re only fake-dating, I don’t want you with Sawyer. If you’re dating him, we won’t do this. If you’re just fooling around, I want you to stay away from him. That’s my one condition.”
I thought through it. Sawyer would be difficult to corral. “Can I flirt with him while I’m dating you, even if it doesn’t mean anything? A little tit for tat? No?”
Will lowered his chin so that I could see his blue eyes boring into me over the edge of his sunglasses.
“No!” I concluded. “Okay. Just let me dump my bike in the back of his truck after school and hitch a ride to work with him so I can explain.”
For the rest of practice, Will and I talked but didn’t really flirt. Suddenly we were acting reserved around each other, afraid to let ourselves go, like we were telling jokes at a funeral. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking, but I for one had a lot of anxiety about our evening together tomorrow. I tried not to get my hopes up. What could happen? It would be, after all, a Wednesday. But when we’d played around in band before, nothing had mattered. Now I felt like we had a lot at stake, and not all of it had to do with the drum challenge and Angelica.
Finally we ran through the pregame show, DeMarcus intoned the announcements, and Ms. Nakamoto dismissed us. As the band walked off the field and Will and I neared the gate, I called out to Kaye, who glowered at me but dropped her pompons to wait for me. I told Will to go ahead while I talked to her. I hoped he understood that I was really asking him to wait to change his shirt until I arrived at his trunk, but I wasn’t sure that message got across.
Then I walked right up to Kaye and eased my drum down onto the grass. Facing her with nothing between us, I wasn’t sure what to tell her. I’d meant everything I’d said to her in the lunchroom. I thought she was a hypocrite for letting a boy take over her life, then scolding me for doing the same. I just hadn’t meant to yell it.
She glared at me a moment more. Then she stuck out her bottom lip and opened her arms.
I walked into her embrace, slid my arms around her, and squeezed. We were going to argue about our issues again, obviously, but not today.
Softness enveloped me like a blanket. Sawyer had put his wings around both of us.
Kaye got the bad end of this deal. She was shorter than me and way shorter than Sawyer in his costume, so her head was down in a hot hole between us. Her voice sounded muffled as she called, “I love you, Tia, but for some mysterious reason, I find your friendship suffocating.” Sawyer let us go, but he got very close to patting her on the butt with his wing.
On our way up the stairs, Chelsea asked Kaye and me if we wanted to go to a chick flick that night with her and a couple of other girls from calculus. Kaye said she was going out with Aidan. Remembering that he was waiting for her in the parking lot, she skipped ahead of us on the steps. Then I told Chelsea I couldn’t go either, because of work. She asked if it would be better for me if we all went tomorrow night instead. “I would love to,” I said, “but it’s a school night, and I need to do my homework.”
“Do you think I’m a stupid fool?” Chelsea asked. “Don’t beat around the bush. Just go ahead and tell me, ‘Chelsea, I think you’re a stupid fool.’ ”
“Kidding!” I exclaimed. “Sarcasm! Tonight I have to work, and tomorrow I’m going out with Will.”
She gazed up at him climbing the stairs with his drum. Then she raised one eyebrow at me. “I thought he was dating Angelica.”
I grinned brilliantly. “That was yesterday.”
***
“If you were really dating Will, of course you and I wouldn’t hook up,” Sawyer said, eyeing me from across the cab of his truck. He faced forward again as he drove past the HOME OF THE PELICANS sign and turned onto the road by the school. “We’re philanderers, but we’re not cheaters.”
I wasn’t sure of the difference. I resisted the urge to ask Sawyer to look up “philanderers” for me using the definition app on his phone, because he was driving. He aced standardized tests, but only the verbal part, never the math, and definitely not the logic.
He was doing a great impression of a logical person, though, backing me into a corner. “If you’re only fake-dating Will,” he reasoned, “why can’t we still hook up?”
“He asked me not to,” I said. “I understand where he’s coming from. He’s trying to make Angelica jealous. If he and I are supposed to be dating, but you and I have something on the side, it won’t look like Will and I are serious.”
“What if we were careful?” Sawyer said in the voice of a lecherous old man, sliding his hand under the leg of my shorts and up to the top of my thigh.
“I don’t think so.” Laughing, I tossed his hand away. “You are the opposite of careful.”
“This sounds like the opposite of faking,” he pointed out. “Will really cares what you and I are up to. You’re genuinely concerned about what he thinks. There’s nothing fake about that. Why don’t you give in and date him?”
I shrugged to the live oaks passing by the window. “I don’t want a boyfriend,” I said for the millionth time in my teenage life. “But for once, somebody’s come along who’s making it hard to keep that promise to myself.”
I turned to look at Sawyer, so handsome in an offbeat way. His white-blond hair, even when it was damp from his shower, was a color I’d only seen before on small children, and his preppie clothes looked like something his mom would have picked out for him in elementary school. But his strong hands lay on the wheel, his sinewy forearms tensed as he steered downtown, and something dark behind his eyes reminded me he was more experienced than he should have been at seventeen.
“You’ve never come across a girl like that?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said like he didn’t have to think about it.
Suddenly I burst out, “Sawyer, you can tell me if you’re gay.”
“Gay!” He gaped across the cab at me, then jerked the steering wheel to straighten the truck and avoid hitting the curb. “After what we did Sunday night?”
“Sunday night was good,” I admitted sheepishly.
“I thought you enjoyed it,” he said as though I hadn’t spoken. Turning onto the main drag through town, he grumbled, “You’ve just got g*y on the brain because you work for Bob and Roger.”
“No.” Well, maybe. “It was just an explanation for why you never commit, even to the point of asking the same girl out twice in a row.”
He pulled the truck into a space near the antiques store, killed the engine, and looked over at me. “What’s your excuse?”
He had me there. Backed against the door of his truck already, I had nowhere to go. I didn’t want to talk about this. He knew it. And in his challenge, I heard all the regret I felt myself when I expected to hang with him at a party but he went home with another girl.
Seeming to realize he’d gone too far, he took a deep breath, popped his neck, and settled his shoulders back against the driver’s seat. “I like somebody who would never fall for me,” he admitted. Then he gave me his sternest glare. “A girl-type person.”
“Is it me?” I asked.
He blinked. In that pause, I was afraid the answer was yes, and I was the one who’d gone too far. I wished I could take it back.
“No!” he exploded. “Are you insane?” He started laughing uncontrollably.
I talked over him. “That makes me feel like a million bucks, Sawyer.”
Still grinning, he pulled himself together. “Look, Tia, I will just flat-out tell you. I really enjoy getting drunk with you. That’s generally the highlight of my week, besides when you give me a hand job.”
“I’m so glad.” Yeah, I was beginning to regret Sunday night now.
“But you and me, together, we would be the death of each other. I’d be like, ‘I know a guy who has some crack. Go with?’ And you’d be like, ‘Sure!’ Somebody has to be the voice of reason in a relationship, Tia, and our voice of reason has had a tracheotomy. If we really dated, in half an hour we’d be facedown in a ditch on the south side of Tampa.”
I glared across the truck at him. I wasn’t sure whether he was making a reference to my mom doing drugs or not.