The Girl Most Likely To

Chapter Eleven

We turned a corner and hid against a pair of doors located between a bank of lockers. Danny audibly swallowed as he collected himself. “Are you out of your mind?”

Yeah, quite possibly. What did he expect after dropping his confession twenty years too late? I wasn’t sure whether I should kiss him or cry.

“Why did you run?”

he asked, snapping me back to the present. “We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

“I don’t know,”

I said lamely. I wasn’t going to tell him that there was still a part of me that worried about my permanent record. It was impeccable, and it was going to remain that way.

“Running makes it seem like we were up to something.”

Okay, I handled it poorly. He didn’t need to rub it in. I lifted my finger to my lips to remind Danny to keep quiet. I didn’t hear anything, so I thought we were in the clear, but a faint flash of light came from our right. I pressed my back flat against the door, hoping the lockers would hide me. “How do we get out of this?”

I whispered as quietly as possible.

Danny tapped my shoulder and directed me to look at his face. He mouthed something I couldn’t make out. The footsteps were approaching us, so we didn’t have much time. Danny put his lips to my ear and spoke as quietly as a gentle breeze.

“Take. Off. Your. Shoes. They’re. Loud.”

The adrenaline pulsing through my veins made me extra attuned to the tickle of Danny’s breath on my skin. If it had been a different time and place, I would’ve taken off more than my shoes. One by one, I stepped out of my heels and slid down to pick them up. Danny turned the doorknob to the door he’d been leaning against, but no such luck. It was locked. I got ready to run again when Danny darted in front of me, caging me in.

“Sorry,”

he muttered as he pressed his chest against mine, trying the door behind me. I didn’t dare to respond when the slightest movement would’ve had my lips brushing his. I didn’t have the chance to anyway because we stumbled into a dark room not a second later.

Danny cleared his throat as he straightened up and turned on the flashlight on his phone. We were in the front office, where visitors had to stop by before they could enter the campus. Surrounding the lobby were administrators’ offices.

“What’s our plan?”

I whispered, trying not to think about the cold tile floor on my bare feet.

“Uh, hide?”

Danny tested the door to the vice principal’s office. It was locked. “Something you’re good at.”

He said this jokingly, but we both knew there was truth behind it.

“I can’t help it if I excel at everything.”

“Rach.”

Danny stopped his search and turned off his flashlight. It took a second for my eyes to readjust to the darkness. “What do you want from me? Did you come tonight just to rehash old shit?”

“No, I—”

It was too embarrassing to admit that I wanted to relive a time when I knew what I was doing. In the last twenty years, it had seemed like the rules of the game we were all playing were constantly changing. Like life was a game of blackjack and suddenly the way to win was to get twenty-five instead of twenty-one. But even then, getting twenty-five didn’t matter because the house always won. I guess I hadn’t figured out this adulting shit yet, and I wanted to go back to a simpler time when I was the master of my own destiny. “I was feeling lost and . . . I don’t know. This was the last place where things made sense. And I wanted to see you . . .”

“And . . . ?”

he asked, sweeping a hand across himself, as if to say he was right there to be seen. He was egging me for an assessment.

My eyes roamed Danny’s body, stopping to linger on my favorite spots, like his face, which could send me spinning for days with a single, soft look from him. Then there were his shoulders, where I found shelter. But if I had to choose, the feature I loved most were his strong hands with those slender fingers that looked like they were meant to play an instrument, though he never did, to my recollection. “Like a piece of art, okay?”

Danny coughed into his fist at my snark, but he couldn’t hide the curl of his satisfied smile. His eyes dropped with a reciprocating glance. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

Thank god it was dark. My skin must have been cotton-candy pink.

“You could have reached out earlier,” he added.

“Do you know how many Danny Phans there are?”

I was too anxious and turned around to search for a way to get past the front counter. Our best bet was to find cover underneath it. “And what about you? I don’t suppose you were looking for me.”

“You made that impossible,”

he replied. I couldn’t argue with that. I wasn’t active on social media. Even when I’d had a profile, I never updated it or checked it. “But it’s nice knowing you didn’t forget about me.”

As if I could ever forget him.

Something fluttered in my chest as it sank in that we’d both looked for each other at some point, but it was outweighed by the fact that the search led us here, hiding from the powers that be.

