Perfect Couple

by Jennifer Echols

  “Smart,” he said. “Do we have to eat our own cupcake?”

  “That was the idea, yeah.”

  “Because some guy’s going to ask if he can eat your cupcake, Harper.”

  I nearly choked on the icing. After swallowing, I said, “I figured Sawyer might say that. I’ve done some deep-breathing exercises, and I’m okay with it.”

  “Sawyer isn’t the only person here with a dirty mind.” Brody licked his icing. I watched his mouth.

  Sawyer walked over. I’d stopped at the bakery that morning and bought him a vegan muffin, since vegan cupcakes were not in my repertoire. He was stuffing the last of it into his mouth. “Quinn,” he called, “didn’t you date Harper last year?”

  “Here it comes.” Quinn rolled his eyes. His thick black eyeliner made the whites of his eyes more pronounced.

  “And, Noah,” Sawyer continued, “didn’t you date Harper last spring?”

  “Fuck you, De Luca,” Noah said softly enough that Ms. Patel couldn’t hear by the window.

  “What does that say about the guy Harper’s dating now? What’s his name, again, the one with the rad pierced eyebrow?” Sawyer snapped his fingers a couple of times close to Kennedy, who hadn’t moved from the desk by the door. “I can’t ever remember that guy’s name.”

  “This is the joke you came up with?” Brody asked.

  “I haven’t had time!” Sawyer protested. “And you! Be careful about this Perfect Couple That Never Was thing, Larson. Harper obviously has a way with guys.”

  “Here’s what I’m going to do to you in PE,” Brody told Sawyer. “Should I say this now, or do you want me to surprise you?”

  The bell rang.

  Most of the class moved toward the door, their minds already off Quinn and Noah and on lunch. A couple of girls looked over their shoulders, smiling, and said a few encouraging words to Noah and Quinn, who were talking with Ms. Patel. Noah put his hand on Quinn’s back. I couldn’t hear what Noah said over the noise of everyone changing classes, but I read his lips as he asked, “Are you okay?” Quinn nodded and relaxed his shoulders, tension released.

  Happy the announcement had gone well, I started to follow Brody back to my desk to pick up my stuff. Kennedy spoke over the noise. “Harper, I need to talk to you.”

  Uh-oh. I hoped he wasn’t sensitive about what Sawyer had said. Heart racing, I sank down in the desk next to his. While we waited for Ms. Patel and the rest of the class to file into the hall, I did my breathing exercises and tried to center myself.

  I managed to calm down quite a bit before Brody passed right in front of me, the last one out the door. My pulse raced again. He looked at me, brows knitted in concern, then at Kennedy, and back at me.

  I gave him the smallest shake of my head, which I hoped Kennedy didn’t see. My message to Brody was that everything was okay, even though I didn’t believe it myself.

  After he left, Kennedy got up, shut the door, and leaned against it with his arms folded, scowling at me. After all my efforts to appease him about my Superlatives photos and his yearbook designs, I was still headed for a weekend of the silent treatment.

  To head him off, I said, “I understand why you’re upset.”

  “I don’t think you do,” he said. “You dated Quinn, then Noah, and now they’re gay? What does that say about me?”

  I wanted to point out that Sawyer had said something similar to Brody, and Brody wasn’t mad. Maybe Brody was more self-confident.

  Maybe Brody wasn’t my boyfriend.

  “I realize it was a surprise,” I said, “but—”

  “You’re damn right it was a surprise!” Kennedy seethed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t give away people’s secrets,” I said. “That’s why Quinn and Noah confided in me in the first place.”

  “Yeah, well, it says a lot about your priorities if you put your two gay friends in front of your boyfriend.”

  “Kennedy,” I said, “I’m not putting them in front of you. This has nothing to do with you.”

  “Really?” he asked. “You can’t turn in your Superlatives photos to me, but you have time to bake cupcakes with pictures for them?”

  “Um.” I didn’t have a response to that. The cupcakes had been important to me. I’d baked them with love for my friends’ important day. Kennedy made them sound stupid.

  “You bring rainbow cupcakes for your last two boyfriends, while your current boyfriend is sitting in the same class,” he said. “Don’t you see how that looks?”

