Текст книги "Endless Summer"

Автор книги: Jennifer Echols

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

“Lori’s day is over.” Rachel reached over and patted my knee.

And just what the hell did THAT mean? On the one hand, it sounded soothing. ere was a comfort in knowing your bad day was coming to an end, and all you had left to do was watch fireworks, ride back home in someone else’s boat, brush your teeth, and go to bed.

On the other hand, it sounded ominous, like Adam and I had already enjoyed our day in the sun, and now Rachel was signaling me to move over, Rover. When she’d come to the marina for lunch with Sean, she and I had talked a little. We’d told each other we were sorry for last night’s Xtreme Dating. But I could tell it would take a while for us to truly forgive each other.

And now she had that look in her dark eyes that she’d gotten a couple of times in the last few weeks when I’d asked her about Adam. e one that said she knew more than she was telling.

I didn’t want to go ballistic on her while all of us waited patiently and contently for the explosions, but God! “What do you mean,” I started, my voice rising over the eerily quiet lake, “my day is o—”

BANG!

We all jumped in our seats at the first explosion. Because the sound was delayed, we looked up to see the bouquet of golden light already spreading across the black sky.

In the pause before the next explosion, the crowd in the boats actually said, “Oooooh.”

More rockets snaked trails of smoke through the gold, then exploded green and blue. e percussion of their explosions reached us at the same time the strings of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” waltzed through the loudspeakers.

“Wow,” Rachel said. I looked over at her and Sean, gazing up at the sky with their heads close together, fireworks reflecting in their eyes. Everyone in the boat was gazing up. Everyone on the whole lake was gazing up. It would have been a great time to be a pickpocket. But only Adam would think of something like that, or the girlfriend of Adam who had gotten used to him over the years and missed him awfully.

Rocket after rocket zipped into the night sky, paused, then turned itself inside out in a rain of light. “My Country, ‘Tis of ee” ended and “America the Beautiful” began. “America the Beautiful” gave way to “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” I would have time enough to pine away for Adam when I lay awake in bed tonight, but right then I enjoyed the beauty of the fireworks and the fact that Adam was helping set them off from the grassy hill next to the yacht club and having the time of his life.

I jumped again—not at an explosion this time, but at my cell phone buzzing in the back pocket of Adam’s cutoff jeans. Maybe my dad was texting me that he and Frances were staying out later than me—but couldn’t he wait until the fireworks were over? I glanced at the screen to see who’d sent the text.

Adam.

I suppressed the urge to look around and make sure nobody was watching. Adam and I might not be together anymore, but the ban had been lifted. He was free to text me if he wanted. Again, his timing was not good, but then again, he might be asking me to call him an ambulance. I opened the message.

This one’s for you.

“You’re a Grand Old Flag” ended. The next song over the loudspeakers wasn’t a patriotic tune at all but a new rock song Adam and I both liked. A love song.

A smaller rocket cut across the sky, trailing smoke. It exploded in a red heart.

“Awwwww!” said the crowd.

“Upside down,” said Sean.

The heart was, indeed, upside down. It grew and grew, upside down, until its lights trailed and faded.

A bigger rocket exploded in bright golden sparks, and then came another red heart.

“Upside down,” said all the boys.

Three explosions layered on top of one another, gold, blue, pink. Then still another red heart exploded, growing and growing before it faded.

“Upside down,” said everyone in the boat but me.

My own heart expanded for Adam. I whispered, “I know what he meant.”

I stood up and started to put one foot over the side of the boat.

“Where are you going?” Sean grabbed me by the wrist. “Are you bailing on us? You’re not upset, are you? Adam’s planning to ask you to go to Birmingham with him in a couple of weeks. He thought you needed a while to cool off but the fireworks would soften you up.”

“Birmingham!” I exclaimed. “That’s serious!”

“That’s what I said to Adam.” Sean raised one eyebrow at me.

I watched a Roman candle pulse into the air: foop, foop, foop, with very bad aim, too low. In silhouette, the people in the boats closest to the shore ducked and covered their heads with their arms. “Adam makes terrible plans,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” Sean said in his most persuasive voice. “Wait a few weeks like he said, and maybe you’ll feel differently. He’ll explode something else to impress you. It wouldn’t be my choice of method to get Rachel back if I were in the doghouse with her, but there’s no accounting for taste.” Rachel batted her eyelashes at him.

