Avalon High (3 page)

I screamed and almost fell off the raft.

“Oh, sorry,” Will said. He’d been smiling. After I screamed, he stopped. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Wh-what are you doing here?” I stammered, staring up at him. I couldn’t believe he was just…well, standing there. Beside my pool. In my yard. On Spider Rock.

“Uh,” Will said, starting to look a little self-conscious. “I knocked. Your dad said you were out here, and let me in. Is this a bad time? I can come back, if it is.”

I stared at him, completely dumbfounded. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I had lived for sixteen years without any boy ever having paid the slightest bit of attention to me, and then one day, without any warning
at all, the cutest guy I had ever seen—and I do mean ever—just shows up at my house. Having come, apparently, to see me.

I mean, why else would he be here?

“How—how do you know where I live?” I asked him. “How do you even know who I am?”

“Student guide,” he said. Then, seeming to realize that I was more than a little freaked, he added, “Look, I’m sorry if I startled you. I didn’t mean to. I just thought…well, never mind. You know what? I was wrong.”

“Wrong about what?” I asked. My heart was still thumping really hard inside my bikini. He had startled me much more than that spider that lived on Spider Rock ever had.

But it wasn’t just that he’d startled me that was making my heart hammer. I have to admit, a lot of it was because of how good he looked, up there on that rock, with the late-afternoon sun glinting off his dark head.

“Nothing,” he said. “I just—I mean, you smiled at me that day in the park like…”

“Like what?” I sounded casual, but inwardly, I was freaking out on multiple levels: one, that he remembered me—he really remembered me!—from that day at the park, and two, that it hadn’t just been me. The smile thing, I mean. He’d felt it, too!

Or maybe not.

“Look, never mind,” Will said. “It’s stupid. When I saw you—first in the park, and then again today, it just seemed like…I don’t know. That we’d met before, or
something. But we haven’t, obviously. I mean, I can see that now. I’m Will, by the way. Will Wagner.”

I didn’t let on that I already knew this, from having looked him up the same way he’d looked me up. Because I didn’t want him to think that I had a crush on him, or anything. Because how could I have a crush on him? I had only seen him twice before. This made it three times. You can’t get a crush on someone you’ve seen only three times. I mean, if you’re Nancy, you can. But not if you’re practical, like me.

“I’m Ellie,” I said. “Ellie Harrison. But then…I guess you knew that.”

The blue-eyed gaze was back on mine, but this time, it didn’t seem as intense. Plus, Will was grinning.

“Pretty much,” he said.

He really was very good-looking. It wasn’t often that good-looking guys so much as looked my way, let alone showed up at my house to see me. I’m not ugly, or anything, but I’m no Jennifer Gold. I mean, she’s one of those
Oh, I’m so little and helpless, please rescue me, you big strong man
types of girls. You know, the kind all the cute guys in school fall in love with? I’m more the kind of girl little old ladies come up to in grocery stores and ask,
“Can you get that can of cat food down off that really high grocery store shelf for me, dear?”

Which basically translates to Invisible to Boys.

“I just moved here,” I said. “From St. Paul. I’ve never been to the East Coast before. So I don’t know how we could have met before…. Unless”—I eyed
him uncertainly—“you’ve been to St. Paul?”

Which was nuts, because if he had, I’d have remembered.

You better believe I’d have remembered.

“No,” he said, grinning. “Never been there. Look, really, forget I said anything. Things have been really weird lately, and I guess I just…”

His expression darkened, just for a split second, almost as if a shadow had passed across it.

Except that that was impossible, since there was nothing standing between him and the sun.

Then he seemed to shrug off whatever dark thought had occurred to him, and said brightly, “Seriously, don’t worry about it. I’ll see you in school.”

He turned like he was going to jump off Spider Rock and go away. I could almost hear my best friend Nancy’s voice screaming in my head,
Don’t let him get away, you idiot! He’s hot! Make him stay!

“Wait,” I said.

Then, when he turned expectantly, I found myself frantically trying to think of something witty and brilliant to say…something that would make him want to stay.

