“You look like your head is going to explode.” Porter jarred me from my private mental tirade—an impudent smirk materialized on his lips. “Have I offended you in some way?”
“No,” I blurted, clearly indicating that the exact opposite was true. Was he screwing with me? I narrowed my eyes at him. It felt like he was screwing with me.
Porter sat up straighter in his chair and looked at his hand that had now stopped drumming the desk. “You were right; you do have a bad temper.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“Yes, but I’m labeled and filed. You’re allowed to just prowl around in the general population.”
“I’ve never tried to bash someone’s brains inside out.”
He turned his head and his eyes met mine. “Maybe not physically.”
Speechless was not a state I typically found myself in. Thankfully, after seconds of painful silence, Mr. T wandered over and clapped his hands.
“So”—he looked from me, to Porter, then back to me—“we all set here?”
“Yep,” Porter announced for us both and grinned. “We just love group work.”
I could tell from Mr. T’s amused expression that he didn’t believe this for a second, but he smiled big anyway and said, “Perfect!” He pulled a chair up between us, turned it around, and then straddled it with his arms resting across the back. “Here’s what I want you to do.”
“What if he freaks out and stabs you?” Eli asked me at lunch.
I pulled my eyes away from Porter, who I just realized I had been staring at, and gave Eli a dirty look. “That’s just perfect. Thanks for planting that seed in my head.”
“I’m serious.” He glanced at Porter, who had again devoured his entirely inedible school lunch and was now leaned back in his chair flipping through a thick binder that looked like it held a thousand pieces of paper. “Does Mr. T seriously expect you to work one-on-one with a sociopath?”
Just then, I noticed Bella Blake and her friends noticing Eli and me looking at Porter. When we made eye contact, they looked away. But it was too late; the damage had been done. “Stop staring at him,” I hissed at Eli. “The whole fricking school thinks I’m in love with the guy.”
“Fricking?” Eli asked.
“What?”
“Since when do you say ‘fricking’?”
“I’m trying not to cuss so much.”
“Since when?”
“Since right now, asshole.”
Eli smiled at me and nodded, as if all were right with the world just so long as there was evidence to refute my ability to ever stop being crass. “Okay, no cussing for you. Got it. And you are in love with him. You might as well just stop trying to fight it,” he teased. “Let the whole world know how you truly feel . . . go ahead and stare at the man you love,” he finished with a flourish.
I reached over and pinched his waist, hard, under the table.
“Ow!” he shouted, and jumped away. “That hurt.”
“Good. Quit trying to be a comedian.”
Eli rubbed his side. “You’re mean.”
Just then, Porter stood up and waved to Henry. “What is he doing?” I asked.
“Looks like lover is getting ready to bail again.”
I shook my head, incredulous. “We’re supposed to meet after school today to start our stupid project.”
“Maybe he’ll come back.”
“He never comes back,” I said, getting up as well.
“Where are you going?” Eli asked.
“To make sure I don’t get screwed over.” Porter didn’t want to just let me handle the work—fine. But I wasn’t going to be sitting around for hours in the library waiting for him to show up either. As I rushed toward the doors to catch up with him, I caught Bella’s table all giving me furtive looks and smirking.
“My God, get a life,” I said as I passed them.
Darren flipped me off, but I ignored him. I didn’t have time right now to comment on his stunning capacity for communication.
By the time I reached the courtyard, Porter was already halfway across the parking lot. His long legs meant he moved fast, especially considering he didn’t want to get caught. I picked up the pace, hoping to at least get up the hill before he disappeared onto the street. By the time I made it to the top of the grassy hill, my heart was pounding and I was out of breath. It occurred to me that I was so totally out of shape. I bent over to catch my breath and watched Porter get even farther away.
“Hey!” I tried to shout, but he either didn’t hear me or was completely ignoring me. I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching or listening to me make a complete ass of myself—thankfully, only a few people had come outside yet and they were busy listening to their music on the far side of the yard.
When I turned back, Porter was already dodging traffic and crossing the street.
Damn. I stood at the curb lining the grass, the concrete demarcation between “technically still on school grounds” and “clearly leaving school grounds” and watched Porter take three running strides toward the opposite sidewalk to avoid getting hit by a speeding Prius.
Every second I hesitated, he got farther away.
Impulsive decisions: I didn’t make them. But I took a step anyway. Then I took another, and another, and before I realized I was actually leaving school, and breaking school rules, I was running across the parking lot, into the street, and onto the sidewalk that, if I didn’t die of a heart attack first, would hopefully lead me to Porter.
CHAPTER SIX
Even running, I didn’t have a chance in hell of catching up with him. I was a sprinting mouse trying to run down a slow, loping giraffe. He had physical advantages I couldn’t compete with. And the fact that I never, ever, engaged in any kind of physical activity was not much of a help.
I promised myself that if this stupidly impulsive adventure didn’t leave me mortally wounded from an exploded chest cavity, I would start using the dusty treadmill in our basement. Even smart girls should be able to run a few blocks without causing internal bleeding.