And I gaped at him. It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying with fireworks flashing and booming above us, but I did believe that, while trying to put in a good word with me on his brother’s behalf, Sean had managed to insult both of us. en I shook my wrist out of his grasp. “It’s a terrible plan because I’m not waiting a few weeks.”

Before Sean could stop me again, I leaped out of the boat and into the one next to it. e men relaxing in lawn chairs in the bow hardly had time to turn around to see what blonde goddess had descended on them before I traversed that boat and leaped over the side, onto a pontoon boat loaded with drunks. ey braced themselves as the boat shifted under their feet, but they were inebriated enough and fascinated enough with Adam’s light show that they assumed it was the alcohol making them sway rather than a teenage pirate on a mission. They never turned around.

Quite a few boats were like that. A few had more alert passengers who stared at me. One old lady tried to lecture me about boat-hopping among strangers at night, a nice girl like me. And a couple of times I had to convince people to start their engines and putter a few feet forward so I could make it to the next boat without going into the lake. At the beginning of this summer I would have sworn I was not capable of drowning, but my last wakeboarding accident had convinced me I was wrong about that.

And it would be my luck to go out that way: floundering in the lake and succumbing under the boats to the jaunty tune of “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

e boats always obliged. Whether I knew the people in the boat or not, the driver idled closer to the next boat, just to stop me from interrupting the fantastic show overhead. I chose a safe path through the boats that would put me onshore at the yacht club wharf, rather than heading straight for the hill where the fireworks were coming from. It would be just our luck for me to get stabbed through the heart by a wayward rocket just as I was making my way back to Adam.

Come to think of it… wasn’t Adam the one more likely to get killed by a rocket, since he was the one setting off rockets? e detail was different, but our luck was the same. I pictured reaching the hill a few minutes too late and the other pyromaniacs pointing to the chalk outline sprinkled with ashes that was the only evidence left of his body.

I leaped from the last boat, hit the yacht club wharf, and ran.

ick ropes anchoring huge white sailboats crisscrossed the wharf, but I was a master at dodging maritime obstacles. I skittered toward shore as fast as my flip-flops would carry me, all the time watching the hill. Between explosions, the hill was dark and silent. Adam had been killed, and the show was over. en pink light flickered through the grass, and silhouettes ran away from the light with their ears covered. Funny that I recognized Adam from the way he ran in silhouette. I would have known him anywhere.

I slowed to a walk now that I knew he wasn’t in (immediate) danger of dying. I hadn’t realized how hard I’d been running, but my lungs felt like they were about to fall out as I turned backward to watch the latest rocket arc impossibly high into the air. It paused, quiet. en it burst into a million golden sparks, and the thunder came afterward to thump me in the chest and take my breath away all over again. e sparks faded into the black sky, then came back in a lovely surprise, bursting suddenly brighter and chasing one another around in circles as they fell. e entire bouquet of golden light reflected in the water. e lake looked like it was rising to meet the light instead of the other way around.

Foop, foop, foop. Three more rockets left the hill. I looked in that direction for Adam’s silhouette.

at’s when I saw him running down the hill– oh no, massive explosion, every man for himself, run for your lives! I did have that thought for a split second, but as I watched him, I saw he wasn’t running away from anything. He was running toward me.

e fireworks exploded in midair and lit him up. Two new burn holes had appeared in his T-shirt, giving me a peek at his chest. Soot streaked his tanned face, and his curls were dotted with small lengths of white straw—courtesy of ducking and covering on the ground, I guessed. He grinned at me.

We were on a collision course. Unless a rocket crashed down to explode just above our heads in the next ten seconds, we would meet in the middle, and I had no idea what to say. I’d told Sean that a few weeks was too long to wait to see Adam again. Now I wasn’t so sure. Maybe I should suggest we forgive each other but let things cool down between us before we started up again. We could have some long talks and discuss where we’d been and where we were going. That would be the adult thing to do—

He threw down his lighter, grabbed me with both hands, and kissed me.

I let him kiss me for a few seconds, shocked and relieved.

Explosions startled me. I’d gotten so lost in Adam, I’d forgotten we were standing in a fireworks display.

Then I moved forward, into him. I kissed him harder and put my hands in his hair, my fingers slipping past the pieces of straw. I wanted him closer.

More and bigger explosions went off behind him. I couldn’t tell whether the percussions in my chest were from the fireworks or from being chest to chest with Adam himself.

