Most Likely to Succeed

Sterns shrugged. “All I know is, you are in serious trouble, young lady. I was talking to your dad at first, but then your mom got on the phone.” He shut the door.

“Okay,” Sawyer said soothingly, but I was already gasping for breath, trying not to cry and failing miserably. “Kaye,” he called over my sobs. He was the one with his hands behind his back in cuffs, trying to make me feel better, and I was the one who was losing it because I’d gotten him into this.

“On a happier note,” he said, “I think I’ve solved the problem of where to hold the homecoming dance.”

Now I was crying and laughing at the same time, and hiccupping as a result. Wiping the tears from my cheeks, I said, “That is of absolutely no use to me in jail.”

“You could hold the dance here,” Sawyer said anyway. “People could leave their cars along the road and walk down here, and we could have it on the beach. Or maybe the city would let us leave our cars over there in the lot at the public park if we told them ahead of time. We could even hold it on the city’s part of the beach. Just have everybody kick their shoes off, string some lights through the trees—”

“We can’t have it off campus,” I said. “Remember? Ms. Chen already shut that idea down. Too much liability.”

“Then what if we made the football field look like the beach?” he suggested. “String some lights across the field, bring in some palms in pots, turn off the floodlights overhead—”

“I thought of that, too,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t think of making it look like the beach, but I already suggested having the dance in the stadium. The school doesn’t want us standing on the grass and killing it. Grass is expensive and more important than our happiness.” I sniffled.

“Then we hold it in the parking lot right outside the stadium,” he said. “People don’t even have to get back in their cars and drive after the game. It’s on school property. There’s plenty of room. We just cordon off a section—say, where the away team’s buses will park, because they’ll be gone by dance time—and string lights through the palm trees that are already there. It’s not supposed to rain. No hurricanes in sight. If the school says no to that, they just don’t want us to have a dance, and they should ’fess up.”

I gasped. “Sawyer, that is a great idea.”

“Some acknowledgment, please, that I came up with it while handcuffed in the back of a cop car, wrongly accused, in my boxers.”

I patted his bare thigh, which was more solid than I’d imagined. “I’ll give you all the acknowledgment you can handle if we ever get out of here.”

He grinned mischievously at me.

“Our night together was so romantic, up to a point,” I said. “We could recreate it for the dance.”

“Would we ask the police to come and handcuff people?”

“Only if they’re into that sort of kink. We could use it as a fund-raiser for the prom.”

“Always thinking, aren’t you, Gordon?” He glanced out the windshield. “Here they come. Now we’re not trying to create a diversion. We only want to get out of trouble, so be humble and say nothing but ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘You’re absolutely right.’ ”

Two minutes later we were hurrying back across the city beach and onto Harper’s granddad’s beach, hand in hand. Sterns had told my mother that I would drive straight home. I don’t know what my mother had said to Sterns, but he’d seemed afraid for me.

“Listen,” Sawyer said as we walked. “Whatever your parents tell you, you didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t let them make you feel like you did. They can punish you all they want, but don’t let them convince you that you’re a bad person, because you’re not.”

I nodded, hardly hearing him. I had a much more serious concern. “They’re never going to let me see you again,” I breathed.

“We’ll see each other at school,” he said gently. “And after we graduate in May, what they say won’t matter.”

I wasn’t sure this was true. I’d planned to live with my parents until I left for Columbia in August. Even after that, conceivably they could continue to jerk me around by withholding my college tuition if I didn’t do what they said.

Sawyer’s words made me feel better anyway—because he considered how to get around unfair rules, which was totally foreign to my way of thinking. And because he assumed we’d still be together in May, no matter what.

At least, he talked the talk.

When he reached the passenger side of my car, he dropped his flip-flops and slapped his wet clothes across the roof. “Give me a sec to put my clothes on,” he said. “I’ve moved from Harper’s house into the B and B.”

“Oh, have you?”

“Yeah, and I don’t want to frighten the elderly.”

While he got dressed, I fished in my purse and checked my phone. “I have a message from DeMarcus, and one from Brody,” I said as he got into the car. “They must be worried about us. One from Noah, one from Tia—”

“Don’t think about that right now,” Sawyer said.

“—two from Quinn, four from Harper, six from Will.” None from Aidan. Either he hadn’t heard he might have gotten me detained by the cops along with Sawyer, or he didn’t care.

“I’ll call them,” Sawyer said. “You’ve got to get home. I’ll say the cops accused us of trespassing and let us go. I’ll leave out all the near-naked parts. Nobody at school will ever hear about that unless the cops blab.”