Call It What You Want(5)

I shove my book into my backpack and shuffle to the front row.





CHAPTER SIX

Maegan

We’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes, listening to Mrs. Quick spell out the details of our assignment, and Rob Lachlan hasn’t even looked at me. It’s bad enough that teachers give me the side-eye. I don’t need it from him, too.

Cheater’s gonna cheat. I don’t know who said it, but I wonder if it was him. He sure doesn’t look happy to be my partner. His hair is kind of longish on top, and unkempt, hanging into his eyes like his mother needs to remind him to get a haircut. He won’t make eye contact, and we’ve never been friends, so I have no idea what color his eyes are. A few freckles dust his pale cheeks, like the remnants of a summer tan that just won’t let go. He’s wearing a black, long-sleeved Under Armour shirt that clings to his frame.

His life might suck, and he might have been ejected from his social circles, but he’s still a back-of-the-class jock.

And I’m still me.

Mrs. Quick is outlining our project, which actually sounds interesting—choosing objects to drop from different heights and trying to calculate their bounce and trajectory—but I keep covertly studying the boy next to me.

He’s taking sparse notes. Keeping his eyes on his paper. Looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.

When the bell rings, he jams his things into his backpack. Still no acknowledgment that I’m his partner.

When I got caught cheating, people made this kind of broad assumption that I was going to turn into a total slacker. I didn’t, but I wonder if that’s the problem here.

“Hey,” I say to him.

He jerks at the zipper. His head lifts a fraction of an inch. “Hey, what?”

“I really care about my grades. You can’t slack off on this.”

His hands go still. His voice turns lethally quiet, and I expect a dig, but instead, he says, “I have an A in this class. Figure out what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

I follow him out. “Why didn’t you answer Mrs. Quick when she asked about a partner?”

“What?”

I can barely hear him over the cacophony of students in the hallway, but I can’t let this go. I need to head the other direction, toward Honors English, but I dog him through the pack of students. “When she asked if anyone still needed a partner, you didn’t say anything.”

“So what?”

I want to hear him say it. I want him to admit it. “You knew she was asking for me. If you don’t want to be my partner, just say so.”

“I don’t want to be your partner.”

I stop short in the hallway. He says it so … evenly. Without emotion. Without looking at me. Without even stopping. It’s worse than a dismissive glance. This is a statement of fact.

I don’t want to be your partner.

I feel like he’s slugged me in the chest. I can’t move. The worst part is that I asked for it. Literally.

While I’m standing there trying to recover, he slips between students and vanishes like a ghost.



At lunch, Rachel and I split a salad in the cafeteria. She and I don’t have any morning classes together, so it’s my first chance to whine about Rob Lachlan.

“Skip the project,” she says to me. “Refuse to do it.”

“Yeah, okay.” I stab at the lettuce. “I need this grade. We don’t all have a college fund waiting for us.”

She jabs at a cherry tomato. “How is that my fault?”

“Nothing is your fault.” I sigh, irritated, though I can’t really parse out why. Maybe it’s Drew’s comments this morning; maybe it’s Rob’s. I probably shouldn’t be taking it out on her, though.

“What are we talking about?” Drew swings a leg over the bench on Rachel’s side of the table and drops down beside her. His tray is loaded with two burgers, a bowl of broccoli, a cup of yogurt, and two bags of chips.

She scoots closer to him until she can rest her head on his shoulder. Drew drops a kiss on the top of her head, then peels the lid off a yogurt and licks the bottom of it.

They’re adorable. And disgusting.

Now that she’s snuggled up against him, Rachel’s sobered. “Maegan’s been assigned to work with the class felon.”

Drew shovels yogurt into his mouth and follows her gaze. “Rob Lachlan?”

“Yeah.” She’s staring into the far corner of the cafeteria, where Rob is sitting alone at a round table. He’s eating a sandwich from a brown paper bag, a thick paperback cracked open on the table in front of him. He didn’t strike me as a reader, but he didn’t strike me as a guy who’d be carrying an A in AP Calculus, either. I actually always thought he was the kind of kid whose grades were boosted thanks to his parents’ donations to the school—or maybe his prowess on the lacrosse field.

“His dad stole seven million dollars,” I say. “Not him.”

“That we know of,” says Rachel.

She sounds callous, but about six tables over from Rob sits Owen Goettler, a kid whose single mom never had very much money at all, then lost what little she had left to Rob’s father. He’s got smooth, cream-colored skin that’s blemish-free, which might be enviable if not for the lank brown hair that hangs to his collar. Owen is eating a plain cheese sandwich—what they give to the kids who can’t afford lunch. His entire house could probably fit in Rob’s living room.