She got in his way. Her smile stayed on, and stayed bright, but he saw a little flicker of impatience in her eyes. “Oh, come on. Since when is Shane Collins concerned about class?” she practically cooed. And before he could stop her, she came at him, backed him up against the lockers with a bang that attracted the attention of the fifty or sixty MHS students currently in the hallway, and . . .
And then all of a sudden she was all over him, hands in the wrong places, sliding up under his shirt, and she was kissing him, and for a long second his body was mostly saying, Mmmm, girl, warm, before his brain yelled, Monica! and the whole thing went very wrong.
Shane grabbed her by her shoulders and shoved her back. Hard. Monica stumbled, shock all over her pretty face, and for a second he saw genuine hurt . . . but only for a second.
Then it was anger, turned up to eleven.
“Oh, sorry—didn’t know you were gay, Collins! I should have known you and Glass—”
“Hey!” Shane said sharply. “Back off.” Because she was already drawing a crowd, and there was nothing Monica liked better than a stage for her personal drama. Michael slammed his locker door, and when Shane glanced over at him, he saw that his friend’s face had gone very still. Michael could get really cold when he wanted, but the last thing he needed right now was Michael weighing in, especially when Monica was bound to push buttons. “Walk away. Look, I’m already doing it.” And he did, shouldering his backpack and pushing past her in the general direction of his next class.
Monica followed. “That’s it? You’re just going to walk away?” Her voice carried so well she really should have been a drama queen. “So you get me to do all those awful things and then you pretend like it never happened?”
“Make up your mind, Monica—either I’m a perv hookup artist or I’m gay,” Shane said, and kept walking. “Pick one.”
“You’re a walking social disease. I don’t have to pick anything!”
“Certainly don’t have to pick me,” he said, and flashed her a grin and a finger on the way into his classroom. “Not interested.”
And he figured, in his innocence, that it probably would blow over by the end of school.
Wrong.
? ? ?
There was no sign of Monica, or any of her posse, lurking around for Shane when school ended, which he figured was a good thing. Michael had headed off to practice guitar, as he did pretty much every day; Shane, on the other hand, was all about the slacking off, preferably someplace not his own house, but in a pinch that would do. Today, he thought he’d walk his sister, Alyssa, as far as the front door—because he was a good brother, mostly—and then see what kind of trouble he could find in one of the game shops, preferably the one that let him play for free, as long as he bought a game once in a while. His mom would gripe, because he probably wouldn’t show for dinner; his dad wouldn’t much care, because, like on most nights, he’d probably wind up at the bar and end up not caring about much.
Alyssa would care, but she was a big girl now, and she’d just have to get over it, the way Shane had gotten over all of the crap that came along with being a Morganville inmate.
He loitered outside the junior high gym until his sister came out—a leggy, willowy girl with a face that was going to be beautiful when it finally gave up the baby fat. For now, she looked . . . sweet.
And deeply amused.
“What?” Shane stayed slumped against the concrete wall. She slumped next to him and crossed her arms. Out on the grass field, the Morganville High Vipers football team was making an effort to look tough. Not very successfully.
“You,” Alyssa said, and laughed. She had a nice laugh, when it wasn’t directed at him. “I hear you got all up Monica’s nose today.”
“She did it first,” Shane said. “She was all over me in the hall. I guess you heard that, too.”
“Hands down your pants?”
“What? No!” His ears were turning red. He didn’t even want to have this conversation with his kid sister. “It wasn’t like that.”
“So what was it like? Did she kiss you?”
Yes. “Kinda.”
“Tongue kiss?”
“Shut up, Lyss.”
“Because tongue kissing Monica would probably give you some dire germs.”
“I’m not kidding—shut up!”
Alyssa made a rude noise, but she let it go, pushed off the wall, and started walking with long, easy strides. She was wearing gym clothes—gray shorts, a T-shirt Shane personally felt was too tight, and cross-trainers with little footie socks. She was sweet, and shy with everybody but Shane, it seemed like. “So, after the thing we won’t discuss, I heard you punched her.”
“Do you really think I’d punch a girl?”
“Well, it’s Monica.”
“No. I pushed her off me, that’s all. Then she—”
“Wait,” Alyssa said, and turned backward as she walked, facing him. She was basically the only person Shane had ever seen who could walk backward as fast as forward. It was weird. “Let me guess. She said—uh—you were gay?”
Huh. “Yeah.”
“Well, that’s her go-to insult for anybody who doesn’t drool over her like a total perv. Did she go to level two?”
“You tell me.”
“Did she Myspace bomb you yet?”