Rough Guy: Providence Prep High School Book 3

by Allen, Jacob

  I actually laughed at that. It was hard to be mad at someone as honest as Samantha—she didn’t even mean it to be mean. She just fucking said it. I had to respect it.

  “And what about your friends?” I said. “There was a big party at the Collins’ house last night. Word on the street was you didn’t show up with Emily and Jackie.”

  “Word on the street? So you didn’t go either.”

  Again, it was less of an accusation and more of a statement of fact.

  “I didn’t get tired of my friends. I love Jackie and Emily, even if they are dumb enough to date your friends. I just got tired of your scene.”

  Again, I laughed. My friends could be pretty dumb.

  “My scene?” I said. “You really think that that is my scene?”

  “Yes?”

  “My scene is not the parties or the drama or any other stupid bullshit the Collins like to enforce and that Kevin likes to carry out,” I said with an eye roll. “Ever notice how I’m just quiet when that shit goes down? It’s because I just don’t care. It’s silly. My scene is the field or the court.”

  “You do care.”

  I care that they notice me.

  “Whatever,” I said. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t get noticed in my scene, so I guess you could say I go to other scenes to get noticed. I’m going to make them all pay for ignoring me, though. You see. I will—”

  “What do you want?”

  I paused mid-sentence, my mouth hanging open, my arms dropping to their sides.

  “Sorry?”

  “You were waiting here like you wanted to say something,” Samantha said. “What did you want? Besides the chance to talk about yourself before me?”

  Wow. I will never get used to this.

  “You seemed to take a strong interest in what was playing on my computer screen,” I said. “I just figured you’d want to know what was on it.”

  “Really,” she said, not believing me in the slightest. “Because you could have said anything at any point in the previous two hours, and yet you waited for me when you, I guess, heard me leaving. So what do you want?”

  I sighed. I guess there was no use bullshitting when a person didn’t have the social graces to be bullshitted. It was less that she was skilled at picking apart dubious arguments than she was just ignoring normal conversation conventions.

  “I just wanted to talk to someone,” I said. “I didn’t think that someone would want to call me a poor athlete as well, though. And I figured since you, too, had your friends blinded by the love bug, you’d appreciate talking to me.”

  Samantha didn’t change her expression at all, which was unnerving in its own way. She could go from awkwardly laughing at things no one else would dare to laugh at to deathly staring at moments when anyone else would have at least humored someone with a chuckle. I swore, trying to predict what that girl would do was impossible; the normal rules of conversation and engagement just didn’t apply to her.

  “Really,” she finally said. “You think that because your friends and my friends hooked up that we could talk?”

  “Well, what, you think I’m going to fall in love with you?” I snorted. “We would not work, and I’ve never thought of if we would work. I just thought I was being nice by offering you the chance to talk to someone in a similar spot as you.”

  Samantha slightly recoiled at that, as if I’d said her dog was ugly.

  “We’re not even friends, I’m not even trying to offer that,” I said, but by now, I was getting impatient. “Look, do whatever the fuck you want. I’ve had a shitty senior year, and I’ve got about three months left of it. Basketball is becoming a full-on disaster. My friends are focusing on their girlfriends instead of me. You clearly didn’t want to go to the party last night, despite your two closest friends going. I figured someone else in my spot would want to hang out on a lazy Sunday afternoon when she’s not really reading her book.”

  I smirked. Both of us could play her game.

  “OK, why don’t we go chat then?”

  She just played it a little better. Granted, she seemed to have the slightest of smirks on her face, but that was only because of the way her lips curled. Her eyes did not match her smile—it was a weird expression that seemed to suggest the slightest hint of amusement, but not any that she wanted to show. It was, in a phrase, “Samantha enthusiasm,” something that anyone who knew of her knew well.

  “There’s an ice cream place downtown here,” I said. “Not going to Mama’s. Too far away and I don’t feel like taking the risk of watching Adam and Emily make out.”

  Not that I need the reminder of that. Not that I need the reminder that Adam stole a girl I actually treated well away from me.

  Fucking prick. Fucking bitch.

  “OK, that works,” she said. “What’s the place called?”

  “Mike’s Ice Cream,” I said as I started to walk out the door. Strangely, Samantha didn’t follow me. “Are you coming?”

  “Hold on.”

  I didn’t bother to hide my exasperation—I wasn’t hiding a lot these days, honestly—as Samantha searched her phone. I hummed the Jeopardy theme and tapped my foot, but Samantha seemed completely unfazed. How do you get someone to do what you want when the normal means of communicating sarcasm or frustration apparently go completely over their head?

  “Oh, it is a real place,” she said. “I thought you were going to just bullshit.”

  “Now why the fuck would I do that?” I said.

  “Think of it as a precautionary measure.”

  Jesus. What does she think I am, a rapist? It’s a Sunday morning in broad daylight, I couldn’t pull any shit if I wanted to.

  “Alright, let’s go, Miss Cautious.”

  Even with Samantha’s weird need to be protective and verify, though, I couldn’t help but feel a little better that she was coming with me. I really didn’t like her, although that had as much to do with the fact that I had just never looked at her that way. Honestly, most of the time, my eyes had fallen for Emily—which of course meant that fucking Adam had swooped in and claimed her.