“Hold that thought.”

I placed my hands flat on the front desk and attempted to hop onto it. If I could hold myself up long enough, I could swing my legs over and get to the other side. After a couple of attempts, it was apparent that I was neither tall enough nor strong enough to pull it off. Danny stood to the side, doing a poor job of holding in his laughter.

I huffed as I leaned against the counter. “You could make yourself more useful and give me a lift.”

“I have a better idea.”

Danny unlatched a swinging door at the opposite end of the counter and let himself in.

I dusted my hands as I crossed the room. “That would’ve been helpful five seconds ago.”

“And deprive myself of seeing how you’d pommel-horse your way over? Never.”

Danny stopped and pointed his flashlight on the wall. “Hey. Look at this.”

I scurried over to Danny with my shoes dangling on my fingers. He narrowed his eyes to read the big plaque on the wall, but I didn’t need to look closer to know what it was. The Student of the Year plaque once haunted my dreams. It hung right outside a back door to the principal’s office. Covered with names etched in gold, it went back to 1965, when the school was first built. I’d never known there was a back door there because only people who were called into the principal’s office went through that way.

Danny ran his finger down the list until he found our graduation year. “Does it still piss you off that Mariana won for our class?”

Was it something I thought about on a daily basis? No.

But did seeing my reflection in the backdrop of Mariana’s glittering name grind my gears? A little bit.

“It’s whatever,”

I said, realizing that sounded like bitter grapes. It was my only loss to Mariana that stung.

“‘Whatever’?”

Danny mocked. “Didn’t you call it your Wimbledon Trophy?”

Damn it. Was he dead set on making me cringe at myself all night?

“It’s the most prestigious of the Grand Slam tournaments,”

I asserted.

That is, according to me it was. One could argue that Wimbledon was pretentious, with the all-white attire, but personally I thought it was elegant as fuck. I always looked forward to watching the tournament every year. “It’s—”

“Your favorite,”

Danny chimed in, taking the words out of my mouth. “I know.”

The corners of his lips tipped upward, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. Once, I had made the error of professing my love of Wimbledon with my own rendition of the NBC Breakfast at Wimbledon theme song, air-drumming to the march of trumpets. Some things weren’t meant to be expressed out loud.

Danny started to hum some version of it that sounded unrecognizable through his snickering. He was being an ass, which made it all the worse that I found it endearing. He was having so much fun crowing his off-tune imitation of fanfare, it was hard not to smile back.

“Are you done yet? Did you forget we’re basically fugitives?”

“To fug- is ‘to flee,’”

Danny said. “You taught me that.”

A spark of pride flickered in me. “Nice to know you remembered your prefixes. Can you focus here?”

Danny laughed but went silent when the lobby doorknob jiggled. I would have stood there frozen if Danny hadn’t swept me into the nearest room, wrapping his arms around me like he was shielding me. The door closed behind us, leaving us in the dark, but the smell of paper and sharpened pencils gave away the supply closet.

“Hello?”

a voice shouted. Though it sounded muffled from where Danny and I stood, I recognized the voice. It was the same voice we’d heard in the quad. Light appeared at the bottom of the door as the sound of footsteps grew louder. If it wasn’t already weird that I was clutching Danny, the light made things ten times more awkward. I could see where I’d been breathing into his neck and the smattering of goose bumps on his skin. It wouldn’t take much to press my lips on every single one.

Danny tucked his head over my shoulder, whispering just a breath above silence, “Sorry for dragging you in here.”

Sorry was the last thing I was feeling at the moment. “We’ll be out of here soon.”

I wasn’t in any rush to disentangle. I steadied my breathing as I took in his faint cologne. It was some combination of a fresh linen scent and his salty skin that, if we weren’t literally hiding, I’d have inhaled all for myself.

“It’s not like we’ve never done this before. I don’t mind,”

I whispered back. Danny didn’t reply right away, making me wonder if I’d revealed too much in my hazy lust. I let go a little to put a sliver of space between us, as much as Danny’s tight hold allowed. “Can I say that?”

“What?”

Doors were being opened and shut as the person outside searched the other offices. My racing pulse kicked up a notch. Given our predicament, I kept things concise. “Because . . . I ‘messed you up’?”

