I could have told Will, Better than her breaking up with him on the day he moves across the country, eh? Instead I said diplomatically, “I hadn’t heard that.”
“My question is, were they really serious? Because if it was casual, I might ask her out. If they were serious, I wouldn’t move in. I don’t want people to hate me. Not my first week, anyway.”
I had no skin in this game. But I wondered if he was playing me, to get back at me for turning him down last night, and saying what I’d said about his ex-girlfriend this morning. It didn’t make sense that he would really be interested in both Angelica and me. The gap between the two of us could not be accounted for by the normal boundaries of taste.
So maybe he didn’t really like me.
I told him the truth. I owed him that much, after the trials I’d put him through in the past twelve hours. “As far as I know, it was casual.”
“Good,” he said, and then, “Thanks.”
We uttered hardly a word to each other for the rest of the time we sat together. The silence was as awkward as it had been before we made up, but this time it was because Will had designs on Angelica. I wasn’t sure why that would turn him cold to me. For my part, I wasn’t jealous, only disappointed that he had such poor taste in women besides me.
In the last hour of practice, gloriously, we got up, and the whole band played the opening number that we’d been marching through with only a drum tap all morning. I worked out my stress by playing a perfect rhythm, my beat fitting with the quad and bass and cymbal parts like pieces of a puzzle. During the pauses between run-throughs, I showed Will some of the tricks the snares had done at contests in the past, reaching over to play on each other’s drums during some passages, and tossing our sticks in the air, which was only effective visually if the freshmen didn’t drop them. Will taught me some even better tricks he knew from back home. We devised a plan to try some of these ideas in future practices and determine how well the worst players could handle them.
We’d joked around before, but now we were building solid mutual respect. Now we were friends.
Or so I thought. Then Ms. Nakamoto let us go for the morning, and Will didn’t even give me a proper good-bye. “See you at practice tonight,” he called over his shoulder as he made a beeline across the field to catch Angelica. Not wanting to witness their young love, I followed at a slower pace, saying hi to some girls in color guard and playfully threatening to bulldoze right over a mellophone player, snare drum first.
By the time I made it back to the band room to deposit my drum, word among the cymbals was that Will had asked Angelica to lunch. Lunch! I never heard of such a thing. He’d already whisked her off in his famous car. The way the other majorettes out in the parking lot were gossiping about them, Will and Angelica were an item already.
As I headed home, passing the majorettes on my way back to the fence, Chelsea said, “Wait a minute, Tia. I thought you were dating the new guy.”
Still walking, eyes on the ground so I didn’t step on glass in my bare feet, I told her, “That was yesterday.” Not that I cared or that Will’s date with Angelica was any of my business, because I didn’t want a boyfriend. But some days this was hard to remember.
***
I snagged my flip-flops from where I’d left them on the wrong side of the fence. At home I grabbed a quick shower, which everybody would appreciate, and another pack of Pop-Tarts for lunch, then hopped on my bike to pedal to the antiques shop.
On the last day of school my sophomore year, I’d biked through the historic downtown, thinking that I needed a summer job. There’d been a HELP WANTED sign in the shop window. I’d walked in and applied. A job was a job, or so I’d thought. I never would have set foot in there if I’d known what I was getting into: Bob had cancer. When his treatments didn’t agree with him, he needed time off from the shop, and Roger took care of him. I sat through a very stressful half hour while they explained this to me and asked me to work for them. I didn’t want to take on that kind of responsibility. My aversion warred inside me against my desire to help them out and my blooming interest in the bizarre junk that cluttered their hideous store.
So I’d accepted the job. And I’d done whatever Bob and Roger asked me to do—a long list of responsibilities that had expanded over the past year and two summers to include inventory, bookkeeping, and payroll. When Bob took a turn for the worse, sometimes I got so stressed out that I cleaned and organized the shop. That just made them love me more, raise my pay, and load more responsibility on my shoulders. It was terrible. I didn’t know how to get out of this vicious circle.