  There were parts of Samantha to appreciate. She really was beautiful—maybe not hot, but definitely beautiful—and she definitely was intelligence. No one in the class was smarter than her, but unlike the stereotype of the smart girl who was dorky and unattractive, she could be very attractive. Granted, the stereotype of the smart girl who’s awkward as fuck is accurate here.

  Frankly, this was probably a hang out made out of desperation as much as anything else. I wouldn’t have talked to Samantha if we passed each other in the classroom hall; a mere serendipitous event had brought us together, me desperate to get into athletics, her just being her usual dorky self. If this conversation was even merely amicable and nothing more, that would qualify as something good.

  Hell, something had to be good about this senior year.

  With it being so early in the morning and before the church crowd, we were the only ones in line and just one of two pairs in the entire shop, with the other couple so old that I didn’t think they’d move from their seats for three hours.

  “What do you—”

  But Samantha just ignored me, walking right up to the register and pulling out cash to make it clear she was paying. I wasn’t planning on paying for her, but the fact that she just up and did it… well, fuck. Oh well.

  I got up and ordered a mix of hot sundae and brownie, while she just got vanilla, banana split, and raspberry.

  “You got that?” I said as she sat back down with her cup.

  “Yeah,” she said, as if no one would see anything weird with getting ice cream with such strong contrasting flavors.

  “Huh, OK.”

  I got my ice cream, sat back down, and ignored the confused glance on Samantha’s face. I didn’t need her judgment from her weird world.

  “Nice thing about being here,” I said. “Is we won’t have any chance of running into Adam or Kevin. Or the girls.”

  “Why w
ould that be nice?”

  I took a bite of my ice cream.

  “Aren’t you jealous of what they have?”

  Happiness. Contentment. No longer a rush or a desire to get whatever they want in school?

  “A little,” Samantha said, surprising me. “It’d be nice to have a relationship.”

  I tried to ignore the fact that my stomach, for some reason, fluttered a bit at that. I just chalked it up to the weird spot I was in right now and that Samantha was the one in front of me. The same would have been true if it was Jane, Stephanie, Carrie, or any other number of girls in my class.

  You know that’s not really true.

  “But I’m more looking forward to getting the hell out of here,” she said. “I’m over Providence Prep.”

  “You and me both,” I said with a snort. “Where are you looking to go?”

  “Harvard.”

  I waited for her to punctuate her words with a laugh or a joke. As good as Providence Prep was, no one from our school had gone to Harvard in five years; plenty of kids went to Vanderbilt and Duke, but that was about the highest students typically went as far as rankings go. I think one kid had gone to Dartmouth, but that was about it.

  This girl’s even smarter than I thought.

  “You’re serious.”

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s what I’ve worked for the last four years. I wouldn’t have busted tail if I didn’t think I couldn’t make it.”

  Damn.

  Who would have thought intelligence would look good like that?

  Yeah, my thoughts were perhaps forcing the issue a bit. Perhaps my state of mind made me see Samantha in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise. Maybe after today, when I went back to seeing her in the hallways and nowhere else, I’d forget I’d ever had an attraction to her right now.

  But damnit, she just seemed so sure of herself, so certain… I wanted that. I was jealous of that. I wasn’t jealous of Kevin and Adam getting girlfriends; I was jealous of Samantha feeling so certain about her future that it felt like an inevitability.

  “And you?” she said, volleying the ball back at me with my metaphorical racket down, staring at her in awe. “Where are you looking to go?”

  “I, uhh,” I stammered.

  Shit.

  “Frankly, wherever I can get an athletic scholarship,” I said.

  “Has anyone?”

  “Well, a couple of smaller schools, but those are just partial, and besides…”

  I’d never hear the end of it from my brothers. The ones who actually got scholarships to Vanderbilt and elsewhere. The ones who actually accomplished what I need to do.

  “Why not the Ivies?” she said. “I don’t think they offer scholarships, but—”

  “Funny enough, I did apply to Harvard and Yale for that very reason,” I said. “The coaches both said they’d see if they could get me in. But that’s not my first choice.”

  “Why?”

  Nothing could ever be taken at face value for her, could it? I suppose that was just another sign of her thought process, but damnit, some things just needed to be left alone.

  “Reasons,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  I could feel my temper rising. That was like a ticking bomb that, when it went off, exploded well beyond its expected radius. People who saw me calm and quiet and assumed I couldn’t be an asshole like Kevin and Adam had never seen me angry.

  “Do you really want to know?” I warned. “I’m not sure it’s a topic that I’m particularly keen to get into.”

  “Yes.”

  Goddamnit. How can you stay mad at someone like this?

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said.

  I was finding the feelings in me too confusing to figure out. There was some mixture of FOMO from seeing Kevin and Adam get girls. There was extreme jealousy and a bit of a void from the lack of athletic scholarships that were coming my way. There was the strange sense that I’d found someone who understood me better than others did right now, and that I needed to see what might come with that.

