Perfect Couple (27 page)

Something had changed this school year when he started practicing with us cheerleaders in his pelican costume as school mascot. He stood right behind me on the football field, imitating my every step, even after I whirled around and slapped him on his foam beak. When we danced the Wobble, he moved the wrong way on purpose, running into me. With no warning he often rushed up, lifted me high, and gave me full-body, full-feathered hugs. Because he was in costume, everybody, including Aidan, knew it was a joke.

Only I took it seriously. I enjoyed it too much and wished he’d do the same things to me with the costume off.

Then, last Saturday, he’d told me he loved my hair. My heart opened to him.

And
then
I’d found out the juniors had made a mistake tallying the Senior Superlatives votes. Each student could be elected to only one title. The girl and boy with the most votes won—except Perfect Couple That Never Was. This position was supposed to be tallied as the girl-boy pair that
gained the most votes, not the girl and the boy individually. I wasn’t allowed to say this to Sawyer or anyone, but he and I had been elected Perfect Couple That Never Was. Our class had paired us together.

My crush on him was now official and hopeless. He was toying with me, like he toyed with everyone. Plus, I was committed to Aidan.

“Yes, of course I’ll marry you,” I told Sawyer, making sure I sounded sarcastic.

The door opened, letting in the noise from the hall. “Hey,” Will said, lilting that one syllable in his Minnesota accent. Lucky for him, derision about the way he talked had waned over the first five weeks of school. He’d started dating my friend Tia, who gave people the stink eye when they bad-mouthed him. And he’d made friends with Sawyer—a smart move on Will’s part. Sawyer could be a strong ally or a powerful enemy.

Sawyer waited for a couple more classroom representatives to follow Will toward the back of the room. Then he turned to me again. “Would you go to the prom with me?”

“Yes.” This was the game. He asked me a series of questions, starting with the outlandish ones. I said yes to those. Eventually he asked me something that wasn’t as crazy, forcing me to give him the obvious answer: I had a boyfriend.

Here it came. “Will you sit with me on the van to the game tonight?”

A spark of excitement shot through me. A few weeks ago, Sawyer had passed out from the heat on the football field in his heavy mascot costume. Ever since, he’d ditched the suit during cheerleading practice and worked out with the football team instead, claiming he needed to get in better shape to withstand entire games dressed up as a pelican.

I missed him at cheerleading. I’d assumed he would ride with the football players to our first away game, but I wished he would ride on the cheerleader van. Now my wish was coming true.

Careful not to sound too eager, I said, “I didn’t know you were riding with us. You’ve been more football player than cheerleader lately.”

“I’m a pelican without a country,” he said. “Some unfortunate things may have gotten superglued to other things in the locker room after football practice yesterday. The guys went to the coach and said they don’t want me to ride on the bus because they’re scared of what I’ll do. The coach
agreed
. Can you believe that? I’m not even innocent until proven guilty.”

“
Are
you guilty?” Knowing Sawyer, I didn’t blame the team for accusing him.

“Yes,” he admitted, “but they didn’t know that for sure.”
He settled his elbow on the desk and his chin in his hand, watching me. “You, on the other hand, understand I never mean any harm. You’ll sit with me on the van, right?”

I wanted to. My face burned with desire—desire for a
seat
, of all things. Next to a boy who was nothing but trouble.

And I knew my line. “We can’t sit together, Sawyer. Aidan wouldn’t like it.”

Sawyer’s usual response would be to imitate me in a sneering voice:
Aidan wouldn’t like it!

Instead, he grabbed Ms. Yates’s chair and rolled me closer to him. Keeping his hands very near my bare knees, he looked straight into my eyes and asked softly, “Why do you stay with Aidan when he bosses you around? You don’t let anyone else do that.”

Tia and my friend Harper grilled me at every opportunity about why I stayed with Aidan too, but they didn’t bring up the subject while representatives for the entire school could hear. My eyes flicked over to the student council members, who were filling the desks and noisily dragging extra chairs off the cart, and Ms. Yates, who was making her way toward the back of the room with her coffee. Aidan himself would be here any second.

I told Sawyer quietly but firmly, “
You
would boss me around just as much as Aidan does. What’s the difference?”

