My English teacher, Ms. Erickson, glared at the class over the tops of her pointy glasses. “Whose cell phone is that? Please bring it to my desk.”
“It’s mine,” I blurted out. Around the room, I heard snickers and giggles. There was no way I, Max Cantrell, boy voted most likely to drop out of school and become a roadie for the all-girl hard-core band Kittens of Mass Destruction, had a Boyz Be Bad ringtone. But Ms. Erickson didn’t know that.
I slid out of my seat and started making my way to the front. My eyes skimmed across the rows of students, trying to figure out who it was that owed me big-time.
“Max. Now.” Erickson gave me the evil eye. She held out her hand, wiggled her crimson fingernails.
“Coming,” I muttered, shuffling the rest of the way up to her desk. I slipped my cell phone out of the center pocket of my hoodie, double-checked to make sure it was turned off, and slid it in the general direction of Erickson’s outstretched talons.
She grabbed my phone and made a big show of depositing it into the top drawer of her desk. “You can come get it after school,” she said. “You can pick up your detention slip then as well.”
Score. I gave her what I hoped was a look of apathy tinged with frustration and then headed back to my desk.
Parvati tapped me on the shoulder. “Smooth,” she whispered.
I peeked back at her. “You have no idea.”
She winked. “Oh, but I do.”
Resting my head on my desk, I let Erickson’s nasal voice fade into the background. I played with the shark’s tooth pendant I wore on a leather cord around my neck, poking the sharp point into the fleshy pad of my fingertip. The necklace was a gift from my real dad. It wasn’t really my style, but it was all I had left from him and I only took it off to shower and surf. He had been an oceanography professor at UCLA and found the tooth when he was scuba diving during a research trip.
Hands went up around me—Erickson must have asked a question. I focused my eyes on the sleeve of my shirt. She called on Parvati, who rattled off the definition of “irony.” What was ironic was that I had to get in trouble to have the thing I wanted most in the world—time with my girlfriend.
I didn’t blame her parents for wanting her to stay away from me. She was smart and rich and pretty, and I was none of those things. We both joked that she had only started dating me to piss them off, but sometimes I wondered if it was true. I was decent-looking, tall and thin, with messy brown hair that managed to look cool even right when I rolled out of bed, but I wasn’t the kind of guy that girls drew hearts around in the yearbook.
Parvati was gorgeous, though, with skin the color of almonds and eyes so dark that her irises receded into her pupils. She had hacked her waist-length, inky black hair to just above her shoulders at the end of the summer. Sometimes I pretended to miss it—I mean, long hair is totally hot—but the shorter cut fit her feisty personality. She refused to be the half-Indian Barbie her mother wanted her to be.
I imagined burying my face in what was left of her hair, tracing her pillowy lips with my fingers, inhaling the scent of her vanilla perfume. My brain wanted to take things further. Parvati and I hadn’t had sex in almost a month, since the Colonel caught us in the family hot tub, called me a despicable little shit, and told me if I ever came back he would kill me. Slowly.
The bell rang and I sat up with a start. Lunch. Parvati was deep in conversation with the girl sitting next to her. “Newspaper stuff,” she mouthed, scribbling something in the sticker-covered mini-notebook she carried everywhere with her.
“I’ll save you a chair,” I said. It was our little joke. Half the school would have killed for our seats in the cafeteria, but no one ever took them. You needed an invitation to sit with the Vista Palisades All-Stars, at the long table right in the middle of the caf. We sat there because we were friends with the school MVP, the football team’s star running back—Preston DeWitt.
I grabbed my books and headed for the hallway. I had barely made it out the door when I felt a hand clamp down on my arm. I looked down. Red fingernails. I turned, expecting to see Ms. Erickson, thinking maybe somehow she had figured out I lied about my phone. But it was Cassie Rhodes, first-team all-American breaststroke champion. (At least that’s what her T-shirt said.)
I pulled loose from Cassie’s formidable grip and gave her a look. I didn’t think she’d ever spoken to me before.
“Max, right?” she said.
“Yeah. So?” I looked down at her arm again. She had the muscles of a marine. I knew swimming was good exercise, but damn.
“How much do you want?”
I glanced up, thinking maybe I could figure out what she was talking about by her expression. No luck. “What do you mean?”
“For taking my detention.”
Oh. That. I imagined Parvati and me parked at the beach overlook, our hands all over each other. If Cassie only knew.
She pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse and slipped it into my fingers. “I would have missed our semifinal meet. You totally saved us. I never would have guessed you were a girls’ swimming fan.”
“Yeah, well, go team, you know?” I slid the folded bill into the pocket of my hoodie. “Thanks.” I hadn’t given a surfing lesson since September, so money was tight. Besides, Cassie could afford it.
She leaned over and gave me a half hug. She smelled like a whole freaking garden of flowers. I hoped Parvati wasn’t lingering nearby watching this. She could be a little jealous sometimes.
“Talk to you later.” I sneezed. Pretty sure I’m allergic to flowers.
“For sure.” Cassie flashed a smile that could’ve been the “after” picture in a tooth whitening commercial. The fluorescent lights reflected off her shiny lip gloss, the whole effect nearly blinding me.
I turned away and strolled down to the cafeteria, thinking about the best way to spend twenty bucks. Grabbing the least toxic-looking things from the hot lunch line—a chicken sandwich, a basket of limp french fries, and a chocolate chip cookie—I headed toward my seat.
Parvati and Preston were already at the table. So were a few guys from the football team, some guy from the tennis team who’d won a couple matches at Junior Wimbledon, and pom-pom captain, Astrid Covington, and her friends. None of them even looked up when I sat down. They were used to having me there, Preston’s outcast playmate. They probably thought I was his drug dealer or something.