He exhaled slowly, his body deflating with his sigh. Danny didn’t deny it, which made me want to crawl into the ground. But then he whispered something back. Something that sounded a lot like, “Missed you too.”

He missed me too, or he messed me up too? I pulled back so I could see his face. I needed confirmation of his exact words. I wouldn’t survive this if it turned out to be a bad case of telephone. “Say that again.”

Danny swept his tongue between his lips before he mouthed the words more slowly. “I. Missed. You. Too. I didn’t know how much until I saw you again.”

I didn’t care to correct him—after all, he did mess me up too—because the feeling was mutual. I had held on to good memories during our time apart, but being in Danny’s presence again gave them a new dimension. His hands, once nervous and shaky, caressed my face as his fingers slid into my hair. His bright eyes had a new touch of sadness, conveying some unspoken apology that I wanted to hear. Instead, the only sound was his uneven breath mirroring the desperate strain of my own.

“Can I . . . ?”

Danny asked, but I was already on my way there. Kissing had made our friendship murky, but we were older now. We could redefine what it meant to us now . . . couldn’t we?

The first achingly soft press of our lips said I’m sorry as memories of golden light flickered in my mind. But regret and longing soon emerged, spreading a dull, persistent ache from my heart. Danny kissed me again, with growing urgency, the taste of his tongue beginning to ward off bad memories. I was getting lost in my desire when he broke away.

“There’s so much I want to say . . .”

Danny paused when light swung in our direction, and waited until it shifted away. “But not here.”

“Why not?”

There was nowhere else we could go. It seemed to me we might as well hash things out here, unless this was his twisted way of letting me down gently after getting some closure. That could wait until the buttons on his shirt weren’t digging into my chest.

“Because”—his lips brushed against mine—“I don’t want to whisper like it’s a secret.”

If that was the case, then I could be patient. I gave him a peck, intending it to be one last kiss for the road, but then it evolved into something not so innocent. We managed to be quiet until Danny’s leg stepped in between my legs. The delicious friction had me gasping before Danny’s hand covered my mouth.

“Anyone there?”

a voice announced, the same one from the courtyard.

Footsteps approached in our direction. I held my breath, for no good reason except in the hope that, in the best-case scenario, not breathing made me invisible.

Then another voice responded, and the footsteps retreated.

“Winston?”

It was Mariana. Hearing her voice threw a bucket of ice over my mood. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,”

the man replied. “I thought I saw someone here.”

Wait. Winston? As in class clown Winston Lin? How did he get access to the office? Was he the security guard here or something?

“Was it Danny? I’ve been looking for him.”

Mariana’s voice was steeped in exasperation. “He’s supposed to help me with the auction. We’re running behind schedule.”

“No, I haven’t seen him,”

Winston replied.

Danny peered over his shoulder and back at me, mouthing, Wanna get out of here?

I shook my head. I wasn’t going to give myself up now. Danny was right. Running made us look suspicious. I couldn’t imagine what Mariana and Winston would think if they discovered Danny and me hiding in the supply closet in a compromised position, all because I got spooked. I had too much pride to present Mariana with gossip on a silver platter.

The footsteps came toward us again. Danny walked me backward to the very back of the closet, though it didn’t provide any more cover. I shut my eyes, waiting for our time to run out, but then the footsteps sounded like they were veering to the side.

“Sorry,”

Winston said as the door to a different office opened. “I need to get my other set of keys to lock up when the reunion wraps up.”

“Sorry to make you stay late,”

Mariana replied.

“Eh, it’s okay. All in a day’s work as principal.”

Principal? This was the same guy who attempted Jackass pranks at school, giving all the administrators headaches? What kind of parallel universe were we living in right now?

“Besides,”

Winston said, “you’re helping me with the fundraising.”

“It’s nothing. We were going to put all this work into the reunion anyway. We might as well let some of that effort go to some good use.”

Mariana’s heels clacked against the floor, bringing her closer. “Wow, I haven’t seen that in a long time.”

“What?”

Winston’s voice gradually grew louder as he moved around the office. “The Student of the Year plaque?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry to tell you, Mari, but it’s rigged.”

What?!