He kissed the corner of my mouth, kissed my cheek, and growled in my ear, “Fireworks or what?”

“Stars and Stripes Forever” ended with a flourish of horns. e silence grew, waiting for another rousing patriotic tune to fill it. e silence stretched. en there was another noise—foop, foop, foop, foofoofoofoofoo—endless launches of rockets. The music had stopped because no one would hear it over the grand finale of explosions.

I put both hands on his chest and backed him up a pace. The black sky behind him was filled with color. I said, “Go. Hurry. You can still help. You’re missing it.” He pulled me close again and gazed down at me, tracing one finger so tenderly along my cheekbone. His finger was black, and he might be leaving an attractive black streak across my skin. I didn’t mind. The way he was looking at me with those light blue eyes, I had never felt more beautiful.

He bent his head close to my ear again so I could hear him whisper, “I’m not missing anything.” Check out another

romantic and fun book from

Jennifer Echols:

The Ex Games

seat belt

(sēt’ belt) n. 1. a trick in which a snowboarder reaches across the body and grabs the board while getting air 2. what Hayden needs to fasten, because Nick is about to take her for a ride

At the groan of a door opening, I looked up from my chemistry notebook. I’d been diagramming molecules so I wouldn’t have any homework to actually take home. But as I’d stared at the white paper, it had dissolved into a snowy slalom course. e hydrogen and oxygen atoms had transformed into gates for me to snowboard between. My red pen had traced my path, curving back and forth, swish, swish, swish, down the page. I could almost feel the icy wind on my cheeks and smell the pine trees. I couldn’t wait to get out of school and head for the mountain.

Until I saw it was Nick coming out the door of Ms. Abernathy’s room and into the hall. At six feet tall, he filled the doorway with his model-perfect looks and cocky attitude. He flicked his dark hair out of his eyes with his pinkie, looked down at me, and grinned brilliantly.

My first thought was, Oh no: fuel for the fire. About a month ago, one of my best friends had hooked up with one of Nick’s best friends. en, a few weeks ago, my other best friend and Nick’s other best friend had gotten together. It was fate. Nick and I were next, right?

Wrong. Everybody in our class remembered that Nick and I had been a couple four years ago, in seventh grade. ey gleefully recalled our breakup and the resulting brouhaha. ey watched us now for our entertainment value, dying to know whether we’d go out again. Unfortunately for them, they needed to stick to DVDs and Wii to fill up their spare time. Nick and I weren’t going to happen.

My second thought was, Ah, those deep brown eyes.

Maybe snowboarding could wait a little longer, after all.

“Fancy meeting you here, Hoyden.” He closed the door behind him, too hard. He must have gotten in trouble for talking again, and Ms. Abernathy had sent him out in the hall.

Join the club. From my seat against the cement block wall of our high school’s science wing, I gazed up at him—way, way up, because I was on the floor—and tried my best to glare. e first time he’d called me Hoyden, years ago, I’d sneaked a peek in the dictionary to look up what it meant: a noisy girl. Not exactly flattering. Not exactly a lie, either. But I couldn’t let him know I felt flattered that he’d taken the time to look up a word in the dictionary to insult me with. Because that would make me insane, desperate, and in unrequited love.

He slapped his forehead. “Oh, I’m sorry, I meant Hayden. I get confused.” He had a way of saying oh so innocently, like he had no idea he’d insulted me. Sometimes new girls bought his act, at least for their first few weeks at our school. ey were taken by the idea of hooking up with Nick Krieger, who occasionally was featured in teen heartthrob magazines as the heir to the Krieger Meats and Meat Products fortune. And Nick obliged these girls—for a few dates, until he dumped them.

I knew his pattern all too well. When I’d first moved to Snowfall, Colorado, I had been one of those girls. He’d made me feel like a princess for a whole month. No, better—like a cool, hip teenage girl who dated! e fantasy culminated with one deep kiss shared in the back row of the movie theater with half our English class watching us. It didn’t end well, thus the aforementioned brouhaha.

I blinked the stars out of my eyes. “Fancy seeing you here, Ex.”

He gave me his smile of sexy confidence, dropped his backpack, and sank to the floor beside me. “What do you think of Davis and Liz?” My heart had absolutely no reason to skip a beat. He was not asking me out. He was asking me my opinion of my friend Liz and his friend Davis as a couple. at did not necessarily mean he was heeding public opinion that he and I were next to get together. Liz and Davis were a legitimate topic of gossip.