“That’s not true.” Sawyer moved even closer. I watched his lips as he said, “I wouldn’t ask for much. What I wanted, you would give me willingly.”

Time stopped. The bustle around us went silent. The classroom disappeared. All that was left was Sawyer’s mouth forming words that weren’t
necessarily
dirty, yet promised a dark night alone in the cab of his truck. My face flushed hot, my breasts tightened underneath my cute yellow bodice, and electricity shot straight to my crotch.

The many nights I’d pulled Tia away from Sawyer at parties over the past two years, she’d drunkenly explained that he had a way of talking her panties off. I’d heard this from other girls too. And he’d flirted with me millions of times, making me feel special, but never quite
this
special. Now I understood what Tia and those other girls had meant.

Abruptly, I sat up and rolled my chair back.

He straightened more slowly, smirking. He knew exactly what effect he’d had on me.

Bewildered, I breathed, “How did you do that?”

“It’s a gift.”

His cavalier tone ticked me off, and I regained my own voice. “That’s what I would worry about. During study hall, you give me the ‘gift’ ”—I made finger quotes—“but you’ve moved on to the next girl by lunch. No thanks.”

His face fell. “No, I—”

Aidan sashayed in, greeting the crowd as he came, already starting the meeting.

Sawyer lowered his voice but kept whispering to me as if nothing else were going on and Aidan weren’t there. He said, “I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t cheat on you, ever.”

Aidan turned around in front of the desk and gave us an outraged look for talking while he was making a speech. Sawyer didn’t see it, but I did. I faced forward and opened my student council binder, cheeks still burning.

Sawyer had complimented me, part of a strange new trend.

He’d dropped the playful teasing and blatantly come on to me, a brand-new pleasure.

And he’d gotten upset at my tart response, as if he actually cared.

I leaned ever so slightly toward him to give the electricity an easier time jumping the arc from my shoulder to his. His face was tinged pink, unusual for Sawyer, who was difficult to embarrass. I was dying to know whether he felt the buzz too.

Apparently not. I jumped in my chair, startled, as he banged the gavel on the block that Ms. Yates had placed on her desk for Aidan. “Point of order, Mr. President,” Sawyer said. “Have you officially started the meeting? You haven’t asked the secretary to read the minutes.”

“We don’t have time,” Aidan said. Dismissing Sawyer, he turned back to the forty representatives crowding the room. He hadn’t argued with us about who got Ms. Yates’s desk, after all. He didn’t need to. Instead of presiding over the council from here, he simply reasserted his authority by running the meeting while standing up. Sawyer and I looked like his secretarial pool.

“We have a lot to cover,” Aidan explained to the reps, and I got lost in watching him and listening to him, fascinated as ever. About this time of year in ninth grade, he’d captured my attention. Previously he’d been just another dork I’d known since kindergarten. I’d preferred older guys, even if they didn’t prefer
me
.

But Aidan had come back from summer break taller than before, and more self-assured than any other boy I knew. That’s why I’d fallen for him. Confidence was sexy. That’s also why, until recently, I’d felt a rush of familiarity and belonging and pride whenever I glimpsed him across a room.

After years with him, however, I was finally coming to understand he wasn’t as sure of himself as he wanted people to believe. He was so quick to anger. He couldn’t take being challenged. But as I watched him work the room like a pro, with the freshman reps timidly returning his broad smile, I remembered exactly what I’d seen in him back then.

Sawyer put his elbow on our desk and his chin in his hand, looking bored already. He glanced sidelong at me.

“We’re entering the busiest season for the council,” Aidan was saying, “and we desperately need volunteers to make these projects happen. Our vice president, Ms. Gordon, will now report on the homecoming court elections coming up a week from Monday, and the float for the court in the homecoming parade.”

“And the dance,” I called.

“There’s not going to be a homecoming dance,” he told me over his shoulder. “I’ll explain later. Go ahead and tell them about the homecoming court—”

Several reps gasped, “What?” while others murmured, “What did he say?” I spoke for everyone by uttering an outraged “What do you mean, there’s not going to be a dance?”

