Most Likely to Succeed

“Why not?” he asked. “You’ve always jumped at the chance before.”

Forcing myself to match his calm, I chewed and swallowed, even though the cookie had gone dry in my mouth. Only then did I say, “Jumped at the chance? I don’t think so.”

He glared at me. “It’s Sawyer, isn’t it?”

My heart pounded. I would have denied it, except that I was such an awful liar.

Instead, I used Aidan’s own bait-and-switch tactic, easing out of trouble. With another glance at my mother’s door to make sure it was still closed, I lowered my voice and said, “You think I’m cheating on you with Sawyer, and that’s the only reason he and I happened to agree with each other in the student council meeting today? No. We agreed because we and the rest of the student council were right, and you were wrong.”

Aidan shook his head. “You’d be too scared to cheat on me with Sawyer. But you’re taken in by his act. You’re as dumb as every other girl at our school.”

The door to my mother’s office burst open. She wore her business suit from her morning at work. She probably hadn’t taken it off while baking cookies because she planned to wear it to pick up Barrett at the airport. As she phrased it, she might be off duty sometimes, but she was always president of the bank.

And she wore a big smile, because Barrett was coming home. Or Aidan was here. Or both.

She turned to me. “Hi, sweetie.” She air-kissed my forehead so her perfect plum lipstick wouldn’t rub off. Then she glanced at the cookie in my hand. “For shame. Those are for Barrett.” No matter that she’d served Aidan the same cookies herself.

She turned back to Aidan. “I think you’ll be happy with this, and so will Columbia.” She slid an envelope printed with her Columbia alumni club logo in front of him.

Aidan swiped the letter off the counter so fast that it never stopped moving. He raked back his barstool and stood. “Thank you, Mrs. Gordon.”

I cringed. My mother hadn’t changed her name to Gordon when she married my dad. She was still Sylvia Beale, BA, MBA, President and CEO. I’d heard her chew out people who insisted on calling her Mrs. Gordon as if women had no choice in naming themselves. But Aidan called her Mrs. Gordon, no matter how many times I warned him.

And she always gave him a pass. Her grin didn’t falter as he walked toward the back door.

At the last second he remembered me. “See you after the game, Kaye,” he threw over his shoulder.

“Yep, see ya,” I said, already turning to toss the rest of my cookie in the trash. I’d lost my appetite. I heard the door close behind him.

When I straightened, my mother was watching me with her hands on her hips. “What’s wrong between you two?” she demanded.

I sighed, and kept sighing, like I’d been holding my breath since study hall. “The gym roof got damaged by the storm. Aidan decided to cancel the homecoming dance instead of relocating it, without consulting the rest of the student council. I wanted to move it. So did everybody else. We nearly had a mutiny in the meeting. The upshot is, I have to figure out how to fix the dance now, and he’s furious with me for speaking up.”

“I would be too,” my mother said. “You led a mutiny?”

“He wasn’t following parliamentary procedure.” I felt sheepish for the first time.

My mother closed her eyes and shook her head. “Parliamentary procedure! It’s high school, Katherine. It’s a high school dance. Your job is to get out of high school, holding your student council office in front of you like a key that opens the door to Columbia. Nobody cares what you actually do as vice president.”

“I care,” I protested. “The parliamentarian cares.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Who’s the parliamentarian?”

“Sawyer,” I mumbled.

“The blond boy who works as a waiter at the Crab Lab?” my mother asked. “The one whose father went to prison?”

Now I really regretted piping up at the dinner table on the first day of tenth grade and gleefully dishing to my mother about the school’s new bad boy who’d already managed to get suspended. I shifted gears. “Will cares—Tia’s boyfriend. Practically everybody at the meeting was on my side.”

“What about Ms. Yates?”

“She sided with Aidan because she doesn’t want to get off her butt.”

“It’s hard to hide attitude,” my mother said. “Yours won’t earn you much of a teacher recommendation, which was supposedly the reason you ran for vice president in the first place.” She crossed the kitchen, took down a plastic container, and started transferring the cookies from the cooling racks so I couldn’t eat any more. “You may care about the dance today. The real test is, who will care in twenty years, or five years, or even a year from now whether you held this one dance in high school? The answer is, nobody.”

A year from now I would be a college freshman in New York. That did make a Florida high school homecoming dance sound insignificant. Trouble was, I couldn’t picture what I’d be doing on a Friday afternoon in mid-September on the campus of Columbia. But I could picture the dark dance I was supposed to have two weeks from tonight in the high school gym, with a boy’s hand creeping down my hip. And in my mind, my dance partner wasn’t Aidan anymore.

My mother was still talking. “You need to be smarter about picking your battles. This dance isn’t worth the trouble. When we agreed you should increase your extracurriculars for college admissions, I never intended for you to get involved in a time-consuming activity that would distract you from your studies. Cheerleading is bad enough. If, on top of that, you’re taking on the responsibility of moving an entire dance, I can only imagine what’s going to happen to your AP English grade, and there goes valedictorian. Don’t you have a paper to write on Crime and Punishment this weekend?”