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professional cheerleader?’ And I was already on student council, but she pushed me to run for office. Now that I’m in charge, she’s like, ‘Why are you expending effort on something other than school?’ It’s frustrating.”
    “I can tell,” he said. “Maybe you should concentrate on another kind of extracurricular activity.” He put his arm around me, with his hand in my hair.
    Here we went again. He came after me because something about me screamed target to him. I knew he was only making fun of me, like he made fun of everybody, and I should stay away from him.
    Especially since I had a boyfriend.
    My deep, dark secret was this: Lately when Sawyer touched me, my palms got sweaty. And I liked it. My make-out sessions with Aidan weren’t as frequent or intense as they’d been when we first started dating three years ago, but we did still have them. And of course, there were the few times we’d gone all the way. But nothing we’d done affected me like Sawyer getting a laugh at my expense.
    So I would put up with Sawyer exactly to the point that my ironic patience might start to seem suspicious to onlookers, and they figured out I had a crush on him.
    Or, worse: He did.
    Sawyer stroking my hair definitely was something I wouldn’t tolerate if I didn’t like him. I tried to dodge away from his hand, which hurt because he’d already wound a curl around his finger.
    “Ow!” Collecting myself, I informed him drily, as if he wasn’t holding me captive by a thread, “I don’t like it when people touch my hair.”
    He raised his brows. “That’s a completely different statement from ‘Stop touching my hair, Sawyer.’ ”
    It certainly was. And now that he’d pointed this out, I was afraid he did suspect the truth. Overdoing my reaction now, protesting too much, would just draw attention to the fact that my crush on him was getting more serious. I gavehim my best withering look—I was good at these, if I did say so myself—and grumbled, “I’m sensitive about my hair, Sawyer. I just had a huge fight with Aidan about this.” In fact, that’s where my recent trouble with Aidan had started.
    I’d never straightened my hair, but I hadn’t been bold enough to let it pouf twice the size of my head, either. I’d worn it tamed in twists or braids until two weeks ago. Natural hair had been gaining popularity—not so much around small-town Florida, but in the parts of America that mattered, like New York and California and TV. I wanted to try it.
    I’d finally found the courage to spend a long Saturday unbinding my hair and nudging my curls to life. My mother had been supportive and helpful at first, working with the twists I couldn’t see in back. Halfway through she’d started complaining that she made enough money to pay someone else to do this.
    When we had finished, I liked the way it looked. I couldn’t wait to show Aidan when we went out that night. He’d told me it looked like an Afro. Logically I knew I shouldn’t have taken this as an insult, but he’d meant it as an insult. I was wearing my hair the way it grew on its own, more or less, and he told me it was ugly. Or dated. Or at least not what he wanted or expected in girlfriend hair.
    “Judging from the part of your fight that I overheard atthe Crab Lab,” Sawyer said, “I think you came down too hard on Aidan about that.” I couldn’t see what he was doing, but it felt like he was looping a bit of my hair around and around his finger, then carefully pulling his finger out, curling iron–style, seeing if my hair would stay that way. It would.
    “You?” I exclaimed. “Are taking up for Aidan ?” Sawyer made fun of everybody indiscriminately, but later you’d see him having a halfway normal conversation with most people. Not with Aidan. He definitely had it in for Aidan. Probably because Aidan’s life was so put together, and Sawyer’s wasn’t.
    “I’m definitely not taking up for him,” Sawyer said, tugging at a curl,