Mia the Meek (18 page)

I quickly stepped away from Tim.

“Well, um, thanks Mr. Benson. Tim offered to help and then we dropped the key, and—”

“Right, I was just helping Mia find the key,” Tim said loudly. “Oh look, Mia. The key’s on the floor, and here’s your retainer. It must have fallen on the floor, too.”

I hastily grabbed my retainer and popped it back in my mouth.

“Well, the problem’s solved,” Mr. Benson said. “I think we can empty the machine and get back to the dance. We have some hungry teenagers out there.” Mr. Benson opened the vending machine and began filling a box.

“Great idea, Mr. Benson,” I said, avoiding Tim’s eyes.

We returned to the gym, and the sound of square dance music filled my ears. I groaned.

“Oh no, not again!”

Mr. Benson laughed.

“Relax, Mia. The kids are asking for this music. I’ve never seen anything like it. After every few songs, kids start chanting, ‘Square dance, square dance, square dance.’ This is the most fun I’ve ever seen students have at a dance. I think you may have started a craze.”

“I hope not.” I shuddered, imagining myself in a dress like Mrs. Corrigan’s. “I better see how Mr. Corrigan’s doing.”

“Do you want me to go with you?” Tim asked. I couldn’t look at him.

“No, I’d better go by myself.”

When I got to the sound stage, Mr. Corrigan mopped his brow with his bandana and hollered, “I’m hotter than a rat in a wool sock, but I haven’t had this much fun since my mother-in-law’s funeral. This dance is goin’ as slick as grass through a goose. Don’t you think?”

“Um, I guess,” I said.

“Some youngin’ named Jake, who’s hotter for you than a marshmallow on a stick, asked me to play this song and dedicate it to you,” Mr. Corrigan said, putting on a slow song. I turned around and Jake was standing there.

“Do you wanna dance?” Jake asked me.

How could I say no to the guy of my dreams?

After I walked into his arms, we began swaying together on the gym floor. I looked across the room and saw Cassie clinging to Tim, but Tim was staring directly at me. I quickly turned away and held onto Jake even tighter. After all, I would be crazy to choose Tim over Jake. I had everything I’d ever wanted. Didn’t I?

A
s my feet pounded the pavement during my Saturday morning run, my head swirled with the events of the night before. After our slow dance, Jake and I ended up behind a hay bale. But as he kissed me, I couldn’t wait until I could pry my mouth from his. I mean, what if Mr. Benson found me making out with another guy on the same night? It was almost funny. Here I’d gone almost fifteen years without kissing a single boy, and then ended up kissing two guys—two
gorgeous
guys, I should add—in one night.

I pushed myself to run even faster as I tried to figure things out. Why did I enjoy kissing Tim so much more than Jake? I didn’t even like Tim. I had drooled over Jake so many years, I should’ve been jumping for joy he wanted to kiss me. Maybe it was the spontaneity of Tim’s kiss that made me tingle. Or, it could have been the thrill of our mission to steal candy from the teachers. Or, maybe it was just the heat of the moment. All I knew was that Tim’s kiss made my knees weak, while Jake’s made my stomach queasy.

As I slowed my pace to cool down, I decided I needed to stay as far away from Tim as possible while I figured all this out. After all, I’d been waiting five years for Jake to notice me, and I wasn’t going to blow it just because my head started spinning after one kiss with Tim.

I was in the middle of my post-run snack when Chris walked into the kitchen.

“I see it’s feeding time at the zoo.”

I lobbed an apple at Chris’s head just as the phone rang.

“I’ll get it,” he yelled, lunging for the receiver.

I picked up the mushy apple and was about to hurl it at Chris when he handed me the phone.

“Who is it?” I whispered, covering the mouthpiece.

“It’s Tim.”

“Tell him I’m not here.”

“I just told him you were here! What’s your problem?”

“Just tell him I’m busy,” I said, shoving the phone back to Chris.

“I swear, Mom and Dad must have dropped you on your head when you were a baby.” Chris put the phone to his ear. “Tim, Mia is standing right here doing nothing, but told me to tell you she’s busy. I guess she just doesn’t want to talk to you.”