  “Has to do with family stuff,” I added, but I wasn’t going to dare add anything beyond that. “What’s your first choice if not Harvard? Vanderbilt?”

  “God, no,” she said with a laugh. “Probably Yale.”

  “OK, if you’re not going to be a goddess at school,” I said with a smile, something she had no reaction to. “Then where would you go?”

  “Probably UT-Knoxville,” she said with a sigh. “I have a full ride there.”

  “Already?”

  Jesus, who else is getting scholarships that isn’t me? Christ!

  “Yeah, I applied early in the process.”

  I shook my head. Sitting here was getting to be too much.

  “Come on, let’s go walk,” I said. “I need to burn off some energy.”

  “OK…”

  I stood her up and gently put my hand on the small of her back as I led her out the door. It was a small gesture, sure, and it wasn’t one that was going to magically make her like me. I wasn’t even sure I wanted her to like me.

  Fuck, man, my mind was in a weird goddamn place.

  We walked to the edge of the Cumberland River. I put my arm around Samantha. She didn’t react negatively or positively.

  “You know, you’re like me in a lot of ways.”

  What are you doing?

  Ah, fuck it. Just see what happens.

  “Am I?” Samantha said, more of an intellectual question than an emotional one.

  “Oh, yes,” I said with a smile. “We’re both like outsiders in our own friend group. We’re both looking to move away.”

  “That describes our circumstances,” Samantha said. “It doesn’t describe who we are.”

  I was left to stumble over my words. I didn’t know what to say in response to that. She turned and faced me, our eyes locking, a slight smile on her face.

  And in that moment, staring into her beautiful, alluring brown eyes, contrasting strongly against her white skin, I did the only thing that I could think in that moment. I went for the win, the thing that would finally have given me something good my senior year.

  I went for the kiss.

  3

  Samantha

  “What are you doing?”

  I’d had a feeling Nick was flirting with me. I’d had a feeling that there was something going on with him that was going to make him a little more flirtatious with me than usual.

  But I had not had any feeling at all that he was going to try and kiss me. I had to move my cheek toward him at the last second to prevent him from actually—eww—kissing me on the lips. This was so far out of nowhere, it was like I’d been sitting in my math class and gotten a question about “Of Mice and Men.”

  “I’m kissing you, that’s what I’m doing,” he said.

  Instead of getting the hint and stopping what he was doing, he seemed even more emboldened. Now both of his hands were on my shoulders, and he was leaning in again to kiss me.

  I shoved him away, causing him to nearly stumble and lose his balance.

  “Why the hell would you think I’d want to do that?” I said.

  Seriously, what had I done to make him actually believe that was a possibility? I was quite confident that I had done nothing in the last half hour to suggest I was romantically inclined for him. He was handsome, but he was also in some sort of a mood that was as far from attractive as you could ever get, even for someone as awkward as me.

  “I don’t know,” Nick said, seemingly pulling out of his love-drunk stupor. “I… I don’t know.”

  “I’m not about to be the third girl to fall in love, most especially with only a few months before I move away, and most especially with a Broad Street Boy,” I said. “I’ve long suspected that Adam and Kevin are going to do something to Emily and Jackie, you know.”

  “You really think that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “People don’t change. They just morph their colors for the setting they’re in. But t
hey’re still the same person. And even if they have changed, what’s going to happen when they go separate ways? Or they go to different schools? Now is not the time for love. Or sex. Or dating.”

  “But—”

  “No, Nick.”

  I had some sympathy for him. It was lonely being single, especially when it wasn’t just one or two of your friends in relationships but everyone. That was going to be true at 29 just as it was now at 18 years old.

  But that didn’t excuse him making a move that just seemed to come out of nowhere, a move that had me actually shoving him away. It didn’t excuse him just… doing that.

  The best explanation I could come up with was that the feelings of failure and isolation were making him desperate, and I just happened to be the unlucky girl to cross paths with him. Maybe someone smaller, someone less academically focused, someone more prone to falling for a guy’s handsome looks would have kissed him then. I was none of those things, and I wasn’t always convinced that that was for the best.

  “Don’t you feel alone without romance and love?”

  That struck me at the core far deeper than I would have expected. Even as I spoke, I felt like Nick had taken a dagger, plunged it into my heart, and then twisted it.

  “I’d feel more alone with someone pretending to love me.”

  I just said it as a simple statement of fact. I didn’t think that it would have actually left Nick hurt as much as it did. When I actually thought about it, yeah, it probably wasn’t the greatest thing I could have said, but was it wrong?

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, anyways,” Nick growled, staring out over the river. “You and I are going through similar things right now.”

  “No, no we’re not.”

  “OK, fine, you’re not going through the embarrassment of not living up to your brothers, fine.”

  I caught onto that as soon as he said it, but he kept speaking, preventing me from inquiring further on it.

  “But you sure do know what it’s like to have to see all of your friends abandon you to make out. You know what it’s like to be an outsider. You, especially, feel that way.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Nick rolled his eyes. He then reached into his pocket, pulling a bottle out that had a light color to it. It took me half a second to realize it was an airplane-sized bottle of Fireball whiskey.