He bit down on his bottom lip and sidestepped around her.
She shifted to block him. “So, taking world history like we talked about? Did you get Mr. Monte—”
“Nice, right?” Sammy gestured down the hall to the tissue box. “Tad’s a kick-ass campaign manager.”
Her relief that it had been Tad’s idea matched her anger at Leo for allowing it.
She tried to focus on this boy in front of her wearing an ill-fitting coat of bravado. “Listen, Sammy. What happened with me and Leo doesn’t have to affect us.”
Sammy sniffed. “You smell that?”
She wrinkled her nose. “No. Should I?”
“Guess it’s the same way smokers don’t smell tobacco anymore. Hard to smell bullshit when you’re always knee-deep in it.” Sammy strutted off without a glance back.
This wasn’t the Sammy who reenacted SNL and did stand-up routines in eighth grade. She and Leo had sat in the audience in place of his parents, giving him a standing ovation, Leo shouting “¡Felicitaciones!” the way their dad would have when Sammy won the talent competition.
And now he thought she was a bitch.
“Nice move, Ang.”
Leo’s voice made the hairs on her arms stand up. He circled in front of her wearing that sweatshirt she’d been trying to get him to replace for years.
“I just ran into him. I wasn’t looking for him.” As if she didn’t have a right to. She’d rip into Maxine or Sonya or Riley if they sounded as meek as she did. Would tell her Ask an Angel viewer to stand up for herself. She squared her shoulders.
“Good, and keep it that way, but that’s not what I meant.” Leo’s tone was flippant, but his eyes looked the same as always. How can that be? “I was talking about the Frankengirls. Don’t know why I’m surprised; you know how to make things explode. Or is it implode?”
“My campaign has every right to address this injustice.”
“Again, not what I meant. Address is one thing. Invent, an entirely different one.”
Confusion jumbled Angeline’s thoughts. “Wait, you really think I did this?”
“If the torso fits.”
“Those are my friends in those pictures.”
“Hence your abundance of photos to choose from.”
“Nice try, Leo. I pride myself on being flexible, but that’s way too low for me.”
“You forget, I know you.”
That snide look on his face seemed as uncharacteristic as the angry one on Sammy’s. Yet instead of it making her sad, it ignited something inside her veins, and the blood that rushed through screamed enough. What she did to Leo didn’t define her. No matter how much he wanted it to.
“You know what I think?” she said. “This reeks of Tad Marcus and the rest of those guys who are suddenly attached to your hip. And instead of owning up to it and apologizing, they’re keeping it going. For fun, for this ridiculous campaign of yours, because they think they can get away with it. And you’re following so closely you’re about to be crushed by their heels.”
The muscles in Leo’s jaw tightened.
“You want to get back at me, Leo? Fine, whatever, run against me—win, if you can. But just leave everyone else out of it, okay? Enough with the photos.”
“It’s not me and—”
“Save it.” Angeline clutched the straps of her bag so hard that her claddagh ring dug into her skin. “Whatever you want to think, hurting you was never my goal.”
“I didn’t think it was.”
“Then why—”
He jammed his hands into his pockets. “Because barreling toward your goal eclipses everything else. I’m tired of being roadkill.”
Angeline leaned in. “It was one mistake, Leo. One. You may be sick of being roadkill, but the truth is, only one of those tire treads belongs to me.”
17
When Cat’s Weekend’s Jam-Packed
14 DAYS TO THE ELECTION
“Leo’s going to abolish finals? Leo’s going to bring in a Food Network chef for lunch menu consultation? Leo’s a descendant of George Washington and a third-generation twice-removed cousin of Jennifer Lawrence? Three sources, people! Three named sources!”
On the couch in their living room, Cat read The Shrieking Violet to her grandfather, her temper at a rolling boil. “How is anyone believing this?”
And preferring it to her own?
“I think you may be missing that this is a prime example of a little-known technique called satire.” He gingerly extracted the tablet from her tense fingers. “Let’s keep this in one piece. I’ve got me a date with an away game tonight. And I’d rather not borrow your sister’s computer since that comes with strings of agreeing to join some mixer they call a dating app.”
“Wow, she’s always working it, isn’t she?”
“Your sister’s intentions come from the right place even if the execution needs jiggering. Your grams was the same way.”
Cat looked dubious.
“Ah, you remember her with hair always curled and feet always in heels when she was actually a woman who would hide my passport in between cake pans to stop me from going on foreign assignments.”
Cat smiled. “She wanted to keep you safe. It’s actually kind of sweet in a warped way.”
“Same as your sister.”
“Uh-huh, sure.”
Tell that to the “Fraidy Cat” moniker that had stuck through most of fourth grade. By the time the kids had found a new bull’s-eye, Angeline had disappeared into her friends. Cat had clung to her own from fifth until the jokes she missed and the homework they had and the recess she didn’t share began to put distance between them.
Cat threw herself into following in her grandfather’s footsteps, reading every one of his articles, begging him to tell her stories, flipping through that passport and learning about all the places he’d been, imagining going to them herself. She threw herself into being what her sister wasn’t: focused on something other than herself.
Not to mention proving her father wrong. Her dreams would become her reality.
“You trust me, Cathleen?” Gramps asked.
“More than anyone, you know that.”
“Then listen when I say that life needs lightness as much as it needs the truth. A balance.”
Cat tried to focus on him, but all she could see was the new ad at the bottom of The Shrieking Violet’s page: Luck o’ the Harbor. The first of what had become a handful of new advertisers for Cat. Ones she was going to lose if things kept going like this. Because no one was reading this thing as satire; they were swallowing it whole. She half expected The Shrieking Violet to edge her out for the Fit to Print award.