What We Saw(16)

“Hey—what’s this hashtag?” Lindsey holds her phone out to Christy, who takes it from her and shows me. The picture of Stacey passed out is somehow worse now that I know she’s not at school today. There are three hashtags: #doonestown #buccs #r&p. I shrug and keep taking bites of my salad, but the ground beef is tough. I think of Ben’s contention that the tacos are made of cats and start smiling to myself.

“What’s so funny?” Lindsey misses nothing.

“Huh? Oh—nothing. Just . . . thinking about something . . .”

All three of them start in at once:

“Oh, I’ll bet you are.”

“You mean someone.”

“I won’t tell you his full name, but his initials are B-E-N-C-O-D-Y.”

I am laughing because what else can you do when your friends torment you, and they’re right? My phone buzzes in my purse. I fish it out and see a text.

Can I talk 2 u? Sr. stairs.

Lindsey sees the name before I can shield the screen. “It’s from Ben!”

The volume from Christy only goes one way in these situations: up. As quickly as I can, I drop my phone into my purse and pick up my tray. Rachel squeezes my arm and raises her eyebrows in excitement as I slip away from the table. The catcalls from Christy follow me, and are met with a general wave of noise from the rest of the cafeteria—as the corn syrup of every Coke and cookie ingested hits the collective bloodstream of Coral Sands High. The strange hush is over. The tipping point toward bedlam has been achieved.

The tone will pulse to end lunch in exactly four minutes. It will take me one minute to drop off my tray and walk to the senior stairwell. There will be three minutes of relative quiet before the wave crests and tears through the halls.

I walk as quickly as I can. I see him as I pass beneath the stairwell and pause in the shadow. He is leaning against my locker, staring at his phone. Is he swiping through the same hashtags Lindsey is patrolling? Or is he waiting for a text from me?

The straps of his backpack frame his chest in a way that makes my knees weak. Better keep walking or you might fall down.

He glances up as I approach and slips into an easy smile that warms me from the inside out. Once more, I’m reminded why all the guys on the team look up to him—even the seniors.

“There you are.”

Was there ever a more perfect greeting? Not a grunted “hey” or a “where’ve you been?” but There you are.

As if he couldn’t go on until I arrived.

As if he’d have waited forever, but is so happy he won’t have to.

“In the flesh.” I smile back, and what possesses me I cannot say, but right there, four feet away from him and closing in, I spin on the toe of my flats. Just once.

I am not a girl for cutesy. I am not a girl for foundation on school days or mascara on weekends or fingernails that hamper typing. But here, in the hallway, this guy who leans on my locker like he owns that space—like he belongs in my world—has inspired me to whimsy.

He laughs at my twirl, his head thrown back slightly, a strand of his bangs falling down into his eyes. I reach up before my brain can stop my arm and tuck it back into the pile.

“You needed to see me?”

He nods, and exhales like he’s got something important to say—something he’s worried about. “Wanted to ask you a question,” he says, then bites his lip.

“Shoot.”

He glances over my head with a little boy’s shy smile and a squirm I remember seeing a long time ago.

“I don’t wanna mess anything up,” he says softly.

When I hear those words, I know for certain that things have been different since September. It wasn’t a figment of my imagination. My fingers tremble just a little as I rest my hand on his chest. “You can’t mess up what’s already changed.”

His whole body relaxes and he wraps his hand around mine, holding it there over his heart. I recognize this feeling. It’s the same one from the other night, when he leaned his forehead against mine. The air is thick with meaning. Ripe with possibility.

Finally, he breaks the silence. “Will you go to the Spring Fling with me?”

“As . . . friends?”

He shakes his head. “As more than friends.”

I squeeze his hand harder—partially from excitement, partially to stay upright.

“Wanted to ask you at Dooney’s party,” he says, “but I chickened out.”

I nod without taking my eyes from his. I didn’t just imagine that moment. He felt it, too. “Probably better this way, ’cause, you know, now I’m not . . . wasted.”

He laughs, that easy, quiet huff from earlier in geology, a laugh that you only notice if you’re watching. “Yeah. I didn’t know if you really felt this way or if . . . you know—”

“It was the Cabo Wabo?”

He nods.

Without moving my hand from his, I straighten up, shoulders back, all business. “Ben Cody, I, Kate Weston, being stone-cold sober, will hereby accompany you to the Spring Fling.” I move my other hand up to his cheek, and whisper, “And anywhere else you want to go.”

When you have an unexpected crush on your childhood best friend, you spend a lot of time imagining the way you might kiss him one day. The fantasies I entertained of this moment were ridiculous clichés, based on movies and TV shows and the romance novels I used to find in the pool clubhouse at Grandma Clark’s condo. These scenarios often involved a helicopter over the Grand Canyon, a ski lift in Colorado, the top of the Eiffel Tower amid fireworks, or an unspecified beach in California.