What he was telling me seemed to glimmer in front of me. “No,” I said. “You wouldn’t think that if you’d known me for more than a week. The people around here have known me forever.”

“I just got here,” Will said, “and that’s exactly why I can see you so clearly.”

Suddenly I was the one who was cold. I crossed my arms but tried to disguise the move by putting my chin in one hand.

“Girls look up to you.”

“Ha!” I crowed. “That is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” I felt my smile dropping away as he watched me silently without laughing along. I asked, “Are you serious?”

“Yes. The girls in the drum line, especially. They watch your every move. They practice the twirls you do with your sticks when you’re thinking about something else.”

I suspected he was making this up. “I never noticed.”

“They wait until you’re walking away.”

“Well, God help them,” I said. “If I can do one positive thing for them between now and when I graduate, it will be to give up drum captain and never be put in charge of anything again.”

“That’s not a goal,” he said. “It’s an anti-goal. It’s an aggressive stance against any sort of goal, like that’s going to help you.”

I let out a frustrated sigh. He was starting to sound like Kaye. Besides, I wasn’t the one who needed help. He was the one who feared the school would show up at his house with pitchforks and torches. And I could use that to my advantage. “Listen, would you challenge me for drum captain if I did you a favor?”

He grinned at me. “What kind of favor?”

He looked so adorable when he smiled. I wished I was suggesting that kind of favor. “I’ll explain the situation to Angelica,” I said. “I’ll tell her the picture yesterday was my fault.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” he murmured. “Not totally. We agreed on that.”

“Still, I’ll try with her. I’ll convince her to give you another chance. You can go out with her again. You and I will keep our hands off each other. Then all your problems will be solved.”

His fingers tapped a beat on one knee. “Knock yourself out.”

“And you’ll challenge me?”

“Yep.” He was looking at the bare bulb in the ceiling. He didn’t seem very invested in this conversation. I would show him, though. Getting out of drum captain was at stake here.

Then he asked, “If Harper really doesn’t come back until the end of the period, we have a few minutes. How should we spend them?” There was absolutely no innuendo in his voice. I knew Will, though. He was flirting with me again, whether he meant to or not.

I handed him the spray bottle.

11

THANKS TO OUR EFFORTS—ACTUALLY more Will’s efforts, because I lost interest in cleaning once I felt better—the storage room was organized. Or, not organized per se, but no longer ready to avalanche its contents on top of anybody. At the beginning of band practice, I was able to extract my drum pretty quickly rather than struggling to free it as usual from a tangle of harnesses and cases and music stands and “silks” and sketchy-looking lost-and-found hoodies. I hurried across the parking lot (yes, while banging out a salsa beat—why not?), where I blew a kiss to Will, who was standing behind the trunk of his car. This was not flirting at all. I carefully descended the stadium steps and found Angelica exactly where I thought I would: on the sidelines, practicing baton twirls that she could perform perfectly already, working hard despite the heat because she was so dedicated to her craft, ten minutes before the start of band.

I marched right over. “Hey there, old Angelica. How’s it hangin’?”

She lifted her chin and looked down her nose at me. Possibly I deserved this. I wasn’t making things any easier by greeting her in the style of drug dealers at a downtown Tampa gas station.

I started again. “Can we talk for just a second?” I even removed my harness and propped my drum nicely against the fence so that my distracting protrusion wouldn’t hover between us.

She swallowed before saying, “Sure,” almost like she was dreading this convo as much as I was.

“Can you lay down your weapons?”

She bent at the knees to place her batons daintily on the ground, then followed me along the fence to stop a few yards beyond where Chelsea and the other majorettes would gather. When they arrived, they could still inch toward us to overhear, but only if they wanted to be super rude. Which I did not put past them, honestly.

I took a deep breath and belted it out. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry for kissing Will when we were taking yearbook pictures yesterday. It wasn’t planned. We were together at Brody’s party, when you were still with DeMarcus.” I thought it might help my case to remind her that she wasn’t the only lady getting around, even if hers was a G-rated version of playing the field.

She grimaced, still sensitive about her breakup with DeMarcus. Good.

“Will and I are friends,” I said. “Definitely. But we’re nothing—”

I stopped as a large foam beak blocked my view of Angelica. Sawyer stood beside us in his pelican costume, nodding at me as if he was participating in the conversation.

“Sawyer,” I snapped, “I swear to God.”

Sawyer put his wings up, just like Will put his hands up when he got in trouble. I watched Sawyer sashay along the sideline toward the cheerleaders, exaggerating the wag of his big bird booty, until I was sure he couldn’t hear us.

I turned back to Angelica. “Will and I are nothing more than friends,” I said. “Except for that one night, we haven’t seen each other outside of band and school. And the picture . . . we were discussing what to do in the picture, and then the kiss just sort of happened.” I was telling the truth, and yet not. It was an accurate depiction of the events, if not of how I’d felt when they happened. Funny how everything that had gone down between Will and me since that first night had been pretty innocent on the face of it, and underneath, so very guilty.

“Will was upset about the picture,” I said, “because he was worried about what you’d think. With good reason, judging from the way you chewed him out yesterday.”

She raised her artfully plucked eyebrows at me. Her meaning was clear: And your point would be what?

“I promised him I would try to explain it to you,” I said. “He’s sorry about what happened and how it looked. He knows he embarrassed you. He was embarrassed too. He’s been cheated on himself, and, um.” I still doubted he’d told Angelica about Beverly, and I didn’t think his treacherous and extremely recent ex back home was a selling point. “He would like to go out with you again.”