I managed to say breezily, “Oh, they’ll get along great until they discuss where to go on a date. en he’ll insist they go where she wants to go. She’ll insist they go where he wants to go. They’ll end up sitting in her driveway all night, fighting to the death over who can be more thoughtful and polite.” Nick chuckled, a low rumble in his chest. Because he’d sat down so close to me and our arms were touching, sort of, under layers and layers of clothing, I felt the vibration of his voice. But again, my heart had no reason—repeat, no reason—to skip two beats, or possibly three, just because I’d made Nick laugh. He made everybody feel this good about their stupid jokes.

“And what’s up with Gavin and Chloe?” he asked next.

“Chloe and Gavin are an accident waiting to happen.” I couldn’t understand this mismatch between the class president and the class bad boy, and it was a relief finally to voice my concerns, even if it was to Nick. “ey’re both too strong-willed to make it together long. You watch. ey’re adorable together now, but before long they’ll have an argument that makes our tween-love Armageddon look like a happy childhood memory.”

Suddenly it occurred to me that I’d said way too much, and Nick would likely repeat this unflattering characterization to Gavin, who would take it right back to Chloe. I really did hold this opinion of Chloe and Gavin’s chances at true love, but I’d never intended to share it! I lost my inhibitions when I looked into Nick’s dark eyes, damn him.

I slid my arm around him conspiratorially—not as titillating as it sounds, because his parka was very puffy—and cooed, “But that’s just between you and me. I know how good you are at keeping secrets.”

He pursed his lips and gazed at me reproachfully for throwing our seventh-grade history in his face, times two. Back then he’d brought our tween-love Armageddon on himself by letting our whole class in on his secret while he kept me in the dark.

Not that I was bitter.

But instead of jabbing back at me, he slipped his arm around me, too. And I was not wearing a puffy parka, only a couple of T-shirts, both of which had ridden up a little in the back. I knew this without looking because I felt the heat of his fingers on my bare skin, above the waistband of my jeans. My face probably turned a few shades redder than my hair.

“Now, Hoyden,” he reprimanded me, “Valentine’s Day is a week from tomorrow. We don’t want to ruin that special day for Gavin and Chloe or Davis and Liz. We should put aside our differences for the sake of the kids.”

I couldn’t help bursting into unladylike laughter.

I expected him to remove his hand from my hip in revulsion at my outburst, but he kept it there. I knew he was only toying with me, I knew this, but I sure did enjoy it.

If the principal had walked by just then and sensed what I was thinking, I would have gotten detention.

“Four years is a long time for us to be separated,” he crooned. “We’ve both had a chance to think about what we really want from our relationship.”

is was true. Over the four years since we’d been together, I’d come to the heartbreaking realization that no boy in my school was as hot as Nick, nobody was as much fun, and nobody was nearly as much of an ass. For instance, he’d generated fire-crotch comments about me as I passed his table in the lunchroom yesterday.

Remember when another heir called a certain redhaired actress a fire-crotch on camera? No? Well, I remember. Redheads across America sucked in a collective gasp, because we knew. e jokes boys made to us about Raggedy Ann, the Wendy’s girl, and Pippi Longstocking would finally stop, as we’d always hoped, only to be replaced by something infinitely worse.

So when I heard fire-crotch whispered in the lunchroom, I assumed it was meant for me. Nick was the first suspect I glanced at. His mouth was closed as he listened to the conversation at the lunch table. However, when there was commentary around school about me, Nick was always in the vicinity. He might not have made the comment, but I knew in my heart he was responsible.

Now I chose not to relay my thoughts on our four-year-long trial separation, lest he take his warm hand off my hip. Instead, I played along. “Are you saying you didn’t sign the papers, so our divorce was never finalized?”

“I’m saying maybe we should call off the court proceedings and try a reconciliation.” A strand of his dark hair came untucked from behind his ear, and he jerked his head back to swing the hair out of his eyes. Oooh, I loved it when he did that! I had something of a Nick problem.

His hair fell right back into his eyes. Sometimes when this happened, he followed up the head jerk with the pinkie flick, but not this time. He watched me, waiting for me to say something. Oops. I’d forgotten I was staring at him in awe.

A reconciliation? He was probably just teasing me, as usual. But what if this was his veiled way of asking me on a date? What if he was feeling me out to see whether I wanted to go with him before he asked me directly? This was how Nick worked. He had to win. He never took a bet that wasn’t a sure thing.

