Most Likely to Succeed

This time I did elbow him softly in the ribs.

“Oof. Maybe that’s just what I was thinking. But nobody was thinking about your mom. And you’re in all the upper-level classes. That’s no accident. You were in the Loser class way back when, right?” The Loser class was Sawyer’s term for the gifted class. “If they put people in the Loser class based only on their hard-hitting parents, Tia wouldn’t have been in it, because God knows whether her mom is dead or alive. Harper wouldn’t have been in it. I love Ms. Davis, but she’s not exactly playing with a full deck.”

“She’s an artist.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

That’s exactly what I thought of Harper’s mom. I loved that Sawyer said he loved her. Everything I found out about him, every additional inch he pulled back the curtain on his life, made me like him more.

And every stroke of his skin across mine made me want him more. Yet if we followed our recent pattern, the closer we felt to each other, the sooner we’d have a dumb fight and push each other away again.

So I brought up the other thing that had been bothering me since lunch. “I didn’t mean to offend you today when I asked if the pelicans were your brothers. I was just trying to snap you out of being mad about Aidan, and I picked the wrong thing to make a joke out of. I didn’t know you were so serious about being a vegan.”

“Why not?” he asked, dropping his sexy tone for the first time and sounding more like his normal self. “I have to eat, like, four gallons of salad to get any calories. Doesn’t that seem serious to you?”

“You’re never serious about anything.”

“I’m serious a lot,” he said.

“It looks exactly like kidding.”

His sultry tone was back as he whispered, “Maybe you just don’t know me that well.”

“Maybe not.” I pulled away from him and turned around in my seat.

“Don’t go,” he murmured.

I wasn’t going anywhere. He was right. After two years, I felt like I hardly knew him at all. If he was as good at reading people as he claimed, he had me at a disadvantage. I wanted to look him in the eye when I posed my next question. I sat sideways, one knee bent and my foot up on the seat, open to him. “When did you go vegan?”

His eyebrows rose in surprise. “Last spring.”

“Why?”

“I was about to try out for mascot. I was up against five other people, really funny characters—”

“Like who?”

“Chelsea.”

“Oh, right! I’d forgotten she’d gone out for mascot.” My friend Chelsea was a majorette in the marching band. Majorettes and cheerleaders tried out in front of the whole school, and students voted. These definitely were more popularity contests than any measure of talent—though I’d probably clinched the wow factor among cheerleaders with my ability to do ten back handsprings in a row. This boggled boys’ minds.

Mascot selection was different. These candidates tried out in front of the principal, the football coach, and the cheerleading coach only. I guessed the faculty wanted to make damn sure the mascot would do a good job of representing the school. They weren’t taking any chances on getting a lame pelican by letting students vote.

That meant the mascot selection had flown under my radar. I vaguely remembered the announcement that rising seniors could try out, and later, the shocking announcement that Sawyer had won. But this event had been as big a part of Sawyer’s life as the cheerleader tryout had been for me.

Maybe bigger.

“They let us put the costume on for two minutes to see what it was like,” Sawyer said, “and that was all. The next day we had to come back, get in the pelican suit, and convince them to give us the job. But my two minutes in the suit had taught me that a lot of the gags I’d been planning weren’t going to work. You’ve got so much padding on that your movements have to be hugely exaggerated for the crowd to see what you’re doing. I left wondering if I should even come back the next day.”

“Really!” I exclaimed at the idea of Sawyer, discouraged. This was a new concept for me. Every time he identified a real emotion he’d had, I was shocked all over again.

“After school, before I went to work, I drove down to the marina and sat on the dock for a while, watching the pelicans, looking for inspiration.” He moved one hand up, swooping like a seven-foot wingspan. “And—”

He stopped in midsentence, hand in midflight, lost in thought. In the dim van, his eyes were darkest blue, watching imaginary birds above us. I’d never seen him so unguarded before. I loved to look at him when he’d forgotten he was being watched.

He blinked and put his hand down. “Pelicans are dorks on land,” he said, “little trolls waddling around. In the air they unfold their wings and grow huge, soaring and then diving for their dinner. It occurred to me that they’re like a lot of students at this school. We’re not so good at sitting in desks, staying still, and paying attention to a boring lecture.”

He cut his eyes to me, and I knew the same thing was going through both our minds: I was good at that. But, granted, he wasn’t.

“That doesn’t mean we’ll never be good at anything, though,” he said. “There’s almost no job out there where you sit at a desk and pay attention while someone else talks. I mean, I’ve already got a job I’m way better at than school.”