Once we were out of view of the school, it seemed like Porter slowed his pace a bit, and after another block, he stopped altogether near a small park with dead winter grass. I actually started to gain on him a bit.
The realization that I might actually catch him sent a nervous rush through my body. What exactly was I planning on doing? Hauling him back to school? Interrogating him on the street? How crazed did I actually look, running him down to . . . what?
What the hell was I thinking?
What would Porter think?
I stopped, suddenly hyper self-conscious in a way I never, ever was. Since when did I care what some guy from school thought? Next to me, I caught sight of my reflection in a large tinted plate-glass window. My hair was wild and my face looked desperate in a physically injured way. If I had been able to see any color in that reflection, I knew my whole head would be flushed a deep, deep crimson from running.
I stepped away, worried that maybe there was someone on the other side of the dark tint watching me disapprove of myself and getting a huge laugh at my expense. I should turn around and head straight back to school before anyone even realized I had left. It probably wasn’t too late. Just stroll across the parking lot, back to the yard, and rejoin everyone else waiting for the fourth-hour bell to ring.
That’s what I would do.
Except, just then, Porter Creed turned his head and saw me standing there, and he started to walk back up the street toward me.
I froze to the spot, right next to the large windows that undoubtedly hid the audience amused by my shame.
This was such a stupid idea.
Wait, this was not a stupid idea at all—that was giving myself way too much credit, because none of this had been an idea in the first place. No, this hot mess of embarrassing idiocy was a headlong, impulsive, rush toward God knows what.
And the what was actually a who and the who was an angry-looking Porter Creed, wh
o was now standing right in front of me.
“Are you following me?” he asked.
I was so obviously following him I couldn’t think of a single reasonable thing to say. So instead I said, “You’re not supposed to leave school grounds.”
Porter looked over my head and all around us, like maybe I had a secret camera crew in tow and we were busting him for News @ Nine. “What are you, some kind of vigilante hall monitor?”
“No, but I am your calc partner and we are supposed to meet after school today to get started.” This, I felt, at least made some sort of rational sense.
Porter lifted his wrist and looked at his watch, “Am I missing something? It’s not after school yet.”
“But you won’t come back.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you never do!” Which was totally true, but I totally wished I could take the statement back, because now Porter Creed knew—
“What, you track my comings and goings?”
“No, but . . .” But what? “But you never do and it’s not like I didn’t offer to do all the work but you’re the one who has the problem with that so if you want to work on this as a team . . . then I need to know you’re going to actually be there!”
Porter, who towered over me by probably an entire foot, just stared at me with those deep, deep eyes. I expected him to maybe yell back, but instead, he let out a shaky sigh and ran his hand through his hair in a way that made it stick up on the side.
Right then, standing there, watching his eyes shift to the street while he tried to think of something to say, a startling realization pushed all my annoyance into an insignificant ball and shoved it to a corner of my racing brain. My heart still hammered like mad. It had started first because of the running. It had continued when I got mad. But now, now I realized—it was hammering simply because Porter Creed was standing in front of me. Shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans, looking not at all like a crazed psycho. He looked completely vulnerable.
When he returned his eyes to mine, my heart pumped so hard it sent a shivery wave of discovery that started in my chest and rode on a current through every nerve ending until it reached the tips of my fingers and the ends of my toes. The feeling was so intense, I had to look away from him. My eyes found a spot of dirty black gum to stare at on the concrete instead.
“You’re right,” he said. “I wasn’t going to come back.”
I just nodded and kept my eyes low, suddenly afraid that if I dared to look up, he would be able to read what was happening inside of me written all over my traitorous face. I should say something. Acknowledge his acknowledgment—somehow. Except, just then, just when I really, really needed it, my normally oceanic-size vocabulary seemed to have dried up to the point of extinction. All that was left flopping on the dry sand of my cognitive resources was, “Yeah, well . . . okay.”
My God! Did physical attraction to another human being reduce me to this? “Well?” I managed to ask. “Are you going to come back with me now?”
Porter looked at his watch again. “No.” He shrugged. “And I don’t think you’ll want to either. Fourth-hour already started.”
“What?” I reached for my phone in my back pocket and saw two things. First, the time, which absolutely confirmed that Porter was right. I had missed the start of my fourth-hour class—I was officially truant. Second, there were about a million text messages from Eli, each one more alarmed, distressed, and CAPITALIZED than the last.
“Shit,” I whispered, and looked up at Porter who actually, amazingly, looked somewhat sympathetic. “What am I supposed to do now?”
Porter shrugged. “I go to the library a lot.”
“You ditch school so you can go to the library?”
He didn’t answer me, just waited for me to decide what I was going to do. Was I going to go back to school, face security, face the attendance clerk, and face an afternoon of detention—or was I going to walk another three blocks with Porter to the city library and worry about all the rest of it later?
“We could actually start working on that calc project,” he suggested.