But before I could think of anything, I heard the sliding glass door being thrown back. A second later, my mom called down from the deck, “Ellie, would your friend like to borrow a suit and go for a swim, too? I’m sure one of Geoff’s would fit him.”

Oh my God.
My friend
. I was sure I was going to die.
Besides which,
go for a swim
? With
me
? She had no idea she was talking to one of the most popular guys at Avalon High, or that he was dating one of the prettiest girls there.

But still. That’s no excuse.

“Uh, no, Mom,” I called to her, giving Will an apologetic eye roll that he grinned at. “We’re okay.”

“Actually,” Will said, looking up at my mom.
I have to go now.

That’s what I thought he was going to say.
I have to go now
, or
I made a huge mistake
, or even,
Sorry, wrong house.

Because guys like Will do not hang around girls like me. It just doesn’t happen. Clearly, Will had thought I was some other girl—maybe someone he’d met at camp and had a crush on when he was eight, or whatever—and now that he’d realized his error, he’d be leaving.

Because that is how things are supposed to go in an ordered universe.

But I guess the universe had tilted on its axis without anyone mentioning it to me, or something, because Will went on to say, “A swim might be nice.”

And not three minutes later, against all laws of probability, Will was emerging from my house in a pair of Geoff’s baggy swim trunks, with a towel around his neck. He was also holding glasses of lemonade that my mom had scrounged up from somewhere, one of which he knelt down at the side of the pool to hand to me.

“Free, fast delivery,” he said, with a wink, as I took
the plastic glass from him. If he felt, as I did, a jolt of electricity race up his arm as our fingers accidentally brushed, he didn’t let on.

“Oh my God,” I said, holding the already-sweating glass and staring at him. He had, I was not at all surprised to see, a terrific body. His skin was tanned bronze—from sailing, no doubt—and he was gorgeously well-muscled—but not in a crazy steroid sort of way.

And he was in my pool.

He was in my pool.

“Did she—” I was in too much shock to think of anything else. “Did she
talk
to you?”

“Who?” Will asked, draping himself over Geoff’s raft. “Your mom? Yeah. She’s nice. What is she, a writer or something?”

“Professor,” I said, through lips that had gone numb. But not from the ice cubes in my drink. From the thought of Will Wagner, alone in my house with my parents, while I, too transfixed with horror to move from my raft, had lain in the pool, doing nothing to rescue him. “Both of them.”

“Oh, well, that would explain it,” Will said lightly.

My blood went as cold as the ice in my drink. What had they done? What had they said to him? It was too early for
Jeopardy!
so it couldn’t have been that. “Explain what?”

“Your mom quoted some poem after I introduced myself,” Will said, leaning his head back and peering up at the sky through his Ray-Bans. Whatever Mom had
said, he clearly wasn’t bothered by it. “Something about a broad, clear brow.”

My stomach lurched. “‘His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d’?” I asked nervously.

“Yeah,” Will said. “That’s it. What was that about?”

“Nothing,” I said, vowing silently to kill my mom at a later date. “It’s a line from a poem she likes—
The Lady of Shalott
. Tennyson. She’s taking the year off from teaching to write a book on Elaine of Astolat. It’s making her a little crazier than usual.”

“That must be cool,” Will said, his raft heading perilously close to Spider Rock, though he wasn’t, of course, aware of the potential spider-related danger he was in. “To have parents who talk about poetry and books and stuff.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” I said, in the flattest voice I could.

“How’s the rest of it go?” Will wanted to know.

“The rest of what?”

“The poem.”

She was so very, very dead. “‘His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d,’” I quoted from memory. It’s not as if I hadn’t heard it seventy times this week alone. “‘On burnish’d hooves his war-horse trode;/From underneath his helmet flow’d/His coal-black curls as on he rode,/As he rode down to Camelot.’ It’s a very lame poem. She dies at the end, floating in a boat. Weren’t you supposed to meet some people at Dairy Queen after practice today?”

Will glanced over at me, as the question had startled
him. I didn’t blame him. It had startled me, too. I have no idea where it had come from.

Still. It needed to be asked.

“I guess so,” Will said. “How’d you know about that?”

