He tilts his head. “Wait. What? I never stood you up for another girl.”
“I beg to differ.”
“But I didn’t. I had a family situation,” he explains, brows knit.
“Then why would Kassie tell me you were seeing Tessa from Fairfax?”
“I don’t even know a Tessa.”
I blink, eyeing him suspiciously. “Then why would Kassie lie to me?”
“I don’t know,” he says, frowning. There’s a flash of anger in his eyes. “But it was a complete lie. Maybe she was trying to get back at me for turning her down.”
“You turned her down? When?”
“After we first met. I wasn’t interested in her that way, and I told her straight up the next day. This was right before school started. Before she even met Ollie.”
I nod. I still remember Kassie, clear as day, telling me she wasn’t interested in him after their makeout session. “But she always tells me everything,” I say, catching myself midsentence. “I mean . . . at least she used to.”
Renner runs a hand through his hair. He has a horrified expression, as though someone’s just punted a baby across a field of AstroTurf. “I’m telling you the truth, Char. I turned her down. Not the other way around. And I never stood you up for someone else.”
I’m stunned into silence, trying to come up with a logical explanation. When I think back, she and Ollie started flirting immediately during that welcome assembly. Maybe she was doing it to make Renner jealous. But believing Renner over Kassie feels unnatural. Then again, this whole situation is unnatural.
“To be fair, I could only go off what Kassie told me,” I say, raising my shoulders in defense.
“You really hated me all this time because Kassie lied and told you I was into someone else? Wild. All this time we could have—”
I hold my hand up to stop him from continuing. “All right, slow your roll. I’ll have you know I had other reasons.”
“Like what?”
I realize that all my other reasons seem ridiculously petty, and I look away. “I don’t know, Renner. I guess it was also all the little things along the way. Mostly because you’re annoyingly likable.”
He gives me an adorable, knowing look. “Oh, come on. People like you too.”
“Not in the same way. I have to work so hard to make people like me.”
“Honestly, I do try. Harder than you think.”
I think about the Wendy’s cashier. The exchange just seemed so natural for him. “Are you saying your charm isn’t some generational family witch curse?”
He laughs. “Sadly, no. Actually, I have a phobia of people not liking me. Like, Mrs. Webber, the school librarian, hated my guts in ninth grade after I messed up her bookshelves. And it took me years of groveling, giving her compliments, and bringing her those magazines to make her like me.”
“Why go to all that effort? If people don’t like you, it’s on them.”
“Dunno. I’ve always been that way. Ever since my sister . . .” His voice trails.
I hang my head. When Kassie first met Renner, she told me how his little sister passed away when we were ten. She’d gotten hit by a car playing outside. It’s kind of an unspoken thing that no one brings up. To be honest, I’d almost forgotten. “I’m so sorry, Renner. What was her name?”
“Susie,” he says affectionately. “She had the cutest laugh. The biggest smile. It’s been seven years and sometimes it feels like yesterday. I can still hear my mom screaming in the middle of the street, holding her.” He pauses. “Well, I guess it’s been more like twenty years if we’re thirty.”
I grit my teeth, trying to find the appropriate words. But there are none.
He continues. “That’s why I couldn’t do the prom errands the other day. It was the anniversary of her death and my parents usually do something in her memory and—”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“No, I feel like I have to. It’s actually the reason I didn’t show up to homecoming. My mom was having a really bad night. She knew I was supposed to go to the dance but I just couldn’t leave her.”
I let that settle for a few moments. All this time, I assumed he’d ditched me because he didn’t want me as his date. “Knowing that would have changed everything.” I think he knows it too.
“Yeah. Well, you didn’t want to know. And to be fair, I don’t think I was ready to talk about it at that time.”
“I don’t blame you at all.”
He runs a hand across the back of his neck. “No. You should. I handled it . . . terribly.”
I shrug. “You handled it like a fourteen-year-old boy. I mean, losing your little sister . . . I can’t even imagine how hard that must have been.”
“The hardest part is thinking about what she could have been. She enjoyed life, laughed constantly at every little thing. I guess I feel obligated to fill that void. Like making my parents laugh, like she did, is the only way to make them happy again.”
His admission makes my heart hurt. It’s like the last piece of the Renner puzzle sliding into place. After four years of not understanding this person, of assuming he had everything easy, I finally get him. His larger-than-life personality makes sense now. And it makes me like him even more. “Renner . . .”
“I still remember, a couple months after the funeral, my parents were just zombies. Going through the motions of the day. I made some dimwit joke and they laughed. Like, really laughed. For the first time since she died. Since then, I’ve just felt like it’s my job to keep them happy. Though happy isn’t the right word. They were functioning, mostly.” The pain in his eyes is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s like he’s dropped his walls entirely, for me. As sad as the circumstances are, I feel grateful that he’s sharing this with me. “When I saw my mom happy that first morning, and then later at Ollie’s, it threw me. Because I didn’t know she could be like that again.”
“She really did look happy.”
“I don’t know how much of it has to do with Jared. But if he’s any part of it, I can’t be mad at that. I guess I just feel shitty that I couldn’t make her happy myself.”
“Don’t say that. You do make her happy. And even if you didn’t, you can’t make everyone you meet like you. Well—I mean, maybe you can. But you shouldn’t have to.”
He shrugs. “It’s just this weird compulsion. I can’t stop. Like, even after Susie died, my parents made me see a therapist. And I even tried to impress her by telling her how great I was doing all the time. And today, I bought vegetables at the grocery store just to impress people.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know . . . random shoppers. The cashier. I have no idea how to even prepare vegetables.” His modesty threatens to melt me into a puddle on the spot.
“Vegetables? You really are a people pleaser.”
“It’s exhausting being me,” he says with a smirk.
“Did it bug you, that I . . . wasn’t your biggest fan?” I ask, careful not to use the word hate.
His simmering eyes meet mine. “More than you know.”
“Then why did you try so hard to make me hate you? You could have told me why you needed the presidency . . . Maybe I wouldn’t have—”
“Char, you already had your mind made up about me no matter what I did. I guess I’d rather get negative attention from you than none at all.”
“But why? That’s so . . . foolish.”
He turns to face me. “You really have no idea, do you?” he asks, voice dropping with a distinct edge. It’s husky and sexy in a way that makes me both want to curl into a ball and reach for him.
“About what?”
He opens his mouth to respond just as a blinding headlight floods my vision. Ollie’s Jeep.
I pull back, half-blinded by the light, pulse thrumming under my skin. I’d entirely forgotten we were still playing a game. The existence of anyone else momentarily forgotten. “They finally found us,” I say, standing abruptly.
“Yeah. Perfect timing,” he mutters behind me. I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic. And I’m too scared to ask.
We only play one more round before Ollie admits he’s tired and needs to be horizontal.
“Looks like Operation Back to Seventeen was a bust,” Renner says on the way home.