“Ms. Yates”—he nodded to where she sat in the back of the room, and she nodded in turn—“informed me before the meeting that the school is closing the gym for repairs. The storm last week damaged the roof. It’s not safe for occupancy. That’s bad news for us, but of course it’s even worse news for the basketball teams. The school needs time to repair the gym before their season starts.”

Will raised his hand.

Ignoring Will, Aidan kept talking. “All of us need to get
out there in the halls and reassure the basketball teams and their fans that our school is behind them.”

I frowned at the back of Aidan’s head. He used this bait-and-switch method all the time, getting out of a sticky argument by distracting people (including me) with a different argument altogether. Basketball season was six weeks away. The homecoming dance didn’t have to die so easily. But hosting the event would be harder now, and Aidan didn’t want to bother.

I did.

“Help,” I pleaded with Sawyer under my breath.

Aidan had already moved on, introducing my talk about the election committee.

Out in the crowd Will called, “Excuse me,” which hadn’t happened in any council meeting I’d attended. “Wait a minute. My class wants the dance.”

I couldn’t see Aidan’s face from this angle, but he drew his shoulders back and stood up straighter. He was about to give Will a snarky put-down.

Sawyer watched me, blond brows knitted. He didn’t understand what I wanted.

“Complain about something in the book again,” I whispered, nodding at
Robert’s Rules of Order
. “Ms. Yates hasn’t stopped Aidan from railroading the meeting. She obviously doesn’t want the dance either, but they can’t fight the book.”

Everyone jumped as Sawyer banged the gavel. “The council recognizes Mr. Matthews, senior from Mr. Frank’s class. Stand up, sir.”

We’d never had reps rise to speak before. I was pretty sure the rules of order didn’t say anything about this. But it was a good move on Sawyer’s part. At Will’s full height he had a few inches on Aidan, and when he crossed his muscular arms on his chest, his body practically shouted that nobody better try to budge him.

Before Aidan could protest, Will said in his strangely rounded accent, “I haven’t been here long, but I get the impression that the homecoming dance is a huge deal at this school. Everyone in Mr. Frank’s class has been talking about it and looking forward to it. We can’t simply cancel at the first sign of trouble.”

“We just did,” Aidan snapped. “Now sit down while I’m talking.”

Sawyer banged the gavel. I should have gotten used to it by now, but I jumped in my seat again.

Aidan visibly flinched. He turned on Sawyer and snatched the gavel away. Holding it up, he seethed, “Don’t do that again, De Luca. You’re not in charge here. I’m the president.”

“Then act like it,” I said.

Aidan turned his angry gaze on me. I stared right back at
him, determined not to chicken out. Will and Sawyer and I were right about this. Aidan was wrong.

As I watched, Aidan’s expression changed from fury to something different: disappointment. I’d betrayed him. We’d had a long talk last week about why we couldn’t get along lately. He understood I disagreed with him sometimes, but he wanted us to settle our differences in private, presenting a united front to the school as the president and his vice president.

Now I’d broken the rule. No matter what the council decided, he wouldn’t forgive me for defying him in public.

And I didn’t care. Keeping the peace wasn’t worth letting him get away with acting like a dictator.

“We don’t have
time
to debate this in a half-hour meeting,” he repeated. “There’s nothing to debate. The decision has been made. The school already canceled the dance because we don’t have a location for it.”

“We’ll move it,” I said.

“It’s only two weeks away,” he said.

I shrugged. “You put me in charge of the dance committee. It’s our job to give it a shot.”

Aidan’s voice rose. He’d forgotten we’d agreed not to argue in public. “You’re only pitching a fit about this because you’re still mad about—”

“Give me that,” Sawyer interrupted, holding out his hand for the gavel.

“No,” Aidan said, moving the gavel above his head.

“Mr. President,” Sawyer said in a lower, reasonable tone, like talking to a hysterical child, “you’re not allowed to debate the issue.”

“Of course I am. I’m the president!”

“Exactly.
Robert’s Rules of Order
state that your responsibilities are to run the meeting and give everyone the opportunity to speak. If you want to express your opinion, you need to vacate the chair.”

“I’m not
in
the chair,” Aidan snapped. “
You’re
in the chair.”