Harper looked up from flipping through the images on her camera. “What curve?”

“Tia was the only one who didn’t have her calculus homework this morning,” Will explained. “Ms. Reynolds chewed her out and said she’d heard about Tia from other teachers and she was not going to have a repeat performance of that in her class.”

“Oh my God!” Harper gaped sympathetically at me.

“Then we had a test on what the homework had covered,” Will said. “Ms. Reynolds graded the papers while we were getting a head start on tonight’s homework. In the middle of it she announced, ‘You can all thank a very surprising person for making one hundred on this test and ruining the curve for you.’ She sounded pissed. And at the end of class, when she passed the tests back, Tia shoved hers in her purse before anybody could see it.”

Protectively I tucked my purse closer to my hip on the bench.

“Tia, damn it,” Harper cried. “Was the curve just for your class or for all of them?” She told Will, “We’re used to her ruining the curve in math, but doing it on the second day of school is pretty obnoxious, even for her.”

“Aren’t you in Angelica’s class?” I asked Harper. “Even if I didn’t ruin your curve, Angelica will.” I was making this up. Math wasn’t Angelica’s thing. She was more of a prim-and-proper-English kind of girl whom incorrectly corrected people’s grammar.

Harper gave me a quizzical look over her glasses, knowing I was only trying to get Will’s goat. “Well, hooray. It’s your turn for a yearbook photo.” She held out a hand toward Will and a hand toward me, her fancy camera hanging around her neck. I wanted to tell her that Sawyer had already tried to get Will and me to hold hands, with lackluster results. Instead, I stopped a few feet away from her outstretched hand and eyed Will.

“Look,” Harper said, “I know this title has caused you two some pain, but I have a job to do here. The yearbook is counting on me. I have to take a flirtatious picture of you both. You didn’t win Most Awkward.” She turned to Will. “Since you’re so great at coming up with photo ideas, what’s your brainchild for this one?”

He glanced uncomfortably around the courtyard, into the tops of the palm trees, up at the sky, the same deep color as his eyes. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

“That’s what I suspected,” Harper said in a tone that made it sound like she had suspected the opposite. Her retro glasses were adorable, but when her art was at stake and she got in this no-nonsense mood, the glasses made her look like a stern 1960s librarian. “I’ll give you a hint,” she said. “For this photo, you need to flirt.”

“What does that mean?” I asked uneasily.

She shrugged. “You’re the flirts. You should do what you were doing to get voted Biggest Flirts in the first place. I never actually witnessed it.”

“We were just standing next to each other on the football field,” Will said. “That’s all.”

“Oh, come on, Will. That’s not all we were doing,” I said just to bother him.

It worked. He cut his eyes at me, and his cheeks turned pink. He wasn’t smiling.

“Sorry,” Harper said, “but you can’t just stand next to each other. Not in my yearbook photo. We need some action.”

It was strange, but my headache was going away now that Will seemed hot and bothered. His discomfort was some sort of elixir for me. I bounced a little and clapped. “What kind of action?”

“He could drag you into the bushes,” Harper said. “That’s been done in a lot of yearbooks.”

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “Drag me into the bushes!”

“I’m not dragging you into the bushes,” Will said. “The bushes are prickly.”

“So are you.” I snapped my fingers. “There’s an idea. I’ll drag you into the bushes.”

He folded his arms on his chest and looked down his nose at me. “You will not.”

That sounded like a challenge. “Get your camera ready,” I told Harper. I slipped both hands around his upper arm, just where it disappeared under the sleeve of his T-shirt.

Then I paused. I’d known all too well that he was built, but I was surprised at how solid his arm was. I wouldn’t be able to move him. But I’d threatened to, and it obviously bugged the shit out of him, so I had to go through with it. I pulled on him and said, “Drag.” I gave his arm a couple more cursory jerks. “Drag, drag.”

Harper had her camera to her glasses, still clicking away, but she said, “Not enough action. It’s less flirtatious and more mournful and hopeless.”

I laughed, because it was true. That’s exactly how I’d felt about Will all weekend, and it was gratifying that Harper was able to see that through the camera lens. Even Will laughed a little.

In fact, he looked so carefree in that moment, like the Will I’d had fun with in band practice last week, the one I’d lost when we got elected to this stupid title, that I couldn’t resist. With one hand still bracing myself against his rock-hard arm, I stood on my tiptoes and moved in to give him a quick kiss on the corner of his mouth, just where his smile turned up. Harper would get the shot, and Will could sigh with relief and go back to his beloved schoolwork. At least until he had to stand beside me again in band.

Just as my lips were about to reach him, he seemed to realize what I was doing and turned his head slightly. Instead of my lips touching the corner of his mouth, his lips met mine.

I was so confused about whether he’d made the move on purpose or not, and so surprised at the zap of electricity racing through me, that I stood paralyzed for a second. Which I shouldn’t have done. We weren’t even kissing, really. Our lips only pressed together. If I’d stepped away from him and acted embarrassed, we could have laughed off the whole thing like it had been a mistake.

Instead, his lips parted, and so did mine. We were kissing for real. Neither of us had tripped into this one. I wore a sleeveless minidress, so I shouldn’t have gotten overheated, but my skin felt like it was on fire.

As quickly as it had begun, it was over. Will unceremoniously took a step back from me.

He turned to Harper and commanded her, “Delete those pictures. You can’t let Angelica see them.”

A hoot of laughter drifted to us. It didn’t sound loud, but it must have made quite a noise inside the building for us to hear it through the closed windows. I glanced around at the windows and saw boys’ faces pressed against the glass. They’d been watching us the whole time.

“Great,” Will exclaimed. “Now Angelica will find out for sure. Those assholes will run right back and tell her. Angelica may even be in that class.” He glared at me, then turned and stalked toward the door. Actually, I don’t think he stalked. Stalking was uncool and self-righteous, and Will didn’t move that way. He sauntered toward the door and threw it open like a rock star.