I grabbed the phone and quickly hung it up.

“You jerk! I’m going to my room. I’ve lost my appetite.”

I slammed my bedroom door and started to pick up the layer of clothes on my floor. It would probably be a good idea if I stayed in for the rest of the weekend. I didn’t want to run into Tim when my defenses were so low. Who knows what I’d do?

On Monday morning, I stopped by Jessie’s locker.

“I’m sorry about your grandpa,” I said.

“Sorry I missed the dance. I heard it was unusual.”

“‘Unusual’ is not the word,” Stephanie interrupted. “How about ‘a total humiliation’? I heard that Harrison High School students are now calling us ‘St. Hillbillies.’”

Jessie rolled her eyes.

“I talked to Mr. Benson this morning,” Jessie said, “and he told me student council made a ton of money. Mr. Corrigan didn’t even charge us for being a DJ, so we had almost no expenses. We made more money in one night than they made all last year. Besides, Cassie, didn’t you tell me you and Tim had an awesome time together?”

“You and Tim are the absolute cutest couple,” Stephanie added.

I wanted to ask Cassie if Tim had kissed her, too, but I bit my overused lips. Instead, I said goodbye to Jessie and walked into Mr. Benson’s room, taking the long way around the back to avoid Tim’s desk.

“I have a surprise for you,” my mom told the class.

“We’re all getting A’s on our report cards?” Collin yelled from the back of the room.

“Nice try, Collin,” my mom replied. “Since you all did such a great job on your hero speeches, I thought we could squeeze in one more fun assignment before we start our next unit on poetry.”

“That’s more like a cruel joke,” Anthony moaned. My mom silenced him with a look.

“For your next assignment, you’ll research a classmate by interviewing the classmate, as well as his or her family and friends. Then, you’ll give a presentation on their life to the class. This will be due in two weeks, and to ensure that you don’t choose a friend, you’ll draw names out of a hat. Who would like to start?”

No one volunteered so—of course—my mom looked at me.

“Mia, why don’t you draw first?”

Why did I have to be the teacher’s kid? I climbed out of my desk and walked to the front of the room. I reached my hand into the hat, took one look at the name on the paper, and folded it up to put it back.

“No way, Mia,” my mom said. “That’s against the rules. Whom did you pick?”

I sighed. “Cassie Foster.”

After the rest of the class had been paired up, we sat down with our subjects to begin our interviews. Needing a good grade to make up for my Joan of Arc fiasco, I swallowed my pride and said, “So Cassie, would you like to interview me first or should I interview you?”

Cassie lowered her voice.

“Let’s make one thing clear—I know you don’t like me and I don’t like you. Also, you can interview me or my friends, but I don’t want you to go near my family. If you do, I’ll make you wish you were never born.”

“Why? What’s the big deal about your family?”

“My parents are extremely busy, important people and they don’t have time to talk to a loser like you.”

“All right,” I said, “but I need an A on this project, so you’d better give me a great interview.”

“Everything I do is great,” Cassie said.

Thankfully, during science class, we were assigned to take notes from our book. I had successfully avoided Tim since our kiss, which wasn’t easy, considering he lived fifty feet from my house. But I was determined to keep my distance from him—at least until the acrobats in my stomach stopped doing cartwheels every time I saw him.

I immersed myself in a paragraph about the lifespan of a fruit fly, trying to ignore Tim’s nearness, when a note suddenly appeared on my book. It read: “We need to talk.”

I swallowed, trying to make my heart disappear from my throat. I scribbled back a note, which I scooted to Tim. “About what?”

When he looked at me, I feigned innocence. “You know,” he wrote.

“No, I don’t,” I scrawled. “Quit bothering me, I need to raise all my grades!”

“We need to talk about the teacher’s lounge.”

By now, Jake and Cassie were watching us. “Anything that happened in there will never be discussed again,” I wrote. “It was a mistake.”

Tim crumpled my response, opened his textbook, and began taking notes furiously.