Danny covered my mouth before the word burst forth from the depths of my wrath, then offered a silent apology for the sudden contact. The move stunned me, but it was probably for the best given that I’d have given our presence away otherwise. Fortunately, Mariana was louder.

“What?!”

she exclaimed. For once, Mariana and I were on the same page.

“The administrators say the teachers voted on it, but the deciding vote always came down to the principal. So really, it was favoritism.”

Winston relayed this information as the sound of their footsteps began to recede as they walked farther away. “And whoever gets the second highest number of votes gets ‘Most Likely to Succeed.’”

They shut off the lights, leaving Danny and me alone in darkness once again. The sound of the back door being locked followed. It was about five seconds before Danny let go of me to check if it was safe to leave the closet. He peeked out the door and then opened it wider, giving me an all-clear nod.

The bitterness I’d buried long ago over this stupid loss resurfaced. The biggest aspiration of my teenage life was built on a lie. The Student of the Year Award wasn’t determined by merit, and my peers didn’t choose me to be Most Likely to Succeed. Teachers gave it to me as an arbitrary consolation prize.

“Shit. We’re not locked in, are we?”

Danny asked as we reentered the front office.

“We can still open it from the inside,”

I said as I zoomed past the plaque. I couldn’t look at it anymore.

“How do you know that?”

“Some of us stayed late after school and got accidentally locked in.”

I wasn’t sure why I said that like it was a flex. “That doesn’t matter. None of it ever mattered.”

Danny caught up to me. “Rach . . . you don’t care about that, do you?”

How could I? Apparently, it was all a sham. The school had dangled a fake carrot in front of me. For the better part of my life, I’d thought I was the girl most likely to succeed. It wouldn’t hurt so much if I had still come out of school above it all, but now, after getting laid off, I was back at square one. I couldn’t help but feel like I’d pushed myself through late nights, offering to go above and beyond, keeping my head down until I got to the other side, only to get nothing. None of it ever mattered.

Danny’s phone lit up from a text. “Shit.”

He swiped the notification away with a little more force than necessary. “I have to get back to the gym. The auction is starting. I’m supposed to run it.”

He searched my face. Whatever he was looking for, he didn’t find it. The moment we’d had was lost. It was in the trash, along with my career and my car. “Hey, Rach.”

I blinked until I saw him more clearly.

Danny gripped my arms and held me at a distance, like he was examining me. “You’re going to be okay, right?”

My head bobbed in a lopsided nod. Apparently, that was enough to convince Danny. “Good, because don’t think I’m forgetting about what you said earlier. If you want to make things right, then stay until the end of the reunion. Can you at least do that?”

I had to snap out of it. I couldn’t let old high school grudges distract me from the real reason I was here. “Yeah. I’ll be here.”

“Good.”

Danny planted a kiss on my forehead. “Because we’re not finished yet.”

April 2003

SuperxSaiyan85: meet you at the library tomorrow

Danny was a mystery. After the drunk phone call, he avoided me. He gave the usual excuses about his jobs, but he wouldn’t make eye contact with me at school. Worse, he hadn’t been online either. If he had, he was ghosting. Did this out-of-the-blue message mean we were okay? Were we moving on, business as usual?

I checked his AIM profile for any illuminating details, but all I gleaned was that he was currently listening to “The Middle”

by Jimmy Eat World.

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: why

He had never showed up before, and he had less reason to once I offered to share my notes.

SuperxSaiyan85: Mrs. Chang found me during passing period and told me she better see me studying

Well, if the principal had threatened me, I’d do the same.

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: Is she really your aunt?

SuperxSaiyan85: do people still think that? She’s a family friend.

xxaznxbbxgrlxx: ok. Be there at 3

The school library practically became my second home. With AP tests only weeks away, assignments were piling up. Some study groups decided to divvy up the work and share answers because there was simply no time to do everything on top of sports and clubs. Nat and I exchanged some assignments, but she wasn’t in all the same classes as me, so I was on my own for the rest.

I put my pencil down and laid my head on top of my history textbook. At the table on my right, Josh Wu was working steadily through each of his physics problems like he was writing letters of the alphabet. He didn’t stop and second-guess himself like I did. I would have loved to barter homework with him, but despite having a few classes together, we didn’t speak to each other. He kept to himself, staying in his lane the way I stayed in mine. Josh flipped the page to his homework packet, not even noticing that I’d been watching him the whole time. I closed my eyes, listening to the soothing sound of his pencil scribbling on paper.