  “Yeah, I get it,” I said softly, without really getting it. “I’m sorry.”

  He shook his head in disgust, focusing his gaze somewhere above my head instead of on me. Abruptly he jerked up his backpack by one strap and opened the door.

  Tia was standing in the hall. Knowing her, she’d had her ear to the door. “Kennedy, we need a word with Harper,” she said, pushing past him into the room.

  “She’ll catch up with you in a minute,” Kaye added, walking in behind Tia.

  “You can have her,” Kennedy snarled. He stormed into the hall and slammed the door.

  3

  TIA AND KAYE STARED WIDE-EYED at me. Finally Kaye said, “Brody came to our table in the lunchroom and told us Quinn is gay? And Noah is gay? And Kennedy is mad ? Brody asked us to check on you.”

  Brody had asked my friends to check on me! If I’d been by myself, I would have replayed this in my mind like the best ending to a feel-good movie. As it was, I didn’t want Kaye and Tia to know how far gone I was for the unattainable Brody. I said only, “It’s been an interesting study hall.”

  “Cupcakes!” Tia hopped up to sit on Ms. Patel’s desk. Crossing her long legs at the ankles, she reached into the container.

  “You can have those,” I offered, as if I could have stopped her anyway.

  She held up the two remaining. “Harper, you made coming-out cupcakes?”

  “You’re adorable,” Kaye said.

  “I don’t feel adorable,” I grumbled.

  “Do you want Kennedy or Shelley Stearns?” Tia asked Kaye. I’d forgotten Shelley had gone to her grandmom’s in Miami for the long holiday weekend.

  “Shelley,” Kaye said.

  Tia examined both cupcakes up close. “No, I want her,” she said. “I don’t want to eat Kennedy.”

  “It’s only a cupcake topper,” Kaye said.

  “Then you eat him,” Tia said.

  Exasperated, Kaye flung out her hand for the cupcake. She examined the topper, murmured, “Cute,” licked the icing off the pick, and tossed Kennedy into the trash can. She slid onto the desk beside Tia and elbowed her to make her scoot over. “So, Harper, you knew about Quinn and Noah all along? And you never told anybody, even us! You sneaky mouse.”

  I moved my own half-eaten cupcake to the far corner of my desk. I’d lost my appetite. “Remember I had a crush on Quinn last year? He wasn’t dating anyone that we knew of, and we couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t ask me out. You both kept telling me to ask him on a date.”

  They nodded slowly. They didn’t look quite as confident as they had when they burst into the room. Obviously they were second-guessing their advice that I pursue Quinn.

  “I did,” I said. “I told you that part. Here’s the part I didn’t tell you. He came out to me. He wasn’t ready to tell everybody. He was afraid of what his parents would do, judging from how they freaked when he dyed his hair black. But he knew some people at school were talking about him and wondering whether he was gay.”

  Tia nodded. Kaye said, “I’d heard that.”

  “Sawyer told me,” Tia said.

  “How did Sawyer know?” Kaye asked. “Surely Quinn didn’t tell him.”

  “Sawyer just knows things,” Tia said.

  I explained, “Quinn asked me if we could go out a few times as friends but say we were dating, to get people off his back.”

  “And you said yes?” Kaye was livid. “Harper, we had that talk about people taking advantage of y
ou.”

  “It was fine!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t mind.”

  “And then you did the same thing for Noah?” Tia asked.

  “No, Noah asked me on a date himself. Remember how excited I was? I’d wondered why a football player would want to date me. And then he came out to me.”

  “Oh,” Tia and Kaye cooed sympathetically at the same time. They were right to feel sorry for me. I’d been devastated when Noah told me the truth. In fact, I’d been so taken with him, and the feel of his huge arm curving around me, that he’d set the stage for my daydreams about another football player.

  But this was exactly what I hadn’t wanted. The more people felt sorry for me, the smaller I felt.

  “And then you got the two of them together,” Kaye said. “That’s so sweet!”

  “No,” I said. “They both swore me to secrecy. Ms. Chen outed them to each other by mistake.” I told Kaye and Tia the boys’ story about the Perfect Couple vote. “I’m just glad they’re happy.”