Today wasn’t so bad. Bob was recovering from his last round of chemo, and he and Roger were both in the back office, so I wasn’t technically in charge. I patted the shop dog for a few minutes, then took over manning the front counter from Smokin’ Edwina. Almost as soon as I slid onto my stool behind the cash register, Kaye and Harper bopped in with a clanging of the antique Swiss cowbell on the door. I always welcomed a visit from friends, because it might make me look less responsible and more like a frivolous teen to Bob and Roger.
This time, though, I could have done without, because I knew what my friends were there for. They wanted the scoop on Will. I would rather have done payroll.
They both stopped to pat the shop dog too. Everybody did. But when they straightened in front of the cash register with their arms folded, without so much as a “How you doing?” I amended their mission. They didn’t want a scoop. They were there to scold me.
“You left with the new guy last night before we could stop you,” Harper said. Admittedly, it didn’t seem much like a scolding coming from a soft-spoken artist in retro glasses and a shift minidress straight out of the 1960s.
“You sent the new guy out to meet me,” I protested. “If you hadn’t done that, I might not have met him at the party at all.”
“Was he still at your house when Aidan and I came by?” Kaye demanded. She wore her tank top and gym shorts from cheerleading practice, and her hair stuck out all over in cute twists. No matter how adorable she looked, though, she made a lecture sound like she meant it. “At the time I thought Will couldn’t have been at your house. It was so late. But after the rumors I’ve heard this morning, I’m not so sure.”
“What’s wrong with him being there late?” I asked. “You and Aidan were still out then.”
“We were on a date,” Kaye said. “Girls are supposed to say yes to a date, then no to manhandling. You’re not supposed to say yes to manhandling, then no to a date.”
Ah, so that’s what this was about. It had already gotten around that I’d dumped Will at the end of the night. I needed to talk to him about revealing personal information to cymbals.
“First of all,” I told Kaye, “you are not saying no to manhandling.”
She uncrossed her arms and put her fists on her hips, cheerleader style. “That’s different. Aidan and I have been dating for three years. You were manhandled by someone you knew for an hour.”
More like two, by my estimate. “And second, I want the manhandling. I don’t want the dating. That stuff is fake anyway. The guy is taking you on dates just so he can manhandle you later. You’re not being honest with each other.”
Kaye gaped at me. “Aidan and I have a relationship that is built on—”
“You know what?” Harper asked, sliding a hand onto Kaye’s shoulder. “This is more confrontational than we talked about, and it’s not productive.” She flashed me a look through her glasses. We’d tried our best to support Kaye’s relationship with Aidan. On paper it looked perfect. They were involved in a lot of the same activities, and they were neck and neck with a few more people for valedictorian. And we loved Kaye. We simply didn’t like him.
“Tell us more about Will,” Harper said. “He’s so hot. Everybody stared at him as he walked through the party last night.”
“That’s because he’s new,” I lied.
“He seems kind of stuck up,” Kaye said.
“Takes one to know one,” I said.
“Hey!” Kaye stomped her athletic shoe in protest. The dog looked up at her reprovingly, like she had a lot of nerve, then settled back down.
Harper talked right over Kaye. “I heard he stands next to you in band.”
“He does.”
“I heard he took drum captain from you,” Kaye said. “Did you throw it?”
“How could you accuse me of that?” I asked, looking her straight in the eye. “You and I had that talk recently about me taking personal responsibility. You speak and I listen.”
Harper, heeding the signs that Kaye and I were about to lay into each other, switched the subject back to Will. “I heard that he took his shirt off during band, and he was very white and very built.”
“He was wearing a drum harness,” I said, “so I didn’t notice.”
Harper and Kaye muttered their disbelief. Because they were talking over each other, I couldn’t hear everything they said, but I picked out “sunscreen” and “bullshit.”
“But you probably got an eyeful last night,” Kaye told me.
“Well, somebody got an eyeful of somebody,” I admitted.
