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Chapter Twenty-Seven
Seb
Ihaveitsobad for this girl.
It kind of blows my mind that someone like her even has the patience to hang around a guy like me. Let alonewantsto. But looks like I’m the luckiest guy alive, because she continues to want to hang out with me. Hell, we’ve hung out every spare second we could ever since that date at the aquarium and the kiss that blew my freaking mind.
I took her go-karting after the aquarium, to the indoor track half an hour outside of Sandy Haven. She’d never been go-karting before, which seems wild to me. And a sin. Because crashing a go-kart, or golf-cart—hell, even a shopping cart—is a rite of passage for anyone under twenty, in my books.
When I drove her home, her parents invited me in for pie and ice cream. And then Caro and I hung out until almost two in the morning in her family room, watching TV and talking and… okay, making out.
We’ve been doing a lot of that these past few weeks. Taking it slow, because she’s new at this thing, and way too conscious of the fact that it isn’t for me. I’m not lying though, when I tell her the way she and I are together, thatisnew to me. I’ve dated girls, yeah. Hooked up, mostly—more than I’d want to admit to her. Which is exactly why this is different. I’ve never cared too much about what any girl thought of me before. I mean, I wanted girls to like me. Obviously. But it never went any deeper than that.
The positive side of me wanting to impress this girl is that I am killing it in all my classes, since she started tutoring me over a month ago.
Okay, so maybe “killing it” is a bit of a stretch.
Okay. A lot of a stretch.
But I am passing every single class. And getting way less detentions. Still, too many for my parents’ liking, but I’m improving, at least. Impressive as hell, given that I’m finding it harder and harder these days to concentrate. Which is saying something, since I already had the attention span of a gnat to begin with.
My appointment with the specialist that Dale booked the day after the slip’n’ slide incident was last week. I faked a bad headache to get out of it. Kind of ironic, with all the headaches I’ve been fighting against lately, that I had to go and fake one the day of an appointment meant to figure out why I get them all the time. He re-booked one for two weeks, which is fine by me.
Caroline has noticed the memory glitches. She’s tried talking to me about it a couple times, because she suspects it’s more than me just being a forgetful guy. The downside of hanging out so much with a girl as smart as hell Caro: she notices stuff a lot of other people don’t pick up on. I shut it down both times, but I know she’ll bring it up again. For now, she’s been putting reminders in my phone for stuff she thinks is important. Which I was already doing before, only lately it’s become more of a compulsion. So, my damn phone goes off every few minutes these days, announcing every little non-event in my life.
“Don’t you ever get bored of it?” Caroline asks, studying the football in her hands like it’s an alien artifact or something.
We’re standing on the east side of campus, by the construction site for the new Arts building. It’s one of those rare afternoons where neither of us have any commitments or anything, so we’re taking our time walking across campus to the parking lot.
“What? Football?” I ask, my voice sounding incredulous.
“Yeah. I mean… Isn’t it basically just throwing a ball or catching a ball and jumping on guys from the other team?”
I laugh out loud, my head thrown back with the force of it, because this girl is killing me right now. “Wow,” I say, once I can talk again. “How do you really feel about it? And don’t hold back this time.”
She looks defensive. “I didn’t say I don’t like football. I’m just saying I don’t get how you play it so much and don’t get sick of it.”
I cock my head. “You ever get sick of looking at starfish and sea cucumbers and reading about plankton?”
A grin slowly spreads across her face. “Okay… Good point.” She studies the ball again, and it cracks me up how she’s still holding the thing like it’s made of glass. “Maybe you could teach me? How to throw it?”
Now I’m the one grinning. “You want to learn how to throw a football?”
“Yeah, I mean, I should probably know how. Since I’m spending almost every minute of my spare time hanging out with a bigshot quarterback and everything.”
“You are? This guy sounds awesome.”
Caro rolls her eyes at me. “He is. Other than his huge ego.”
I pull her against my body and plant a kiss smack on her lips. Then take her to the field just beside the construction site. She seems shocked that I’m taking time right now to show her how to throw a damn football. Because even though we’ve been together for a few weeks now, it still surprises her when I suggest doing something with her. Or when someone else comes up to talk to her or something. I’m waiting for the day when she’s so used to it, she doesn’t react any more as if people liking her is some huge novelty.
I take the ball from her. “Kay. Watch how I put my hands.” I show her how to hold it, then pass it over and adjust her hands on the ball. Her fingers look tiny next to mine. Pale skin, nails cut short. No fancy painted nails for Caroline Heinz. Not when she has her hands submerged in tidepools or that touch tank of hers half the time.
We spend almost half an hour in the field, tossing the ball back and forth. She’s got a surprisingly good arm for someone who’s not really into sports. Then, Xave, Mason Dyer, and a couple other friends wander past and stop to hang with us for a while.
And then Annabel Chisolm and Jackie Delaney and a couple other girls show up shortly after that. And twenty minutes later, Xave has cranked the tunes on his portable speaker, the girls have tied their hair up in ponytails, and the ten of us are into a full-on game of touch football.
I love that Caro’s starting to feel more comfortable around my crew. She had it in her head that all my friends are like Trev, and Declan, and Connor—the guys Scarr and I were hanging with that evening she returned my phone at Helicina Cove. Her high school experience has been hella different from mine, so she doesn’t get that there are different levels of friendship. And that guys like Trev and Declan fall into that lowest “acquaintances” level. I know them. I cross paths with them and might hang with them sometimes at parties or whatever. But I don’t consider them good friends. Sure as hell wouldn’t trust them with anything. Because Caroline’s not wrong: those guys can be real douchebags.