And if he’d been listening to everyone in class prodding him to ask me out, the timing was perfect, if I did say so myself. He was between girlfriends (not that I kept up with his dating status) and therefore free to get together with me. Everett Walsh, my boyfriend of two months, had broken up with me last week because his mama thought I was brazen (no!). Therefore I was free to get together with Nick.

Playing it cool, I relaxed against the wall and gave his puffy parka a squeeze, which he probably couldn’t feel through the padding. With my other hand, I found his fingers in his lap and touched the engraving on his signet ring, which he’d told me back in seventh grade was the Krieger family crest. It depicted bloodthirsty lions and the antlers of the hapless deer they’d attacked and devoured—which seemed apt for our relationship in seventh grade, but not for our relationship now, in eleventh. I was no deer in the headlights. Not anymore. Coyly I said, “I’ll mention it to my lawyer.” Ha!

He eyed me uneasily, like I was a chemistry lab experiment gone awry and foaming over. But Nick was never truly uneasy. He was just taken aback that I hadn’t fallen at his feet. Then he asked, “What are you doing for winter break?”

Winter break was next week. We lived in a ski resort town. It seemed cruel to lock us up in school the entire winter. ey let us out for a week every February, since the base might or might not start to melt by spring break in April.

Was he just making convo, whiling away our last few minutes of incarceration at school, or did he really want to know what I was doing during our days off? Again I got the distinct and astonishing impression that he wanted to ask me out. Perhaps I should notify Ms. Abernathy of a safety hazard in her chemistry classroom. Obviously I had inhaled hallucinatory gas just before she kicked me out.

“I’m boarding with my brother today,” I said, counting on my fingers. “Tomorrow I’m boarding with Liz. Actually, Liz skis rather than boards, but she keeps up with me pretty well. I’m boarding with some friends coming from Aspen on Sunday, the cheerleading squad on Monday—” Nick laughed. “Basically, anyone who will board with you.”

“I guess I get around,” I agreed. “I’m on the mountain a lot. Most people get tired of boarding after a while, which I do not understand at all. And then on Tuesday, I’ve entered that big snowboarding competition.”

“Really!” He sounded interested and surprised, but his hand underneath my hand let me know he was more interested in throwing me into a hot tizzy than in anything I had to say. He slid his hand, and my hand with it, from his lap and over to my thigh. “You’re going off the jump? Did you get over your fear of heights?” So he’d been listening to me after all.

My friends knew I’d broken my leg rappelling when I was twelve. at actually led, in a roundabout way, to my family’s move from Tennessee to Colorado. My dad was a nurse, and he got so interested in my physical rehab that he and my mom decided to open a health club. Only they didn’t think they could make it fly in Tennessee.

The best place for a privately owned health club specializing in physical rehab was a town with a lot of rich people and broken legs.

ough my own leg had healed by the time we moved, I was still so shell-shocked from my fall that I never would have tried snowboarding if my parents hadn’t made me go with my little brother, Josh, to keep him from killing himself on the mountain. Josh was a big part of the reason I’d gotten pretty good. Any girl would get pretty good trying to keep up with a boy snowboarder three years younger who was half insane.

And that’s how I became the world’s only snowboarder with the ability to land a frontside 900 in the half-pipe and with a crippling fear of heights. Not a good combination if I wanted to compete nationally.

“is competition’s different,” I said. Growing warmer, I watched Nick’s fingers massaging the soft denim of my jeans. “For once, the only events are the slalom and the half-pipe. No big air or slopestyle or anything that would involve a jump. Chloe and Liz swore they’d never forgive me if I didn’t enter this one.”

“You’ve got a chance,” Nick assured me. “I’ve seen you around on the slopes. You’re good compared with most of the regulars on the mountain.” I shrugged—a small, dainty shrug, not a big shrug that would dislodge his hand from my hip and his other hand from my thigh. “anks, but I expect some random chick from Aspen to sweep in and kick my ass.” And when that happened, I sure could use someone to comfort me in the agony of defeat, hint hint. But Nick was only toying with me. Nick was only toying with me. I could repeat this mantra a million times in my head, yet no matter how strong my willpower, his fingers rubbing across my jeans threatened to turn me into a nervous gigglefest. Sometimes I wished I were one of those cheerleaders/prom queens/rich socialite snowbunnies who seemed to interest Nick for a day or two at a time. I wondered if any of them had given in to Nick’s fingers rubbing across their jeans, and whether I would too, if he asked.