  “So why’s Kennedy mad at you?” Tia asked. “Other than the fact that he’s always mad at you lately?”

  I winced. It was true, but coming from Tia, the truth was especially blunt.

  “Sawyer made a joke about me dating gay guys. He said Kennedy must be gay too. Also Brody, since the school thinks we’d be perfect together.”

  “Oh my God!” Tia yelled with her mouth full. “Why did Sawyer say that? I’ll kill him.”

  “Nobody cares what Sawyer thinks,” Kaye said between nibbles. “Sawyer’s a pothead.”

  “Not anymore,” Tia corrected her. “He swore it off. He’s turned into a health nut since he passed out on Monday.”

  Kaye tossed her cupcake paper into the trash and placed her fists on her hips, cheerleader style. “Why are you always defending him?”

  “Why are you always so down on him?” Tia turned back to me. “And that’s all Kennedy’s mad about? Sawyer shouldn’t have said it, but Kennedy’s as used to Sawyer’s inappropriate comments as the rest of us. There’s no reason for him to be angry unless he was already sensitive about the subject in the first place. Brody’s not mad.”

  “No, Brody’s not mad,” I acknowledged. “Brody and Noah are best friends, plus Brody’s so happy-go-lucky. Brody . . .”

  Tia and Kaye stared wide-eyed at me again. Any story including Brody was more delicious than cupcakes. I found myself telling them what Brody had said about me to the football team.

  “Oooh, he’s into you,” Kaye said approvingly. She rubbed her hands together. “Intrigue!”

  “Perfect Coupling?” Tia puzzled through Brody’s joke. “Like you’re a piece of PVC pipe and he’s an elbow joint?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think it was all that sexy either.” Actually, I did, but I couldn’t admit this. “I confronted him about it, and he said he blurted it out when the team teased him about the Perfect Couple title. Who’d you vote for?” I’d been wanting to ask them this for a while.

  “I voted for you!” Kaye told me triumphantly.

  “And Brody?”

  “Oh, God, no! You and Evan Fielding. He looks so cute in his plaid hat, like an old man. You’re both so retro.”

  Wearing an old man’s hat was the most interesting thing I’d seen Evan do. He was in my journalism class, and when we brainstormed ideas for the yearbook, he never uttered a peep. I’d been partnered with him a couple of times and ended up doing most of the work myself because I’d expected he would let me down. This was the guy one of my best friends thought was my perfect match?

  Kaye read the look on my face. “Only because of his hat,” she backtracked.

  “Why are you curious?” Tia asked me. “You’re dying to know why so many people paired you with Brody, aren’t you?”

  “Nooooo.” I tried to brush it off. “I have a boyfriend. Brody has a girlfriend. Being elected together is a big joke between us.”

  But joke or not, sometime in the next two weeks, we would have to take our yearbook picture together. And during that short interlude, at least on my end, our relationship would be dead serious.

  * * *

  I wished I could have hung with Kaye and Tia at the football game that night. But Tia stood next to Will in the drum section of the marching band. Kaye was on the sidelines with the other cheerleaders, including Brody’s glamorous girlfriend, Grace. I braved the sidelines all by myself to shoot the game.

  Though I was a bit unclear on the rules, I’d always enjoyed football games. I loved the band music, the screams of the crowd and the cheerleaders, and the charged atmosphere. And though I feared for my life a couple of times when huge guys in helmets and pads hurtled toward me, the danger seemed worthwhile after I got some great shots of our players.

  That is, I got some great shots of Brody. In the third quarter, our defense recovered a fumble and returned the ball all the way to the end zone for a touchdown. I missed the entire thing because I was pretending to take pictures of our team watching from the sidelines. Really, I’d zoomed in on Brody, whose helmet was off. He’d pulled his long, wet hair out of his eyes with a band. And he had no idea he was in my lens. He focused on the action on the field and screamed his heart out for his friends on the defensive line.

  In the fourth quarter, Sawyer, dressed as the pelican mascot, came marching jauntily toward me. He picked up his knees and big bird feet high with every step, swinging his feathery elbows. I hoped he hadn’t caught me gazing wistfully at Brody. I wasn’t sure how well he could see out of the enormous bird head he was wearing. If he’d noticed my moony stare, he would make fun of me for it.

