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Any other night we’d found ourselves thrown together like this, I would have flounced across the room to drag Harper’s beanbag chair closer to the computer. I never would have accepted Sawyer’s invitation to lie next to him. But Aidan and I were on a break. I was a free woman who could do what I wanted.
And though I wasn’t at all sure where I stood with Sawyer, we’d definitely moved into new territory for us. What I wanted was to lie down beside him.
“Oh my God, is that Xavier Pilkington?” I exclaimed, keeping my eyes focused on Xavier’s photo filling the computer screen as I crawled onto the bed beside Sawyer. There was a moment when I had to decide whether to settle a few inches from Sawyer or lie right alongside him with our arms and hips and legs touching. I chose to touch him. If he was still so angry with me that he found me distasteful, this would serve him right. Cooties.
“Doesn’t Xavier look great?” Harper asked, grinning at me over her shoulder. She did a double take when she saw how close Sawyer and I were lying, but she smiled right through it and turned back to the computer.
“Like a 1940s movie star,” Tia agreed, “especially with the grease in his hair. How do you make people look so good, Harper? If you really want to expand your business to wedding photos, you should post what Xavier normally looks like as the ‘before,’ and this picture as the ‘after.’ ”
“Two-part secret to good pictures.” Harper held up one finger. “Lighting.” She held up a second finger. “Lots of frames. Let me pull up the rest of my shots for Most Academic, and you’ll see why.” She opened another folder and expanded a photo of blond Angelica, primly perfect as usual, next to Xavier, who looked like Harper had caught him mid-sneeze.
“Ah, there’s our Romeo,” I said.
Sawyer laughed. For someone with a great—even if snarky—sense of humor, he didn’t laugh a lot. The sound warmed me up.
“Speaking of Angelica,” Tia said, turning to me.
“Don’t tell her,” Harper muttered.
“She needs to know!” Tia defended herself. “Kaye, I swear to God, not ten minutes after Aidan told you he wanted to take a break, I saw him talking to the majorettes and, specifically, hitting on old Angelica.”
“You don’t know that he was hitting on her,” Harper reasoned. “She’s dating Xavier.”
“Oh, and you think Aidan couldn’t steal a girl from Xavier Pilkington?” Tia challenged her. “Xavier’s mom still cuts the crusts off his sandwiches.”
“I’m not saying he couldn’t,” Harper clarified. “I’m saying I saw Aidan having that conversation with Angelica too, but that didn’t automatically signal he was making a move in my mind.”
“You’re right,” Tia said. “Most likely they were discussing the Higgs boson and the standard model of particle physics. It only looked like he was hitting on her.”
Tia was what my mother referred to as “highly excitable.” She had a reputation for stirring up trouble. Aidan might have been passing pertinent information along to Angelica about the student council’s upcoming doughnut sale or something. He wasn’t the type to hit on girls. But what did I know? He’d never had the chance before. Maybe he would become our school’s playboy now that he’d decided our relationship was temporarily over.
And his choice of Angelica struck me. In the student council’s incorrect tally of the Superlatives votes, Angelica had won Most Academic along with Xavier. In the newer, correct tally Ms. Yates had claimed we weren’t letting out of the bag, Angelica had won Most Likely to Succeed with Aidan. Maybe he wanted to date the girl whom the school had paired him with. He obviously had no use for me now that he knew I hadn’t really won the title. And now that he had my mother’s recommendation letter.
I said, “I guess we won’t be on a break after all, then. We’ve broken up permanently, because there’s no way I can out-nerd that girl.”
“You got that right,” Harper said at the same time Tia said, “Es la verdad.”
As I uttered this realization, I honestly expected Sawyer to smooth his fingertips across my back. Maybe I would poke him in the ribs in retaliation. Maybe not. But he’d embraced me in a full-bird hug when Aidan handed down his initial decree. Seemed like my letting Aidan go deserved at least some touch from Sawyer. He didn’t move, though. He kept staring at the computer screen.
“Now that’s a handsome bloke,” he said. The photo was of him in the pelican costume—actually, it could have been anyone in the pelican costume, but I assumed it was Sawyer—looking very studious and contrite as he sat in Principal Chen’s office with his legs crossed at the knees, reading Crime and Punishment. Perfect.
Suddenly I felt a flash of panic that I hadn’t started my Dostoyevsky paper, which was due to Mr. Frank on Monday. My mother had reminded me this afternoon that the title of valedictorian probably hinged on everyone’s AP English grade because Mr. Frank was a stickler. But getting up from Harper’s bed to make a few outline notes when I was trying desperately to flirt with the class criminal was something Angelica would do, not something I would do.
Not anymore.
I called, “Are you really using that picture for Most Likely to Go to Jail?”
“Yes,” Harper said. “Kennedy complained. He said I hadn’t really taken Sawyer’s photo for his title in the yearbook if his face wasn’t showing. But we were on deadline. Kennedy had to let it through. And we’re not using this next one for Most Likely to Succeed, but we’re putting it in one of the front collages.” She clicked to a picture of Aidan and me grinning behind Ms. Chen’s desk—we’d fought over who would sit in the chair that day too, and finally pushed it out of the way—with Sawyer behind us, only one huge cartoon eye of the pelican popping up over Aidan’s shoulder. Sawyer had photobombed us on purpose.