“Anyway, those are all my plans so far,” I threw in there despite myself. What I meant was: I am free for the rest of the week, hint hint. I wanted to kick myself.

“Are you going to the Poser concert on Valentine’s Day?” He eased his hand out from under mine and put his on top. His fingers massaged my fingers ever so gently.

Nick was only toying with me. Nick was only toying with me. “at’s everybody’s million-dollar question, isn’t it?” I said. “Or rather, their seventy-two-dollar question.

I don’t want to pass up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Poser, but tickets are so expensive.” I may have spoken a bit too loudly so he could hear me over my heart, which was no longer skipping beats. It was hammering out a beat faster than Poser’s drummer.

Nick nodded. “Especially if you’re buying two because you want to ask someone to go with you.” I gaped at him. I know I did. He watched me with dark, supposedly serious eyes while I gaped at him in shock. Was he laughing at me inside?

We both started as the door burst open. Ms. Abernathy glowered down at us with her fists on her hips. “Miss O’Malley. Mr. Krieger. When I send you into the hall for talking, you do not talk in the hall!”

“Oh,” Nick said in his innocent voice.

I was deathly afraid I would laugh at this if I opened my mouth. I absolutely could not allow myself to fall in love with Nick all over again. But it was downright impossible to avoid. He bent his head until Ms. Abernathy couldn’t see his face, and he winked at me.

Saved by the bell! We all three jumped as the signal rang close above our heads. On a normal day the class would have flowed politely around Ms. Abernathy standing in the doorway. ey might even have waited until she moved. But this bell let us out of school for winter break. Ms. Abernathy got caught in the current of students pouring out of her classroom and down the hall. If she floated as far as the next wing, maybe a history teacher would throw her a rope and tow her to safety.

Chloe and Liz shoved their way out of the room and glanced around the crowded hall until they saw me against the wall on the floor. Clearly they were dying to know whether I’d survived being sent out in the hall with my ex. Both of them focused on the space between me and Nick. I looked down in confusion, wondering what they were staring at.

Nick was still holding my hand.

I tried to pull my hand away. He squeezed even tighter. I turned to him with my eyes wide. What in the world was he thinking? After the insults Nick and I had thrown at each other in public over the years, we would have been the laughingstock of the school if we really fell for each other.

And now he was holding my hand in public!

He wouldn’t look at me, though I pulled hard to free myself from his grasp. He just squeezed my hand and grinned up at the gathering crowd like he didn’t care who saw us.

Which was everyone. Davis sauntered out of the classroom and slid his arm around Liz. Unlike the train wreck that was Chloe and Gavin as a couple, Liz and Davis were the two kindest people I knew. ey deserved each other, in a good way. But even Davis had a comment as he casually glanced down at Nick and me and did a double take at our hands. “That’s something you don’t see every day,” he understated to Liz. “Usually at about this time, Nick is going around the lab, collecting whatever particulate has dropped out of the solution so he can throw it at Hayden.”

“We didn’t do an experiment today, just diagrammed molecules. Nothing to throw,” Nick said in a reasonable tone, as if he and I were not sitting on the floor, surrounded by a two-deep crowd of our classmates. ey had all filed out of chemistry class and joined the circle. ey peeked over one another’s shoulders to see what Nick and I were up to this time.

en Gavin exploded out of the classroom, and I knew Nick and I were in trouble. He whacked into Chloe so hard, he would have knocked her off her feet if he hadn’t grabbed her at the same time. Over her squeals, he yelled at Nick, “I knew it!” while pointing at our hands.

“Oooooh,” said the crowd, shifting closer around us, totally forgetting they were supposed to be going home for winter break. If Davis, Liz, Gavin, and Chloe hadn’t made up the front row, the rest of the class would have overrun us like zombies.

“I was just shaking Hayden’s hand, wishing her luck in the snowboarding competition Tuesday.” Nick stood, still gripping my hand, pulling me up with him.

“See you tonight,” Davis mouthed in Liz’s ear. en he turned to Nick and said, “Come on. I’ll fill you in on what Ms. Abernathy said after you got ejected from the game.” Of course Nick didn’t give a damn what Ms. Abernathy said in the last ten minutes of class before winter break. But that was Davis, always smoothing things over.