She faced Will across the field, lowering her chin to look at him through long, thick lashes. I didn’t turn around to follow her gaze. I was trying to get these two back together so I could hand off the drum captain position to Will and keep him as a friend. But if I actually saw him gawking at this girl like I imagined he was right now, I wasn’t sure my heart could take it.

“You know,” she said, still gazing in his direction, “Will is sooooo good looking.”

Yeah, I knew.

“And he’s pretty nice.”

Pretty nice? Try nicest guy ever! What was wrong with this chicklet?

She opened her hands and let out a high-pitched sigh. “I don’t have to settle for a good looking, pretty nice guy who acts half the time like he prefers another girl.”

I nodded, but I was frowning. “Or a guy who will have a beer at a party.”

“Or a guy who will have a beer at a party,” she confirmed, enunciating her words and opening her eyes wide at me, like she’d already had this argument with DeMarcus and her perspective should have been obvious by now.

I stepped back and looked at Angelica, really examined her, maybe for the first time ever. She gave the impression of being a gorgeous girl, but she wasn’t really, or wouldn’t have been without carefully applied makeup and a flattering top hanging at exactly the right length over her shorts. She had taken a lot of shit throughout high school for stuff she’d done in ninth grade, but I’d never heard of her breaking down about it. She just took care of herself, came to school, and plowed through. I’d always viewed her as a stubborn stick-in-the-mud with no personality, but now I was realizing that being a stubborn stick-in-the-mud was her personality, and she deserved kudos for being true to herself.

Surprising myself, I told her, “I like you, old Angelica.”

She didn’t seem moved by this admission. “You like everybody.” Then she nodded at something over my shoulder. “We’ve got to go.”

Turning around, I saw that DeMarcus was on his podium. “Oh, shit,” I said. He officially started band practice every day by calling us to attention, but we were supposed to keep track of time and find our places on the field before he did that, so people weren’t scrambling. As I ran for my drum, I tossed over my shoulder, “Thanks for the talk, Angelica. See you around!” I thought she rolled her eyes at me, but I didn’t hang around to see.

I grabbed my harness and tried to fit it over my shoulders while hightailing it across the field to the drum line. Panicked about getting caught on the forty-yard line when DeMarcus called us to attention, but elated about the way Angelica and I had resolved our differences in a nonviolent manner, it occurred to me only gradually that “You like everybody” might have been a dig rather than a compliment.

And it wasn’t until I’d almost reached Will that the other shoe dropped. I thought he was in the wrong place next to Travis. Then I remembered I was the drum captain at the end of the line now. And I realized that Angelica had said no to dating Will. My mission to get her back with him had been a complete failure. What if I was stuck as drum captain forever?

Just as I reached my place, DeMarcus must have made the motion to start practice. Will played the riff that the rest of the drum line echoed, snapping the band to attention.

I held my breath. I wasn’t in trouble. But I felt like my body, not to mention my brain, was still rushing across the field.

“At ease,” DeMarcus called.

As I exhaled and everyone relaxed, Will immediately whispered, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to step on your toes, playing your riff like that.”

“You didn’t!” I exclaimed.

“You did that for me before and saved me from getting in trouble, so I thought I’d return the favor.”

“I know!” I sighed, so frustrated in my first few hours of being drum captain that I could hardly stand it. “Look, this is going to be completely insufferable if we’re tiptoeing around each other. Let’s make a pact that whatever happens for the rest of the year, we will always have each other’s backs.”

“Deal,” he said, sticking out his hand.

My palm touched his. We gripped hands. He slid his fingers down my arm. We touched elbows. “And then like this,” I suggested, linking arms with him. It was a badass secret handshake if I did say so myself.

“And now we’re flirting,” he scolded me.

I wiped my hands on my shirt. “Ew, flirt germs.”

I’d hardly gotten this out of my mouth when Will played the riff again. Ms. Nakamoto had finished giving us instructions, which obviously had been very interesting to me, and DeMarcus was calling us to attention to run through the show. This time I realized what was happening in time to echo the riff with the rest of the drums, just like I used to, but damn. This drum captain thing required a lot of concentration and did not agree with me.

It wasn’t until we’d played through the entire halftime show, and my ears were ringing with the ending squeals of our trumpets, who really were awesome if you were listening to them rather than looking at them, that Will asked, “What did Angelica say?”

“She said no. But you have to challenge me for drum captain, because at least I tried,” I burst out. I’d been worrying about how to say this through three numbers and a drum break. Clearly I’d needed more time to think it through.

“No way,” he said. “You promised you would convince her to give me another chance.”

“Blugh,” I said, shaking out my arms. My shoulders were sore from wearing the drum harness so long without a break. I looked past Will down the line of drums. I was only one person higher in the line than I’d been yesterday, but from this perspective, the snares seemed to continue forever like they were reflected in two mirrors pointed toward each other.

“Don’t give up so soon,” he said in the tone of a basketball coach in an inspirational TV movie for preteens. “Tell you what. You and I will go out for a few days, just to make Angelica jealous. That will get her interested in me again.”

I snorted, remembering how flatly she’d rejected his offer of reconciliation. “I don’t think that’s going to work.”

He said, “It worked on you.”

I felt my face flush red underneath my hat. He must have known how attracted I was to him, but I thought we had an unspoken rule that we wouldn’t mention it. My soul seemed as bare to him as my body had been on my bed our first night together.

But he was right, wasn’t he? Dating would make Angelica jealous if she felt anywhere as strongly about Will as I did. I’d sworn him off, promising myself our flirtation meant nothing and I didn’t want him or anyone as a boyfriend. And one glance at him lying on the beach with his hand on Angelica had transformed me into a scheming freshman.