“Uh…” Foster began, but Tate was on a roll and he kept on rolling.
“But just so you don’t think I’m one of those guys who only reads ‘guy books,’” Tate air quoted, “I’ll round out my top five with three women authors. I don’t like genre labels, but YA authors are killing it right now with their awesomeness. Last year I read Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy. Damn, those books rocked! But I’m not counting them as three. So…” he tapped his chin, thinking. “I know! S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders is a classic. I even made my dad take me to Tulsa one spring break so I could check it out.” He paused again and gave the very silent Foster a raised-brow look. “The city wasn’t anything like the book, but I did visit the center of the universe there. Anyway, one more. It’s gotta be Renee Ahdieh’s retelling of the Shahrzad story, The Wrath and the Dawn, and its sequel, The Rose and the Dagger. My mom turned me on to them, and they were just flat-out cool. So, there you have it. My real top five favorite books. For right now. I’ve been checking out those thrillers in Cora’s library, though. Would you mind if I borrowed some of them?”
When he stopped talking he realized Foster was staring at him as if she’d never really seen him before.
“Yeah, you can borrow any book you want.” Foster cleared her throat. “Well, I admit it when I’m wrong, and I was wrong. You’re not a dumb jock cliché.” Foster’s lips twitched again as the beginnings of a smile formed on her surprised face. “You do a great impression of one, though.”
He felt himself relax. She actually admitted she was wrong! And she was almost smiling at him. Tate shrugged. “Yeah, well, I am planning on using a football scholarship as well as an academic scholarship to get me through college so I won’t be stuck in debt forever. It takes a lot of education to become a doctor.”
“A doctor?”
Tate nodded and tried not to sound too gleeful. “I’m good at science. Really good, as in scholarship-level good. I want to be a neurologist. My g-ma died of Alzheimer’s. It was awful. I’m going to find the cure.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Why in the hell have you let me believe you’re just a dumb pigskin thrower?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I guess I didn’t want to tell you who I am. I wanted you to get to know me and find out for yourself. Like, when I first saw you I thought you were probably a cheerleader.”
Foster looked like she’d bitten into a lemon. “A cheerleader!”
“Well, yeah, until you opened your mouth,” he said with a totally straight face.
“What!”
“Yeah,” he went on nonchalantly, pretending that she wasn’t giving him her “I’m going to knock you on your ass with my air cannon hands” look. “Then I got to know you better and I decided that if you were a cheerleader by day, by night you’d for sure run some kind of underground political school paper where you’d probably uncover a major human trafficking ring and were on your way to being the youngest journalist to win a Pulitzer in the history of Pulitzers.”
Foster just kept staring and staring at him, until finally she started to giggle, and the giggle turned into honest-to-god laughter. “I thought you were a dumb, can’t grow hair and chew gum at the same time, football guy,” she gasped, still giggling. “And you were making up the coolest story ever about me. Tate, I owe you a major apology. I absolutely misjudged you. You’re not a douche. You’re an onion.”
“Is that better than being a douche?”
“Of course it’s better! You look like one thing, but if your surface is scratched just a little, there are layers and layers of stuff waiting to be discovered. You’re an onion, Tate. Embrace the onion.”
Then, Foster Stewart Fields smiled at Tate—really smiled—and in that moment a wonderful, terrible feeling sizzled through his body.
When she looks at me like that she makes me feel as if I could do anything. And I can do anything; I will do anything, to keep her looking at me like that.
Suddenly Foster’s green eyes widened in shock, and that beautiful smile that radiated from them somehow, impossibly, grew brighter.
“Tate, I just found my story for you, and you’re not just an onion. You’re The Hawk. By day you’re the star quarterback leading his team to victory, but by night … by night you’re a superhero.”
Tate’s stomach felt filled with the light of her smile and he laughed. “Okay, Hawk is better than being an onion, but a superhero? You’re only saying that because I call this place our Fortress of Sauvietude.”
“Nope, I’m only saying that because it’s true. Tate, look down.”
He did.
He was floating about five feet off the ground.
“Fuck!” he shouted.
Then he dropped from the sky like a stone—or, as his g-pa would say—like a good ol’ dog turd.
“Tate! Shit! Foster! What the hell is going on here?” From behind them came the sound of Finn’s panicked voice as he and a young woman sprinted across the pasture toward them.
16
FOSTER
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Just everyone shut up!” Foster shouted over Finn’s questions, Tate’s stammering, and the constant you can’t be serious coming from the young woman standing too close to Finn to simply be a casual acquaintance.
“What the hell is going on?” Finn asked for the zillionth time.
“I said shut up!” Foster barked.
“Don’t yell at him like that.” Purple-streaked braids sliced the sky as the young woman whipped her attention from Tate to Foster. “He’s freaked out. We’re both freaked out. We just saw someone—”
“I just need it to be quiet!” Foster ran her hands through her hair. “For, like, two seconds. This won’t work if I can’t focus.” She could fix this. She had to fix this or … or what? There was no alternative. To save Tate and herself, Foster would erase this moment from existence.
Tate eyed her suspiciously. “You’re not going to—”
“Yes,” Foster surprised herself with her calm collectedness. “Yes, I am.”