Perfect Couple

Once a cheater, always a cheater.

Tia clapped her hands, looking irate. Apparently she’d been trying to snap me out of my daze for a while. “Here’s what you’re going to do. See that truck over there?” She pointed across the rapidly emptying parking lot.

“Sawyer’s truck?” I asked.

“Exactly. You’re going to march right over there and get in the truck with Sawyer. You’re going to drive around town until you find Brody and Grace, and you’re going to make out with Sawyer right in front of them.”

I squinted at her. “Is that going to help somehow?”

“No,” said Will.

“Well, it’s sure as fuck going to make me feel better,” Tia said. “How could he do this to you?”

I was having trouble holding my eyes open, and I felt dead. But somewhere deep down, I was almost as angry as Tia sounded. I’d attracted Brody in the first place by wearing a bikini like Grace. Now, acting like Grace to get revenge on him made a perverted kind of sense. “Okay.” I started to tumble out of the car, then paused. “Should I take my laptop and shit or leave it here?”

“Leave everything in Will’s car. People are in and out of Sawyer’s truck and it can get sticky.”

“You don’t have to do this, Harper,” Will told me. “I vote no.” He said to Tia, “I don’t see what this is going to solve.”

“We’re not solving at this point,” she said. “There’s nothing to solve. We’re getting even. Maybe you don’t have revenge in Minnesota, but this is how we roll in Florida.” She turned to me again. “Let’s go, girl. Vámonos. We’ll be right behind you.”

I stumbled off the seat and staggered toward Sawyer’s truck. The floodlights far above me seemed brighter than they should have been, and the night was blacker. A sudden stiff breeze rattled the fronds of the palm trees scattered around the parking lot, reminding me that a hurricane still barreled toward us.

As I approached the truck, Sawyer, blond hair dark from a shower, looked up from talking with Noah, also freshly showered after the game, and Quinn, dressed completely in black. “What’s up?” Sawyer asked me.

“Brody just left in his truck with Grace. They are probably having sex or whatever. Tia says you and I should find them and make out in front of them. Revenge kissing.” I laughed like I’d gone insane.

“I think you should go home and go to bed,” Quinn said.

“I think you should do the revenge kissing,” Noah said.

“Wait a minute,” Sawyer said. “If they’re having sex, why can’t we have sex too? Revenge sex.”

“That would make me uncomfortable,” I said.

“I guess I’ll take what I can get.” Sawyer opened the door of his truck for me. It screeched on its hinges. “Hop in.”

As Sawyer started the engine, Will cruised up, stopping so that Tia could talk through the passenger-side window to Sawyer. They decided that we would swing by Brody’s house and Grace’s house near downtown before ending at the harbor. It was a common place for teenagers to park and cops to harass them. Irate old men wrote about the harbor’s parking lot in their letters to the newspaper about the downfall of today’s youth.

“You look nice,” Sawyer said as he crossed the high school campus and pulled onto the road through downtown. “I’m not just telling you that because we’re about to revenge-kiss.”

“Are people saying I stopped wearing contacts and started dressing like Grace just to get Brody?”

“No,” Sawyer said, “and I hear everything. Who told you that?”

“Kennedy.”

“Kennedy,” Sawyer repeated, low and husky, like Tia cursing in Spanish. “Why do you care what he says? Why don’t you just wear what you want?”

“I guess I don’t know what I want.” I paused. “But everybody dresses the way they do for a reason, right? Even you.” I gazed doubtfully at his beat-up flip-flops.

“Not really,” he said. “I only have four shirts.”

I blinked against the passing streetlights. “And you don’t eat anything you want. You’re very strict about that.”

“I’m a vegan because I don’t want to cause the death of an animal,” he said. “I mean, I’m not so strict about it that I’m going to insult other people for eating what I don’t. I serve what I’m told to serve at work. But I’m not personally going to eat it.”

“It’s an anticruelty thing?”

He glanced over at me, seeming to consider this for the first time. “Yes.”

“You didn’t seem concerned with cruelty when you made fun of Kennedy’s eyebrow piercing.”

Sawyer’s glance turned to a glare. “When I first moved to town two years ago, Kennedy ribbed me for one solid hour of PE because my dad had just gotten out of jail. You should have heard all the jail jokes. Oh, he was a fucking laugh riot, right up until I punched him.”

I’d known Sawyer got suspended for fighting on his first day of school. I hadn’t heard why.

“So fuck Kennedy and his eyebrow,” Sawyer finished.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Sawyer heaved an exaggerated sigh. “It’s crazy for you to apologize, Harper. You didn’t do anything.”

“I know. I just don’t think Kennedy deserves to be made fun of. Like when you made that joke about him the day Noah and Quinn came out.”