These last words I heard as an echo down the hall. I’d left the kitchen while her back was turned. I tiptoed up the stairs and through the master bedroom to the smaller front porch on the second story, which we referred to as Dad’s “office.” Most days he wrote his books and articles here, where he could see his dock through the palm trees, and his sailboat, and the lagoon that served as his escape route to the Gulf of Mexico.
“Hey, my Kaye,” he said without looking up from his laptop. He sat in his cushioned lounge chair, sunglasses on, iced tea beside him. Barefoot, he wore board shorts and a holey Columbia T-shirt that he might have owned since college. He would still be wearing this when my parents left for the airport tonight. My mother would look him up and down with distaste and tell him to change. In response, he would put on flip-flops.
“Hi,” I huffed, plopping into the other chair.
He examined me over the top of his sunglasses. “Why so glum?”
I told him in a rush how Aidan had canceled the dance and my mother had told me I should have shut up and let Aidan run over me.
As soon as I said “Mom,” Dad started making a noise—rrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnt—like I was a big loser on a game show. “You know I don’t like that kind of talk between my ladies,” he said.
“You asked,” I said bitterly.
He stuck out his bottom lip in sympathy. “Come on now. Your mom just wants to make sure you don’t bite off more than you can chew.”
“Oh, ha!” I sneered. “Funny you should say that. She won’t let me eat Barrett’s cookies, either.”
He rubbed his temple like I was giving him a very familiar headache. “Kaye. Your mom sees her baby only once every few months. She couldn’t sleep last night because she was so excited to see him today. She misses him desperately. And she’ll miss you desperately too. When you go off to Columbia and come home again, she’ll bake you cookies and get mad at me for eating them. Promise.”
I doubted it.
“And as for Aidan,” Dad went on, “I know you’re spending tonight over at Harper’s, but you’re making some time for Aidan in there somewhere, huh?” He gave me a cocky grin.
“Yeah,” I grumbled.
“The two of you are a little high strung, we could say. You might have let Most Likely to Succeed go to your heads a bit. You need some space for a few hours. But when you see him again tonight, I’ll bet you both feel completely different about each other.”
I didn’t know then how right he was.
3
AN HOUR AND A HALF later, I drove slowly across the school parking lot, pretending I was concerned about traffic safety, but actually looking hard for Sawyer’s dented old pickup truck among the cars near the boys’ locker room and the school buses. He wasn’t here yet.
Unless he’d ridden with someone else. I’d heard rumors about him being with other girls—usually fooling around with them at parties, not dating them—but honestly, I didn’t know much about his love life. If he was dating someone else, Tia would know, but she might not tell me, because I acted like I didn’t care.
And I didn’t. That’s what I told myself as I accelerated toward my ride, the cheerleader van. But as I parked, I was still gazing across the vast lot. I watched under the HOME OF THE PELICANS sign for Sawyer’s beater truck to appear.
“Loser,” I said to myself as I got out of the car. After I stepped up into the van, a quick glance around told me 1) Sawyer wasn’t on it, and 2) Grace and Cathy were early, which was bizarre. They hadn’t used their extra time to bring our cooler and twenty pompons out of the girls’ locker room, though. Rather than disturb them, force them to look up from their cell phones, and listen to their excuses for why they were physically fit to cheer tonight but not to carry pompons sixty feet, I started making trips myself.
And watching for Sawyer’s truck as I walked.
By my fourth trek, some juniors had arrived to help me. They were a lot more responsible than the other senior cheerleaders I’d been saddled with. When we had the van loaded, I chose an empty seat toward the back. Ellen tried to sit with me. I got along fine with Ellen, Cathy, and Grace most of the time. That was the head cheerleader’s job, and the student council vice president’s job: to make friends with everyone. But if I was Snow White, their dwarf names were Shut Up, Hapless, and Drunken. I really could not deal with Ellen’s conversation halfway to Orlando.
I told her I was saving the seat for Harper, which was true. She was the yearbook photographer. She’d planned to snap shots on the marching band’s freshman bus during the drive to the game, since the yearbook didn’t have enough freshman shots, and on the cheerleader van during the drive back. I didn’t mention to Ellen that Harper wouldn’t be occupying the seat until later. If Ellen sat with me now and complained to me about how her remedial math class was so haaaaaaard, that wouldn’t leave the space open for Sawyer.
I stashed my bag beneath the seat, settled against the window, and scanned the parking lot again for a certain undesirable pickup. There he was, finally, making a beeline for us, driving right over curbs like he was in a Humvee. That might explain why his truck sounded the way it did. He parked beside my car, got out, and looked up at the van.
I looked away.
A few seconds later the van door rolled open. My stomach fluttered with butterflies. I would not look. I couldn’t let him know how I was beginning to feel about him. He teased me constantly, which must be why our class had voted that we should get together. But his teasing came with a side of mean, as surely as the fries he served with shrimp at the Crab Lab. He might turn on me if he knew he had the upper hand.