Page 13 of Taking Sides

I’m breathless when I’ve finished talking.

“O-kay.” She says the word slowly as if she heard me but can’t line that up with my actions. And fuck, fair enough.

“Shiiiiit!” Grady exclaims as his footsteps pound up the steps. Whitney swivels around to see what’s wrong.

“I heard that, Coach!” one of the kids shouts from the pool.

“I hope you like your dogs burnt,” he yells back. “Food’s ready.”

Whitney slowly turns back to me. I can feel the commotion happening around us—the kids hurrying out of the pool and moving this way, Penn stepping back onto the deck, and Grady pulling food from the grill, but I’m concentrating only on the woman in front of me. I need her to understand.

But all I get out before we’re overrun with teenage boys is, “It had nothing to do with them.”

“Okay,” she says, this time more definitively, but she still looks as if she doesn’t really believe me, then takes a step closer to me to let the boys pass.

This is not going well, and I need to do something fast.

“It’s you,” I blurt out, and immediately my face is on fire.

“Excuse me?” She laughs though her expression does give away that she’s at least a little offended.

I hold in a groan already knowing I’m going to replay this conversation later and feel like the world’s biggest idiot, but right now I can’t dwell on it. There are so many things I could say to help her understand: “I’m bad at talking to women.” Or “You intimidate the fuck out of me.” Or “You might be the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.”

What I go with instead is, “Do you want to go out with me sometime?”

Shock splashes across her face like she’s been doused with water. The red sparks in her eyes light up, and her jaw goes slack. The rejection I know is coming stings less than the annoyance of how badly I’m bungling this.

“I’m sorry,” I say, while she’s still figuring out how to turn me down. “It was a bad idea.”

I start to walk away—to throw myself in the pool, perhaps—but Whitney reaches out to stop me.

“Wait.” Her fingers wrap around my forearm. A pleasant tingle spreads from her touch. She still wears a confused expression, but she’s nodding. “Yes.”

“Yes?”

A smile slowly curves her lips, and her tone is back to sounding amused. “Yes, I’ll go out with you.”

FOUR

I’m standing on a stepladder, adjusting the final wall poster so it doesn’t hang crooked. Either the ceiling is uneven or my level is broken.

“I hate you.”

The three words startle me, and I cling onto the ladder to steady myself. When I look to the open doorway, my friend Sloane smiles in at me.

“I nearly fell three feet to my death,” I say, matching her grin. I come down off the ladder.

Sloane steps into my classroom, glancing at the tables already arranged for students and the walls covered in posters of famous mathematicians and helpful formulas. Her voice is quiet but awe-filled as she asks, “How do you already have this place looking so organized nearly a month before school starts?”

“Bored. Lack of a social life.” Nerves for my date tonight. “I didn’t know you were here.”

Teachers don’t officially report back for another two weeks. School starts the week after.

“Tomorrow is the deadline to order textbooks and reference materials, so I have an inbox of emails from teachers who waited until the last minute.”

I bite the corner of my lip.

“You sent me an email, didn’t you?” she asks with a laugh that is almost too soft to hear.