“Because I heard Jennifer ask you about it when I saw you today in the hallway at school,” I said. Nancy, I knew, would freak out if she’d heard me say this. She’d be all,
Oh my God! Don’t let on that you know about Jennifer! Because then he’ll know you went to the trouble to look her up, and then he’ll think you like him!

But not mentioning Jennifer just didn’t seem very practical to me.

Nancy wouldn’t have liked the next words that came out of my mouth, either.

“She’s your girlfriend, right?” I asked, looking at him as he floated past.

He didn’t look at me. He lifted his head up to take a sip of his lemonade, then dropped it back down to the air cushion on his raft.

“Yeah,” he said. “Going on two years.”

I opened my mouth to ask what seemed to me to be the next natural question—the one Nancy
definitely
would have forbidden me from asking. But before I could get a word out, Will lifted up his head, looked right at me, and said, “Don’t.”

I blinked at him from behind the lenses of my sunglasses. “Don’t what?” I asked, because how was I to know—then—that he could read my mind?

“Don’t ask me what I’m doing in your pool instead of
hers,” he said. “Because I honestly don’t know. Let’s talk about something else, okay?”

I could hardly believe what was happening. What was this totally great-looking guy doing in my pool? Not to mention, reading my mind?

It didn’t make any sense.

But then, I’m not sure it made sense to him, either.

So instead of asking him about it, I asked him something else that had been bothering me: just what, exactly, he’d been doing in the ravine that first day I’d seen him.

“Oh,” Will said, sounding surprised I’d even ask. “I don’t know. I just end up there sometimes.”

Which pretty much answered my question about what he was doing in my pool instead of his girlfriend’s: He was clearly mentally unstable.

Except that—the being-in-my-pool-instead-of-Jennifer’s thing aside—he seemed totally normal. He was able to make perfectly lucid conversation. He asked me why we’d moved from St. Paul, and when I told him about the sabbatical, he said he knew what that was like—having to move around a lot, I mean. His dad, he said, was in the navy, and had been stationed lots of different places—forcing Will to change schools every other year or so when he was younger—before finally taking a teaching position at the Naval Academy.

He talked about Avalon High, and the teachers he liked, and the ones I should try to stay away from—Mr. Morton he declared, much to my surprise, a good guy. He talked about Lance—he described the month off he
and Lance had taken over the summer to sail up and down the coast, just the two of them.

The only thing Will didn’t bring up again was Jennifer. Not even once.

Not that I was counting.

I didn’t have any trouble figuring out what Nancy would have made of that. Clearly all was not happiness and joy in
that
relationship. Why else was he floating in my pool, and not hers?

Not, of course, that I imagined his interest in me was at all romantic. Because who’d want hamburger when they could have filet mignon? Which isn’t—despite what Nancy would say—putting myself down. It’s just being realistic. Guys like Will go for girls like Jennifer: perky little blondes who seem to know instinctively what color eyeshadow looks best on them, not girls like me—gangling brunettes who aren’t afraid to pull snakes out of the pool filter.

The sun was starting to slide behind the house, and there was more shade than light on the surface of the water when my mom came back out onto the deck and announced that she’d ordered some Thai food, and asked if Will wanted to stay for dinner.

To which Will replied that he’d love to.

Will was the perfect guest, helping me set the table, then clear it afterwards. He finished everything on his plate. And when my parents and I declared that we were stuffed, he ate everything that was left over in the cartons—to my dad’s very obvious admiration.

He was nice to Tig, too, when she came over and sniffed the back of one of his shoes. He bent down and put his finger out so she could smell it before she decided whether or not to let him pet her. Only people who’ve actually spent time around cats know that this is accepted cat etiquette.

He didn’t laugh when I told him Tig’s name, either. It’s kind of embarrassing to have a pet that you named when you were eight. Back then, I’d thought Tigger was the most original, creative name you could give a cat.

But when I mentioned this to Will, he grinned and said Tigger wasn’t as bad as the name he’d given his Border collie when he was twelve—Cavalier. Which is a pretty weird name for a dog, if you think about it. Especially a naval family’s dog.