And I stared after him with my mouth open, desperately grasping for something funny to say to lighten his mood. He would stop, turn on the step, and give me a grudging grin. I would know that, even if I’d messed up things between him and old Angelica, at least he didn’t hate me, and we’d be back to normal soon. But without a joke, I was lost.

I turned to Harper. “Think of a joke.”

Harper gaped at Will too. Without taking her eyes off him, she said, “I’ve got nothing. And I don’t think a joke would fix this.”

The door slammed shut. Will was gone.

“Of course a joke would have fixed it!” I squeaked. “Normally you’re hilarious. What kind of friend are you if you can’t think up jokes on cue?”

She looked at me somberly through her glasses. “I’m the kind of friend who will support you during what comes next. If you two Biggest Flirts keep claiming you’re not going to flirt anymore, you’re going to blow each other’s lives wide open.”

***

Angelica did indeed find out about her brand-spanking-new boyfriend kissing the girl he’d sworn off. And then everybody else found out from Angelica. During the break after history, I heard her before I saw her in the crowded hall outside my English class, looking small and dead serious as she pointed her finger in Will’s face and raised her voice at him. I gave them a wide berth and ducked into class without either of them seeing me, I thought—which didn’t change the fact that everybody in the room stared at me as I walked toward the back and plopped down, four rows away from where I’d sat behind Will on Friday.

Will walked in on the bell, mouth set in a grim line, a pink flush crawling up his neck. I wondered if he’d gotten so angry with Angelica that he’d given her the “That’s enough!” line I kept getting from him when I pushed him past his breaking point. He didn’t look angry, though. He looked mortified. Apparently he got angry at a girl giving him heat only when he didn’t deserve it.

Band that afternoon was exactly as awful as I’d suspected. Unlike in the other classes I shared with Will, I couldn’t avoid him. I was stuck right next to him for the whole hour. And he didn’t say a word to me unless he was barking orders to the section. He’d brought two bottles of water for himself so he wouldn’t run out, and he must have spread sunscreen on the back of his neck already. He sat on the grass by himself instead of sharing my towel. It was the first practice we’d had in which Ms. Nakamoto didn’t have to tell him to get off me.

As we rehearsed the halftime show over and over, the hour flew by. But the heat was terrible, even to me, and Sawyer’s antics in the pelican costume weren’t funny. I tried to lose myself in the music and just enjoy it, forgetting Will was there. This was difficult when I was often sliding one stick sideways to play on his drum while Jimmy played on mine. Then we reversed direction, with me playing on Jimmy’s drum and Will’s stick in my personal space.

I fantasized about switching places with Jimmy, so that I stood between him and Travis. Just moving one person down in the drum line would make all the difference. I wouldn’t feel Will beside me constantly, his arm brushing against mine and suddenly pumping my body full of adrenaline. I wouldn’t smell the spicy scent of him that dragged me back, against my wishes, to our hopeless night together. With him finally out of my life, I could spend my spare time floating in the waves at the beach rather than trying to party thoughts of him away.

All it would take was one person in the snare drum line to challenge somebody else. Then we’d all have to try out, and I could carefully throw the competition so that I came in third. Problem was, except for Will, our snare drum line wasn’t very ambitious. I hadn’t convinced them to challenge me after begging them all summer. I wouldn’t convince them to challenge Will now.

I could, however, challenge Will myself.

That fantasy turned into an idea. The idea turned into a plan, because I had plenty of peace to think it through without the pesky drum captain teasing and distracting me. By the time DeMarcus started reading the end-of-day announcements, I’d made up my mind. Without a word to Will or Jimmy, I hefted my drum onto my shoulders, marched across the field, and climbed the stadium steps, making a beeline for Ms. Nakamoto. I whispered in her ear.

When DeMarcus finished his monotone of the day, Ms. Nakamoto held out her hand for the microphone. “One last announcement,” she said. “Snare drums, report to the band room before school tomorrow. Ms. Cruz is challenging Mr. Matthews for drum captain.”

“Oh, man!” was the first cry to come out of the snare drums, followed by some lower-key cursing—likely because they didn’t want to come to school early, not because they were worried about keeping their positions in the section. Then came a swell of “oooooh” as the rest of the band realized I must be trying to make Will’s life as miserable as possible.

While I had their attention, I used my drumstick to point at him far away across the field, like a tough boxer talking smack at the press conference before a big match: You, my friend, are dead meat.

***

I wasn’t sure I’d ever cried at school before. My decision never to have a boyfriend had come early, so nothing much had bothered me even during middle school when everything bothered everybody and girls broke down because a stranger insulted their sandals.

And now, as a senior, I’d been alternating between swallowing tears and outright sobbing for hours, since I’d beat Will and all the other drums in the challenge to become drum captain.

“This is so frustrating,” Kaye said. “Why do you get upset when you do well? It makes no sense!”

She and Harper and I stood in the hall outside Mr. Frank’s classroom before study hall. Kaye kept Sawyer and other curious boys at bay with the glare of a student council vice president. I ached to talk to Sawyer about what I’d done too. He understood my problem with responsibility a lot better than Harper and Kaye. But he and they did not get each other at all. I couldn’t talk to the three of them at the same time.

“I’m not upset for doing well,” I grumbled. “I always do well on drums. I’m a good drummer. I just don’t want to come in first, because first chair is drum captain and has to be in charge.”

“If you didn’t want to be drum captain,” Harper puzzled, “and Will was drum captain before, why’d you challenge him?”

“Because he’s furious with me for breaking him and Angelica up, and I didn’t want to stand next to him every day for the rest of marching season. I challenged him and intended to get third.”