He grinned, and Brynna sucked in a breath. “Because I got arrested for drunk driving when I was fifteen.”
She waited for Evan to gape, but he didn’t. He just threaded his arms in front of his chest and nodded appraisingly. “Well, aren’t we the bad girl?”
“It was stupid and I can’t believe I did it, and now I can’t get my license until I’m twenty-one.” She felt the sting of humiliation on her cheeks. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone?”
Evan leaned into her. “Your criminal past is safe with me, Queen B. Any more secrets you want to lay on me while I’ve still got half a Coke?” He shook his half-empty can.
“Not that I can think of. But maybe you can tell me why Darcy seems to hate me on cue?”
“Teddy. They kind of used to date.”
Brynna blinked. “What? He never told me that.”
“Well, honestly, he wasn’t so much dating her as she was dating him.”
“That makes absolutely no sense.”
Evan nodded. “It made sense to Darcy. She was constantly glued to him, and so they were sort of dating by proxy. Or by proximity.”
“Group dating? Like, Teddy and Darcy and you and Lauren?”
“I just threw up a little in my mouth. That’s my sister, B. But don’t even worry about Darcy. She’s totally harmless, and you’ve got the guy.” He gave her a slick smile, tilted his head back, and finished his soda in one swig.
EIGHT
When the final bell rang, Brynna tried to be ready for it, but every second afterward seemed to race too quickly as she retrieved the swimsuit bag from her locker. She avoided all of her friends, unwilling to face any additional questions, and slipped into the nearest girls’ room she could find. She had no intention of going back into the locker room, even knowing that this close to school’s end, the place would be packed. She tried not to remember what was scrawled on the mirror in there, but lately her head was so filled with the things she didn’t want to think about, the few things she did—homecoming with Teddy, shopping with Evan—had no room.
Everything she did made a horrible racket, metal and concrete reverberating a thousand times over while her heart pounded out a drumbeat that trumped everything else. Her swimsuit pinched at her skin; the slick material once like a second skin was now foreign and cold and deeply uncomfortable. She grabbed her swim cap and goggles and had a brief flashback of the hundreds of other times she had done the exact same motion: swiping both from her swim bag, dangling the goggles between her two fingers as she waited for Erica to finishing sucking in her stomach and glaring at herself in the four-by-four-inch mirror stuck to her locker door.
“If I could lose three more pounds, I would be unstoppable,” Erica said, brushing a palm over her already flat stomach.
“If you lost three pounds, you’d go straight down the drain in the showers.”
Erica clamped her hands together and batted her eyelashes. “But you would rescue me, wouldn’t you, my shining prince?”
“Sure,” Brynna said, her front teeth clamping over a snag on her thumbnail and biting down hard. “I’ll get right on that—becoming a prince, growing a penis and all.”
“Ew!” Erica beaned Brynna with a wadded-up towel. “Who says ‘penis’?”
Brynna could still hear her and Erica’s fading laughter, and for a brief second, she almost felt soothed by the memory, comforted by the fact that right after that exchange, they both snapped on swim caps and goggles and took to their lanes, slicing through the water, their bodies taking over. But she didn’t feel that way anymore.
She slid her jeans and sweatshirt back on over her suit, concentrating especially hard on the techniques that Dr. Rother had taught her. She couldn’t help thinking how proud her shrink and her parole officer would be, knowing that she was not only learning but “applying” techniques for “relaxation and reengaging.” The thought made her stumble. It wasn’t that long ago that she would go running into any body of water within a twenty-mile radius. It wasn’t that long ago that she only wondered whether her parents were proud of her—not a shrink or a parole officer.
“Things change,” Brynna muttered under her breath.
The halls were still peppered with slow-moving students and teachers straightening their rooms, so Brynna was surprised that when she pushed through the heavy double doors to the poolroom, it was empty.