We were ditching school to work on school work—it wasn’t exciting, it was unlikely I would end up drunk in a basement and tattooed with pink hair, but it made me feel better. Sort of like we weren’t really ditching at all, just working remotely. “Okay,” I nodded. “Let’s do that then,” my tone was super grave, like I just found out I had some incurable disease.
Porter stared at me like he was observing some undiscovered freak of nature. “Have you seriously never ditched school?”
We started walking. The wind had picked up, and I was starting to feel cold because I had rushed out of the cafeteria in January without my sweatshirt—or anything else, I realized. I had left my bag and all its contents right there at the table next to Eli. “I don’t even stay home when I’m sick.”
Porter laughed, and without even asking, slipped first one arm and then the next out of his severely beaten leather bomber jacket and handed it to me.
Not understanding what he was doing, I looked first at it and then at him while we walked and he continued to hold the jacket between us.
“You look cold,” he explained.
“Oh!” I took it from him and hesitated—the rough looking leather was actually super soft in my hands—before putting my arms through the sleeves that hung way past the tips of my fingers. The inside of the jacket had a quilted liner that was still warm from Porter’s body. “Thanks,” I said. I watched him nod, shove his hands in his jean’s pockets, and raise his shoulders against the cold.
No boy, not even Eli, had ever offered me their coat before. As much as I hated to admit it, as we walked that last block, side by side, it felt really good to be wearing it—and somewhere inside me I realized, it wasn’t just because it was warm.
When we reached the stone steps to the library, Porter leaped up them two at a time ahead of me, pulled open the door, then stood holding it for me until I caught up.
“Thanks,” I said.
The library had a double set of doors, so I reached for the second set but Porter moved fast around me and took the door handle from me. Because I wasn’t expecting it, the whole exchange was sort of awkward, me reaching, him reaching, me moving out of the way, me saying, “Thank you,” again, even though I just said it.
Both of us not looking the other one in the eye.
God, maybe I should have gone back to school and taken the detention.
“There are some tables on the second floor that I usually use. No one else really knows they’re there.”
I nodded. We were here to work on our project, even though I didn’t have anything with me. How exactly was I planning on getting anything done, I wondered. Porter’s coat sleeves slipped over my hands again, and the thought occurred to me that I should probably give it back to him now that we were inside.
But I didn’t.
I followed him to the back of the first floor toward the staircase. “I don’t have any of my things,” I whispered.
Porter turned around and inspected me, then shrugged. “We’ll plan it out for now,” he explained, and then looked at his watch again before heading up the marble stairs. He didn’t race up these, maybe because we were inside the library instead of outside. As his feet climbed each step in front of me I noticed the bottom of his left shoe had a flap of the rubber sole that was peeling away. Actually, now that I was looking closely, both of his shoes were so tattered and worn, they looked like they might completely fall off his feet at any moment.
And the collar of his T-shirt, I noticed, the ribbed collar was separating from the rest of the shirt at the base of his neck. A thin sliver of his skin showed through the hole. I looked away quickly, like I had seen something I wasn’t supposed to. When we reached the top of the stairs I slid off his coat and handed it back to him. “Thanks again,” I said. “Sorry if you were cold.”
He shrugged and held the coat like is was a stray animal in
one hand.
What was I doing here?
When we reached the table, Porter let his backpack slide off his shoulder and I took my phone from my back pocket. There were five more text messages from Eli, who was now in full-blown emergency mode and threatening to go and get my mother if I didn’t—!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!TEXT ME BACK RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Crap,” I said, and started typing.
“Everything okay?”
“Yes—no. I don’t know.” A nervous dread filled me as I finally responded to Eli and told him I was fine and that I would meet up with him after school and tell him everything. Also, did he happen to pick up my stuff from the cafeteria?
YES! AND THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME KNOW YOU’RE NOT DEAD. I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!
Sorry! I texted back
“My friend is just worried,” I explained.
Porter raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything. He pulled out his calculus book and a single sheet of crumpled notebook paper that looked like it had been living at the bottom of his bag for weeks. He dug around in his bag some more, pulled out the strange small binder filled with thousands of pages I had seen him with at lunch, a torn manila folder, a broken eraser, and finally stopped when he produced a tiny nub of a pencil that had been sharpened down to about two inches. “Sorry, this is all I have,” he held it up. “Wait!” He got up and left the table. I had no idea where he was going, and he was gone before I thought to ask.
This entire afternoon had me confused and lost—completely adrift from my normal routine. It felt like being inside a strange movie about someone else’s life. I had no idea what might happen next.
I stared at Porter’s giant paper-filled binder and wondered why in the world he would lug such an enormous thing around. It must weigh a ton.
When Porter came back, he was holding a small golf pencil like it was a victory torch. Ah, now I understood. They kept these next to the catalog computers so people could write down the call number for the book they were looking for. “Thanks,” I said. When I took the tiny pencil from him and our fingers brushed against each other, I tried to ignore the electric sensation this insignificant physical contact created in my nervous system.
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