A backpack slammed next to me, interrupting my peace. My eyes popped opened in time to see Danny waving apologetically to our librarian. “Hey,”

he whispered as he took the seat next to me. “No sleeping in the library.”

“You’re late,”

I said, smoothing my hair as I sat up. I pointed at the clock above the front counter. It was three forty-five.

“I had to take care of something.”

At this point, I thought, Danny should trademark his vague excuses. “You could’ve told me during fifth period if you were going to be late.”

“It’s only forty-five minutes. What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is that I’m helping you and you could at least do me the courtesy of telling me if you’re going to be late,”

I said, sounding snippy rather than assertive as I’d intended. I had my reasons lined up in case he called me out on it. I was stressed from the extra work, and college acceptance letters were coming any day now. Anyone who applied to private schools would receive their admission decisions this week. Mariana had already accepted her early admission to Georgetown. The UCs were lagging. Exams were looming. The direction of my life was going to be determined in a matter of weeks, maybe days, and I had no idea where it was going to take me.

With all of that on my mind, somehow my thoughts circled back to Danny. Why did I revolve my schedule around him? If he was late, that was on him. If he didn’t log into AIM, then I’d actually finish my homework before midnight. Why was I so concerned about him? Why did I care so much if he said hi to me in class, or wonder if he got enough sleep? Why did I want to spend more time with him when I already saw him five days out of the week?

Danny opened his backpack and took out the stack of flash cards I let him borrow. “Test me.”

I glared at him for the demanding tone, but I reluctantly took the cards. I was still his tutor after all. I worked out my frustration as I shuffled the cards.

To my pleasant surprise, Danny recited every detail I’d written on each card with startling precision. We went through every American and British author and their celebrated works. At times he answered with his eyes closed and sometimes while doodling on the margins of his notebook, like he was showing off. When Mrs. Chang popped into the library, as she had promised, he didn’t even stumble, only smiled as he waved to her. As quickly as she appeared, Mrs. Chang departed once she saw Danny being productive.

“Do you have a photographic memory or something?”

I couldn’t recite my own flash cards that well.

“I’ve been studying when it’s slow at work or when I get home,”

he explained.

“Oh.”

Was I allowed to feel proud that I helped in some way?

“That’s why I haven’t been online.”

Now I felt dumb for taking his absence personally. He had more responsibilities than me. Of course he had more important things to do than chat on AIM. “Does that mean you’ll show up tomorrow?”

It was a fair question since he hadn’t shown up consistently, but Danny was looking at me as if I asked him if the sky was blue.

Danny warpped a rubber band around my flash cards. “I thought it was an open invitation.”

“It is. You’re always welcome.”

Someone across the library shushed us. I wasn’t sure where it came from, but enough people looked in our direction to confirm that the admonition was meant for us.

“Um,”

I said, lowering my voice, “do you want to meet at my house instead?”

I wasn’t sure why I was holding my breath. I’d had friends over for projects all the time. And technically speaking, Danny was one of my oldest friends. There wasn’t any reason to feel nervous about being alone with him in my house while my parents were at work.

Danny’s face was starting to look like a pufferfish as he thought about his answer. My mind started to fill with all the ways I’d made things awkward when his mouth popped open.

“Uh, yeah. I just need to tell Jimmy I won’t be going in for my shift.”

Again, I had worried for nothing. He had to adjust his schedule. That was all.

“Okay. It’s a d—”

I coughed. I almost said it was a date! Which it totally wasn’t! It was totally normal to confirm a meeting by saying it was a date . . . right? “It’s a dead-end street . . . my house.”

This would’ve been a good save, but my house wasn’t on a dead-end street and Danny would see that when he came over. “I mean, you pass one on the way there.”

I waved my hand in the air. Hopefully, he’d get the hint to disregard everything I’d said in the last ten seconds. “Meet me in the parking lot and you can follow me there.”

I opened my book and pretended to study before this conversation could become a bigger disaster. What was going on with me? Why was I getting so worked up over studying?