Shine - Lauren Myracle [21]
Patrick didn’t understand. He thought I was avoiding him on purpose, because of something he did.
Not true. I just didn’t know how to explain what was going on inside me. Finally, after I’d shrugged and toed the ground and made too many excuses for not doing this or that with him, he asked me flat-out what was up. He biked over one day in July and knocked on our door, and when I slipped out back to escape, he came around the house and found me.
“There you are,” he said with a strained smile. He tried to act casual, but his muscles were jumpy. “Want to ride into town and get a milkshake?”
In town, there would be people. In town, I could run into Tommy. My mouth went dry, and I said, “Thanks . . . but nah.”
“Why not?” He waggled his eyebrows to be funny. “It’d be my treat.”
“It’s too hot,” I said. “It’s too hot to even move.”
“Ah, but that’s where the milkshake comes in.” He stepped closer, and I took a step backward. I didn’t mean to. I would have done the same no matter who it was.
“Did I do something?” Patrick said. “Whatever I did, just tell me. And . . . I’m sorry, Cat. I swear.”
“Please, just go,” I whispered. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t bear it that he was apologizing just in case he’d accidentally hurt my feelings. “You didn’t do anything. I’m just tired.”
He stood there. He was a person, and my friend, yet what I saw from under my eyelashes was a dark shadow that only made me feel bad. I wanted that shadow gone.
“You’re just tired,” he repeated.
“Yes, I’m tired.” Irritation crept in, or desperation. “Really tired, and I don’t want to go on a bike ride. Okay?”
I succeeded in wounding him, but he wasn’t one to act needy. That was never his style. “Yeah, whatever,” he said, and he took off. I didn’t see him again until the first day of ninth grade.
With nothing and no one left to distract me, I spent the rest of that miserable summer going from anger to humiliation to wondering if I had it all wrong. What if Tommy liked me, and he’d just been too much of a boy before I was enough of a girl to handle it? What if he ended up being my boyfriend once I learned the rules of how a girl was supposed to be?
I tried to convince myself that things would be better when school started. I’d be a freshman, taking the bus every day to Toomsboro High School. Tommy, as a junior, would never lower himself to taking the bus, not when he could ride his BMW. He called it his crotch rocket, which I thought was gross, but at least it meant I wouldn’t be trapped with him for twenty minutes every morning.
I wouldn’t be hanging with Patrick, either. Mama Sweetie liked driving him into town herself.
When the first day of school arrived at last, I was a wreck. I stepped off the bus at the high school—a thousand times bigger than Black Creek’s combined elementary and middle schools—and focused on not getting lost, not falling on my butt, and not doing something randomly embarrassing that would identify me as a backwoods hick.
But Tommy was always in the back of my mind.
I saw him before he saw me. He was in the hall, shooting the breeze with a couple of his football buddies. The sight of his broad shoulders and easy slouch made it hard to breathe, and I thought, Well, and why not just head on to your first class now.
But I didn’t, due to a distraction at the end of the hall. It was Patrick, strolling into the fancy townie high school in his orangish red pants. Surrounded by jeans, jeans, and more jeans, his orange pants were a beacon signifying disaster.
Did he wear those pants on the first day of school for a reason? He must have, because pants like that were a statement. He knew they’d draw attention.
Was it his brazen, goofy way of saying, “Yep, this is me! Hellooooo, high school!” Or was he possibly—oh, it