Kaye raised her eyebrows. Harper emitted a cute, embarrassed snort, wringing her hands as if the whole prospect worried her. “Is he like Sawyer?”
Girls at my school were captivated by Sawyer. He was fun to watch. He was likely to fly off the handle at any moment. And when he chose to be, he was downright sultry. One time he’d talked dirty to me during an assembly in the high school auditorium, just for fun, in a way that made me want to rip my clothes off for him right there in front of Mr. Moxley and the championship tenth-grade robotics team.
But most girls wouldn’t hook up with Sawyer, in the same way that they wouldn’t hook up with a train wreck. That task was left to me. And Harper and Kaye didn’t want me hooking up with him either. They’d gotten very upset the first time they’d caught me with him in a compromising position at a party. Kaye told me that if she ever found me with him again, she and Aidan would not be my designated drivers anymore, and I would have to ride home from parties with the trumpets, who listened to a lot of lite jazz.
Kaye and Harper had gotten used to the idea of Sawyer and me after a while, and now, frankly, they were fascinated by our relationship. Harper was more obvious in her enthusiasm. Kaye listened quietly to my Sawyer stories. That told me she was more interested than she wanted to let on, since she was used to asserting herself in student council meetings and was rarely quiet about anything.
“Will is like Sawyer,” I said, “but better.”
“Better!” Harper exclaimed. “Better how?”
Better in that I felt myself flush every time Will looked at me. Sawyer and I had agreed a long time ago that we were too much alike to have any real chemistry. That didn’t stop us from making out when nobody else was available, of course, but it had kept us from trying for anything more than friends with bennies.
The thing was, I didn’t want more than that out of a relationship with Sawyer. Or even with Will.
“Better . . . taller,” I said. Sawyer had only half an inch on me. It wasn’t often that I encountered a guy who made me feel downright dainty. I thought of Will looking down at me during band practice, and wondered again what he’d been thinking when I couldn’t see his eyes behind his aviators.
“It doesn’t matter, though,” I said. “Will’s out to lunch right now with old Angelica.”
“Angelicaaaaaa!” Harper and Kaye moaned in despair. Once, in ninth-grade science class, they’d been passing a note back and forth about Kaye’s crush on Aidan. Angelica, instead of passing it along the row like she was supposed to, had turned it in to the teacher, who had read it out loud. That had led to Aidan asking Kaye to homecoming. So the outcome could have been considered a good trade-off if you thought Aidan was a prize, which I didn’t.
Or if you had not been completely mortified by the incident, which Kaye had. I could hear it in her voice still as she cried, “How could you let Angelica have Will?”
“It wouldn’t have worked with Will and me,” I told them honestly. “He would get as exasperated with me as you are right now.”
They both opened their mouths to say awww, they weren’t exasperated with me (Harper), or they were exasperated with me but only because I consistently sold myself short (Kaye). I was saved by the cowbell on the door. After petting the shop dog, a customer asked to see the women’s jeweled watches I’d posted to the shop’s website. That was going to take a while because we had fourteen, which was why I’d been trying to move them out of inventory. I waved good-bye to Kaye and Harper and led the customer back to the display case, with the dog following.
And I tried to shake the uneasy feeling my friends had left me with. Will and I had shared an unwise night together. Okay. We’d had another argument this morning, yes. But we’d made up, and when things had gotten awkward between us again, that was probably because he was preoccupied with asking Angelica out. Things would be better tonight, and for the next three days of band practice. By the beginning of school on Friday, we would have no problem getting along in the drum line.
I honestly believed this, because I was not the best at foreseeing trouble and planning ahead. I had no idea our friendship was about to go south.
5
BAND CAMP WENT OKAY AT first. I had ten times more fun with Will than I’d ever had standing between a past year’s seniors. They’d taken their shirts off, all right, but they hadn’t looked as good as Will did, or laughed like he did at my jokes. And they hadn’t had an earring. I’d become a big advocate of the earring.