Page 110 of The Cheerleader
At the doorway, I look around for an empty seat anywhere but next to Liz, where she saved one for me. Shit. Taking a deep breath of the aroma of spaghetti sauce and garlic bread, I slide into my seat at the end of the table. Next to Liz.
“You missed the big news,” Liz says. “Bryan has an agent to negotiate for him with any teams interested in him.” She clutches my arm, digging in with her excitement.
I glance up and see Bryan standing there with a basket of garlic bread. He places it on the table and leans in between Liz and me and says close to her ear, “I can hear you talking about me.” His voice is accusatory.
He barely looks at me, but I need to bail Liz out and change the subject. I blurt, “Are you staying for your tutoring session tonight?”
He turns to me as he straightens, his expression unreadable. Liz is watching us, her eyes bouncing between us, and I know she can see and feel the tension. Was I trying to deflect his attention to help her, or help myself? I look away.
He says, “Yes.” But there’s no inflection of any kind in his voice. He’s all business.
Shit. Maybe he doesn’t care at all about English comp class anymore, now that the season is over. He only cares about football. And Liz.
Then what was that night about? We shared so much, so many private things.
I hardly eat a thing and don’t say much at dinner. When it’s over and Bryan comes by to clear dishes, I say, “I’ll go get my notebook and be back down in a minute.”
He doesn’t nod or say anything. Instead, taking a wet cloth, he bends and starts wiping the table down, dismissing me whether he means to or not.
When I come back downstairs—after convincing Liz she needs to stay in the room and finish her accounting homework so she can concentrate—I find Bryan seated at a table, bent over his papers with his brows furrowed.
“Let me see,” I say as I join him. He hands the draft of his essay to me, and I read it.
“Pretty good.” I smile at him. Then I point out a couple of places where he might want to change the order of his words or phrases and a paragraph to move down.
He sighs as he draws arrows in the places where I suggested changes and circles the words and phrases. “I’ll need to rewrite this. It’s a fucking mess.”
“You have great penmanship,” I say. And then I blush when he looks at me in surprise because my comment borders on a non sequitur, not exactly following his comment about rewriting.
“Thanks.” He turns to a fresh page in his notebook and starts writing.
I watch for a few seconds, feeling like he doesn’t need any more help tonight. Or maybe for the rest of the semester.
Liz pops her head in the open dining room door, with Pemberly standing close behind her.
“Do you want anything at Irma’s? Pemberly and I are going for a French fry run.”
“Irma’s? The food truck all the way over near the Frats? We just had dinner,” I say, though I didn’t eat much.
She shrugs and waits for Bryan’s answer.
“I’ll have a meatball sub.”
I laugh.
“Writing essays is hard work,” he says.
“We’ll be back in a jiffy,” Liz says.
Bryan pulls out his wallet, handing over a bill, and they take off.
“Now that football season is over, you probably don’t care about your grade in English comp anymore,” I say, realizing I’m making a bold assumption. I hope it’s bold enough to provoke him into giving me some answers to the mystery of what’s going on with him.
“I don’t care about getting a B minus, or even a C plus, but I do want to pass. Mom expects me to graduate next semester, so I can’t afford to take this class again.”
“So you care about what your mother thinks.” I’m thinking out loud, speaking before I consider my words, always a dangerous thing. Something about this guy makes me want to act dangerously.
He stops writing and looks hard at me, trying to intimidate me, but I stare right back, and after a few beats, I quirk a brow as if to say, Well? What are you going to do about it?
