Most Likely to Succeed

“No, but you also would never be nice to me, even if you were faking.”

“That is correct.” He bent his head toward me. The lighter top layers of his hair fell forward, revealing the darker blond underneath. “Go ahead, touch my hair. It’s this strange, exotic thrill. Get your revenge.”

Any second he would decide he’d proven his point and sit up. I could be patient. But while I waited, my eyes fell on his nape, where his thick hair became light and fine. I couldn’t help wondering what it felt like.

He repeated, “Touch it,” which I now realized was going to attract some unwanted attention from the other girls in the van if they couldn’t see what we were really doing. He groped in my lap for my hand. This was dangerous. My cheerleading skirt rode up so high when I sat down that my boy shorts underneath almost showed. His palm brushed across the top of one of my thighs, then the other. He found my hand and placed it on the back of his neck.

My fingers sank into his hair. I needed to pull them out. But as I did, they stroked his hair. It felt different from my own wiry hair or the coarse strands of Aidan’s. Sawyer’s was like warm water against my skin.

Over the sounds of girls laughing and the van’s air conditioner blasting, I heard a muffled beeping. The ringtone wasn’t mine.

“Excuse me, won’t you, darling?” Sawyer said in a British accent like a debonair spy. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, touched the screen, only glanced at it, and put the phone back.

“You don’t answer your phone?” I asked.

“I don’t answer her.”

I felt a pang that he was having a quarrel with another girl.

Then he eased the tension, moving his head into my personal space and shaking it so that his hair fell into his eyes. “You can touch it some more. You know you want to.”

I fingered a white-blond lock curving around his ear. “You have such a baby face. Do you even shave?”

He gave me a sideways glare.

“The guys on the football team make fun of you,” I ventured. Tentatively I traced my fingertip down the hard line of his jaw. He did have stubble, just golden and nearly invisible in the sunlight glinting across his face.

“Right,” he said, “I don’t need to shave. Let me show you.” He grabbed me, one hand cradling the back of my head and the other bracing my shoulder so I couldn’t duck away. He rubbed his chin across my neck.

“Ow, ow, ow, rug burn.” Normally I would have squealed, but I didn’t want him to let me go.

He stopped, eye to eye with me. Our faces had never been so close. This time I knew he felt the electricity buzzing between us as strongly as I did. His lips parted. His breath stroked across my cheek.

We couldn’t stay like this. The cheerleaders carried on around us like what we were doing was normal. It wouldn’t be long, though, before these gossip-hungry girls took notice.

He was thinking the same thing. Holding my gaze, he whispered, “If you were so mad at Aidan, why’d you run back to him?”

My friends had asked me this so often in the past few months, my answer came automatically. “I was looking at the long term. We’re applying for early admission to Columbia.” I wanted to get off the subject of Aidan as quickly as possible, though. “Are you applying anywhere?”

“No,” he said.

“What are you going to do, live in a box underneath the interstate?”

Sawyer raised his head and backed away. There was no expression in his blue eyes. Sawyer always had an expression, easy to read. He poked fun at me. He laughed at me. He enjoyed the fact that he made me uncomfortable. That’s why I ribbed him right back. But this time his face was blank.

Without warning, he stood and moved up the aisle.

“Where are you going?” I called. The other cheerleaders turned to me in question. Too late I realized I sounded like I wanted him to stay.

He stopped in the open doorway and threw over his shoulder at me, “Back to my box.” He jogged down the steps.

I watched for him out the window. In a moment he crossed behind the van and headed for one of the football team’s buses. He disappeared up the steps. A few seconds later he came reeling down to the pavement again like they’d thrown him.

He walked over to one of the four band buses next. The door was closed. He knocked. The door folded inward. I recognized Tia’s long auburn hair as she reached down and held out her hand to him. He let her pull him up the stairs.

The door shut.

I stared at that bus until the cheerleading coach, Ms. Howard, finally guided our van into motion, leading the school caravan across central Florida. Maybe Sawyer had planned to ride with the band all along, and he’d only been visiting me. Yet he’d dumped his pelican costume into the back like he planned to stay. I couldn’t help thinking I’d actually offended him with my comment about the box. But that wasn’t possible, when Sawyer acted like he didn’t have any real feelings.

At least, not for me.

4

I SPENT MOST OF THE drive with my forehead pressed to the window, staring at the orange groves flashing by beside the interstate, mulling over the homecoming dance. I was trying to brainstorm for an alternate place to hold it, but I kept getting sidetracked by my anger at my mother, and Ms. Yates, and Aidan, and a mass of confused feelings about Sawyer. Anger at him, too, for storming off without explanation, guilt that I’d really hurt him somehow, lust as I remembered his hand in my hair.

As soon as the van pulled to a halt in the opposing school’s parking lot, Sawyer climbed back up the stairs. He hardly glanced at me as he moved down the aisle. I peered nonchalantly over my shoulder, as if I were just curious about the view out the back windows. He was sitting beside the pompons on the bench, stripped down to his gym shorts, pulling the bird suit up to his knees.