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“You then made the broad generalization that all girls were impossibly biased.”
He’s halfway through a swallow of soda and starts choking. “I said that?”
“You did.”
“I don’t remember that!”
“Maybe the memory is buried by the sound of all your football buddies laughing their asses off.”
“Oh.” He frowns. “I guess I do remember that.”
“So.” I cross my arms over my chest. Point made.
“So?”
I shrug with one shoulder.
“That proves nothing. You took that away from some cocky comment I made while I was trying to win a debate and get a better grade? You didn’t have to dumb yourself down.”
“Didn’t I?”
“Why would you take that lesson away from some random comment a dumbass fourteen-year-old boy made? I wasn’t exactly enlightened. That was half our lives ago! I used to think all kinds of bullshit.”
“Because I was a supersensitive fourteen-year-old girl, Will.”
“How could something I barely remember hurt you so much?”
“I didn’t say it hurt. Just that it made me dumb myself down.”
“No. No way. There’s no way one comment like that did it.”
“I–”
He’s watching me in a way that makes it clear he’s studying me. Figuring me out. This isn’t about his being right. It’s about Will trying to find the truth.
Dear God. He’s more dangerous than I thought.
My heart starts to pound hard, the drumbeat moving up under my collarbone as I wait him out. He’s patient, but he’s far less practiced. I have a treasure trove from four years of turning Will Lotham into my unofficial honors class, an independent-study project that no teacher supervised. If you could earn an A+ in Will, I’d have that shiny grade on my high school transcript.
But never, ever, did I imagine he’d study me right back.
“Mal.” His frown is miles deep. “What else?”
“It was your friends.”
“Which ones?”
“The big, hulking ones.”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
“Ramini. Osgood. Fletch.” A mental image of them in their football jerseys, one of them half sitting on the edge of my rickety desk, makes my stomach sour.
“What about them?”
“After the debate. They… said stuff. Did stuff.”
He goes tense. “Did stuff? To you?”