  He put his wing around me.

  I glared up at him.

  He turned his huge head to look at me, too. His fuzz-covered beak hit me in the eye.

  “Get your wing off me,” I said, moving out from under his arm.

  He put his hands on his padded bird hips and stomped his foot like he wanted to know why.

  “You have a lot of nerve, bird,” I said. “Quinn and Noah were so brave today, but you had to take a jab at them, and at Kennedy and Brody and me. As if people can be turned gay! Now Kennedy is mad at me because of what you said.”

  Sawyer shrugged.

  “I know you don’t like Kennedy, but he’s my boyfriend!”

  He opened his hands, pleading with me.

  “Sure, you didn’t mean it. That’s the problem. If a joke is funny, you’ll go ahead and blurt it out, whether it hurts somebody or not.”

  He bowed his head, and his shoulders slumped. He was sorry.

  “I don’t care,” I said. “Go away.”

  He got down on his knees and clasped his hands, begging me.

  “No,” I said. “You deserve to sweat it for a while.” Instantly I felt bad for the way I’d phrased this. He had fainted from heat exhaustion four days earlier, and he was probably dying in that getup. The night was at least eighty degrees.

  He didn’t take offense, apparently. He wrapped both wings around my leg.

  I tried to step backward, out of his grasp. He held on tightly. His wings were at my knee, dangerously close to pushing my dress up higher than I’d wanted to hike it in front of five thousand people.

  I glanced up at the student section. Kennedy pointed at me and laughed to everyone around him.

  Imagining the only thing worse that could happen, I looked over at the team. Sure enough, Brody was watching us too. Suddenly, his friends slugging it out on the defensive line weren’t as interesting to him. Shouldn’t he be watching the game?

  He raised one eyebrow at me.

  I protected myself with the only weapon I had. I leaned way back, focused my camera, and snapped a photo of Sawyer’s looming bird head, with Brody grinning in the background. The whole episode was so mortifying that I doubted I would find it funny by the end of the school year or when I was in college or by the time I turned thirty, but maybe I could laugh about it before I died.

  “Hey!” Kaye came up behind Sawyer and slapped him on the back
of his bird head. He spent PE with the cheerleaders. I guessed he and Kaye had been around each other enough, and he’d annoyed her enough, that she knew how to whap him in costume without hurting him. Or maybe she’d wanted it to hurt.

  At any rate, he felt it. He let go of me and made a grab for her. She took off down the sidelines, behind the football team. He ran after her. All this happened so fast that I didn’t even get a picture.

  After we won the game, and the team and coaches and cheerleaders and Sawyer had surged onto the field for a group hug on the fifty-yard line, I watched Brody walk toward the stadium exit with Noah. The newspaper had said this would be a great season for the team and for Brody, but his talk with Noah looked way too serious for two friends who’d just won their first game.

  I was thinking so hard about what could be wrong that it took me a few seconds to notice Brody was waving at me. By the time I waved back, he’d given up waggling his fingers and was making big motions with both arms like he was adrift at sea and trying to hail a Coast Guard helicopter. Then he resumed his solemn confab with Noah. I watched them until they’d wearily climbed the stairs and disappeared through the gate.

  That was the highlight of my night. Afterward, I met my friends from journalism class at the Crab Lab, but Kennedy was still giving me the silent treatment. He didn’t offer me an angry word or even look at me the whole time. He just sat in a two-person booth and had an in-depth discussion about yearbook design with the sports section editor. A couple of times I overheard him pointedly say that placing pictures at an angle was a great way to vary the pages.

  He was leaving the next morning to visit his cousins in Orlando and wouldn’t be back until Sunday night. I wanted to make up with him so the fight didn’t hang over our heads and tarnish the Labor Day weekend. But since he was still ignoring me, I knew he wasn’t ready to kiss and make up. I didn’t order any food, and I left a few minutes later. I had a lot of stuff to do at home.

  I worked most of Saturday and Sunday. My friends were tied up, anyway. Kaye had a family reunion. Tia’s dad was about to buy a fixer-upper mansion, and she was helping him get the house they lived in ready to sell.