“That’s not stupid.” Sawyer was grinning. “That’s cool. I want to read it when you’re done.”
I snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious,” Sawyer said, considering. His white T-shirt seemed to glow in the light from the storefronts. “Early graduation, huh?” he asked after a moment. “You’re that desperate to get out of here?”
“No,” I explained, “it’s not that. I mean, of course I’ll miss my family and everybody. I love my family, I just …” I shrugged. I didn’t know how you could explain something like loneliness to someone like Sawyer—the feeling that I had to find something to wrap my hands around, and that whatever it was, it wasn’t here. “There’s not a whole lot for me here, you know?”
Sawyer smiled a bit, unreadable. “So I better hang out with you while I can, is that what you’re saying?”
Which—what? What was going on here? I had no earthly idea what he was after. “Pretty much,” was all I said.
We sat in silence for a little while, watching the cars go by on the highway. I ate my ice cream. I waited. “You’re quiet,” he said eventually.
I considered that for a moment. “Well,” I said, “so are you.”
“Reena.” We were close enough that our arms were touching, warm and the slightest bit sticky with heat. “Why are you here?”
I looked at him sideways. My heart was a foot on a kick drum inside my chest. “You tell me.”
Sawyer shook his head. “I’m serious.”
“Are you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I really am.”
“Sawyer.” I hesitated, blushing. I was ninety percent sure I was completely misunderstanding whatever was happening here. “Look. Allie’s my friend. Or was my friend, at least, and—”
“Don’t you get tired?” he interrupted.
I stopped. “Of what?”
Sawyer shrugged. “Being who everybody thinks you are.”
“What? No.” I shook my head, stalling, and glanced out across the highway at the strip malls and the palm trees. I smelled wet pavement and car exhaust. “Who else would I possibly be?”
Sawyer seemed to know I was faking; he looked at me for a second in a way that made me almost nervous, like he could see the tissue underneath my skin. Fighting the creeping feeling that I was in way, way over my head, I did what any rational human being would do when confronted with a question she didn’t want to answer, by a person she’d had a miserable crush on for two presidential terms:
I nudged my cone right up into his face.
“I’m sorry,” I said immediately, giggling a little hysterically. “Jesus Christ. I’m sorry. I can’t believe I just did that.”
Sawyer stared at me for a second, ice cream smudged over his mouth and his nose. “I … kind of can’t believe you did, either,” he said, but he was laughing. When he put his free hand on the back of my skull and kissed me, I tasted chocolate and rainbow sprinkles. I didn’t even close my eyes.
He pulled back a little bit. “Is it okay that I just did that?” he asked, after a second or two.
I nodded dumbly.
“Did you like it as much as I did?”
I nodded again.
“Are you ever going to talk to me again in your whole life?”
I nodded. “I mean,” I said, recovering slightly, thoughts skittering like moths at the panicky edges of my brain. “Yes.”
Sawyer grinned. “Okay,” he said. He tossed the rest of his ice cream into a nearby trash can and cupped both of his hands around my face. “Good.”
He was still kissing me when his cell phone rang inside his jeans a minute later, and I made to pull away but his grip tightened, a gentle fist in my hair. “Ignore it. Ignore it,” he muttered, and I did for a minute, but then mine started ringing, too.
“Sawyer,” I said, reaching for my purse even as the rest of me was still otherwise engaged. “Sawyer, it’s my house. I have to pick it up. Hello?” I said, while—oh God, oh hell, we were in the middle of a parking lot and my dad was on the phone—Sawyer moved his mouth down to my neck. “Hi. What’s up?”
“Reena,” my father said, and there was a sound in his voice I’d never heard before, panic and anger. “Oh, thank God. Where in the hell are you?”
I jumped off the hood of that Jeep so fast that I just about took Sawyer’s head off, squeezing my eyes shut as I tried to figure out what to say: I’d lied to my father for the first time in my entire life and I was caught. How was that even possible?
I was still trying to come up with an answer when he pushed on: “Are you with Allie?” he demanded.
I curled my free hand into a fist, felt my nails dig into my palm. Sawyer was watching me carefully. I fumbled around for something plausible, finally had to settle for the truth. “No,” I admitted. “No, I’m not.”
“Thank God,” he said again, then, to whomever was in the room with him, Soledad or Cade: “She’s okay. I’ve got her.”
“What?” I said sharply. Suddenly I was very, very afraid. “What’s going on?”
“Reena,” he said, and I knew I’d never forget this as long as I lived, the neon lights of the ice cream place in the near distance, the curious expression on Sawyer LeGrande’s pretty face, and the tiny shards of glass embedded in the asphalt, like something fragile and bright had only just exploded there. “I have to tell you something bad.”