Ms. Malone stepped behind her desk again and flipped through her calendar. She looked up at me. “Is this period okay?”
I nodded dumbly.
She wrote my appointment time down on a card.
“And can she also have an excuse that says she was here talking to you?” Sawyer asked. “She’s late for history.”
Ms. Malone gave Sawyer the briefest look that let him know she saw right through his ploy.
But she paged through her book of preprinted excuses and filled one out for me. Handing it across her desk, she said, “All right, dear. You come see me sooner if you need to.” She turned to Sawyer. “And you, here, tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Sawyer put his arm around my shoulders and steered me out the door.
“Thank you,” I breathed as we walked down the hall.
“You’re welcome. I earned my shoulder rub.”
“You did.” I laughed and felt better, even though I had a horrible five hours in front of me, and my face was still wet with tears. “Did Ms. Malone help you? What did she say?”
“Don’t think about that right now. Until one o’clock when you e-mail this paper to Mr. Frank, your only thoughts are Dostoyevsky, Raskolnikov—”
“Okay.” I stopped in the hallway. He stopped too, in surprise. His eyes were full of concern.
I wanted to kiss him—not a show of lust, but of appreciation. I would get us both in hot water, though. I only kissed my finger and placed it on his lips.
He looked shocked for a moment. But as I pulled my hand away, he said solemnly, “I know. I feel that way too.”
And we walked to history together.
* * *
The following Friday, I skipped out of calculus even earlier than I had the previous week for the student council meeting. I waited outside Ms. Yates’s classroom. Sure enough, I’d beaten Sawyer by a hair. I watched him saunter up the hallway, walking more like the jaunty pelican than his usual cool self while he thought nobody was watching. His backpack hung heavy over one shoulder. It probably contained six different library books explaining Robert’s Rules of Order. He wore the madras plaid shirt with the blue stripe that I loved so much. When he looked up at me, his blue eyes were arresting in the blank white hall. He broke into a wide grin.
He’d been kind to me Monday while I was writing my paper, checking on me between classes. During lunch I’d e-mailed him my mostly finished draft. He’d read over it on his phone while I was still typing the end, and he suggested places I could clarify my statements or add more detail. Best of all, he told me my paper wasn’t crap. That kept me going. I didn’t have time to eat lunch, but I typed my closing statement just as the bell rang to go to Mr. Frank’s class, where Sawyer slipped me a candy bar underneath our desktops.
The way he’d treated me, and the way Aidan had acted when he found out I’d forgotten to write my paper, made me question my decision not to date Sawyer if he asked. The problem was, he didn’t ask. All week we hung out during lunch and the classes we had together. People certainly saw something between us. Tia and Harper, wide-eyed, asked me for updates three times a day. The cheerleaders and my other friends who hadn’t heard about everything that had passed between Sawyer and me demanded to know whether we were hooking up. Several of them told me they’d voted for Sawyer and me as Perfect Couple That Never Was, and they were disappointed when I was named Most Likely to Succeed with Aidan.
Me too. I hadn’t felt that way when the Superlatives titles were first announced, but hindsight was 20/20.
Maybe I should have taken the plunge and asked Sawyer out. But he was holding back with me. That was unlike him. He must have some good reason. And I was enjoying being close to him so much that I was afraid of messing things up if I pushed too fast for a change.
“Hey,” I said as he stopped beside me at Ms. Yates’s door. “I wanted to catch you before the meeting. Were you planning to sit at Ms. Yates’s desk again?”
“I don’t have to,” he said. “I only did that last week to make Aidan mad.”
“Great minds think alike.”
He didn’t laugh. He watched me carefully, as if talking about Aidan was making him as uncomfortable as it was making me.
“I don’t want to argue with him anymore,” I said in a rush. “I’m just not interested. And I think it would help us get along with him if we let him have the desk. We’re trying to get stuff done in student council, and we should pick our battles.”
The bell rang. Sawyer and I stepped back into safety against the wall as Ms. Yates’s freshmen streamed into the hall, followed by Ms. Yates, who hurried toward the teachers’ lounge. She obviously couldn’t deal with these meetings without a fresh cup of coffee. Considering the last meeting and Sawyer pulling out the rule book, I didn’t blame her.
After the flood of freshmen had passed, I walked into the room and sat in a desk in the front row. Sawyer slid into the desk behind mine. Goose bumps rose on my skin as he whispered so close that I could feel his breath on my neck. “Will you marry me?”
“Yes,” I said without hesitation, turning to smile at him. “I already told you.”
He glanced up as the first reps walked in. Then he lowered his voice and asked, “Will you go to the prom with me?”
For the first time I really thought about our senior prom with Sawyer as my date. It could actually happen now. He would look dashing in a tux, a combination of handsome elegance and dangerous energy. I wanted to say yes.