“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He wants more. At a minimum, friends with benefits.”
“Oh … no,” she says, shaking her head. “He doesn’t want that. He’s like a brother to me. That’s just … gross.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. It comes out way louder than it should in the library and everyone turns to stare at us.
“Sorry,” I mumble to no one in particular. Leaning across the table, I whisper to Paige, “I guarantee he doesn’t find you gross.”
I can’t imagine any guy finding her gross. Her attitude, yes, but not her looks.
She frowns, then studies the papers in front of her. After a minute, she says, “Let’s get back to work so we’re not stuck doing all this over the weekend.”
* * *
On Sunday afternoon, after finishing most of our class project, Paige and I meet in the gym yet again. Two more hours and we should finally be done with the floor, easily meeting Paige’s deadline.
“Hey,” I say to her before collecting my rag and heading over to where we had left off yesterday. Then I yawn. One of those prolonged yawns that keeps going and going.
“Tired?” she asks.
“Yeah. I’ve never run so much in my life.” I was unsuccessful in avoiding Jernigan at dinner last night, and he assigned me ten laps for a snide comment. That was what he said anyway. I’m sure the real reason was because I worked with Paige on the class project.
She looks up at me. “I saw what happened. It was only supposed to be five laps, but you had poor impulse control.”
It’s true. I might have flipped him off because his punishment was ridiculously harsh for a minor comment.
“Besides, the mileage was good for you,” she says. “My dad always told me, ‘What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.’”
“Wallingford may kill me,” I reply.
She smiles. “To my knowledge, there have been no deaths in the sixty years it’s been open, so you’re probably safe.” After refolding her rag, she asks, “If you weren’t here, what would you be doing right now?”
I glance at her. She’s hard at work, not really even paying attention to me. To an outsider, it’d probably seem like a simple question between friends. To me, it’s weird. This is the first personal question she’s asked me. She’s playing it off like it’s nothing, but it’s not nothing. It makes me feel … weird. There’s no other way to describe it.
“Something adventurous, no doubt,” I reply.
“Really?” she asks, interest lighting up her face. “Like what? Skydiving? Bungee jumping? White-water rafting?”
“Uh, no. I was kidding. My life is the complete opposite of adventurous.”
“Oh. How so?”
“You want to know exactly how unadventurous my life is?” Why now, all of a sudden does she have an interest in me? We’ve spent hours upon hours together over the last few weeks, and the topic of hobbies has never come up. The topic of anything even remotely having to do with my life outside of Wallingford has never come up. Why would it? It’s not relevant to her job of turning me into a good cadet.
“Yeah, sure,” she says.
“Okaaaay … my life back home consisted of school, way too many video games with my friends Gordy and Nate and Lora, a reading addiction that would make any librarian proud, and a shitload of TV, especially when I was forced to spend weekends at my dad’s. That’s about it.”
“Your parents are divorced?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“How was that?”
“Awful.”
“That’s too bad.”
I nod and rub the wax in a little harder than I need to. How did we get talking about my parents? The only people who know about what happened are Gordy, Nate, and Lora. Nobody else needs to know.
“You live with your mom?” she asks, not taking the hint I’m pretty much done with this conversation.
“What about you?” I ask to change the subject. “Are your parents still together or divorced?”
“Neither. My mom died a long time ago.”
Aaaaand I’m a complete ass. “Sorry,” I mumble.
She shrugs. “Like I said, it was a long time ago.”
We continue the monotonous job of buffing the floor, now silently working next to each other. This feels normal. This is the way we work together in the gym. Of course, the silence used to be tainted by mutual hatred. The hatred is gone. I’m not sure when it started to fade or when it disappeared completely. All I know is one day I was cursing her name and now … I’m just trying to keep the peace. I feel like we’re in some sort of nebulous gray area. Not really friends but no longer enemies, either.
“What’s your plan after Wallingford?” she asks from out of the blue.
“I’m still weighing my options,” I reply, not wanting to get into the fact it’s actually the court weighing my options for me. “You?”
“The Air Force Academy.”
Of course. I should’ve guessed a military academy. She’s in for life.
“Why Air Force?” I ask while stifling another yawn.
She slides to a new section of floor. “I want to be a pilot.”
“The Navy has pilots, right?”
“Yeah, but I’m not into living on a ship for months at a time.”
I tilt my head to the side and raise a brow at her. “You do realize you’re at a Navy boarding school, right?”
She grins. “I didn’t have much of a choice. My dad went here.”
“Yeah? Did he join the Navy afterward?”
“Uh-huh. Then he was a Navy SEAL for a long time.”
So it’s a family thing for her. That could explain a lot about her personality.
“But, honestly,” she continues, “there’s only one Air Force high school and it’s tiny compared to Wallingford. Even if I had the option, I would’ve chosen Wallingford.”
Sitting back on my heels, I grin and say, “So size matters?”
“Of course,” she replies stone-faced, obviously not getting it. Gordy would’ve appreciated my joke.
“That was supposed to be funny,” I point out.
“What?”
“That size matters to you.”
Her forehead scrunches up, and a little line appears across the top of her nose. It’s funny how nothing around here—not our classes, not the military lingo, not completely disassembling and reassembling a rifle—confuses her, but this one joke does her in.
“I don’t get it,” she says, shaking her head.
I smile as I work my rag over the wooden floorboards. “You know, I kind of like that about you.” She doesn’t strike me as a person who will admit she’s wrong, or doesn’t know something, or doesn’t get something very often. The fact that she does makes her seem … imperfect. Apparently I like imperfection. Maybe it’s because I’ve got imperfection down to a science.
We continue chatting, which makes the time go by much faster than it has been. In what feels like only minutes, we’re finally done with the floor. Three weeks of work done in two, just like Paige promised.