2. Taylor
CHAPTER 2
TAYLOR
T aylor Levine would have given a great deal to get rid of the way she felt when Kane looked at her. He was a very inconvenient person to have a crush on.
She wasn’t sure that Kane even knew she existed. Or rather, he did, of course — they ran in the same circles and they’d had conversations in which he had addressed her by name. But he probably never thought about her when she wasn’t right in front of him. They were only friends because Maddie and Bradley were dating, had been dating for as long as they had known one another.
Unfortunately, that didn’t change the way she felt about him.
She could feel Maddie’s eyes on her as she got up from the lunch table to dump her tray, trying to act as if her leaving right after Kane was nothing more than a coincidence. She suspected that Maddie probably knew how she felt — they were best friends, after all — but if Maddie did know, she had always been gracious enough not to say anything about it, which Taylor appreciated.
She hurried down the hall now and caught up with Kane at his locker. “Hey,” she said. “Can I talk to you?”
He glanced down at her. “Don’t you have a class to get to or something?”
“We both have a class to get to,” she said. “It’s study hall next.” The two of them had the same study hall, and she would have expected him to know that, because even though he’d skipped that period more times than he had attended it this semester, they’d shared it for the past four years.
“Right,” he said, as if he had recalled it only now that she had told him. “Well, I’m not going to that.”
“Will you please come? I need to talk to you.”
It was more direct than she usually was with him. He stared at her. “Talk to me about what?”
It would have helped immensely, she thought, if he wasn’t so good-looking. If she wasn’t so distracted by the way his hair fell into his dark eyes. “About your party,” she said.
“Are you going to tell me not to have it?”
“I can’t tell you what to do,” she said, knowing that he would respond well to that admission. “I just want to have a conversation. We’re friends, aren’t we?”
Kane sighed. “Okay,” he agreed. “A conversation. And I guess I can’t persuade you to come to the shed with me instead of class?”
“The shed?”
“You’ve never been?”
She shook her head.
“Okay, you have to come to the shed at least once before you graduate,” he said. “You can skip study hall for one day, right?”
She frowned, uncertain. “I don’t know.”
“You can,” he said. “I’ve skipped a thousand times and no one has ever said anything.”
“But we do need to stay out of trouble,” she said. “If we don’t stay out of trouble, Valencia will let our schools know. I believe she’ll do that.”
“She won’t do anything because you skipped a study hall. Trust me. She wouldn’t mess up your future over that . She’s saying that stuff to try to threaten people out of serious infractions. No one expects seniors in their last few months of school to attend every single study hall. That would be crazy.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Taylor said.
“So you’ll come with me?”
“I guess I will. Promise we won’t get into any trouble?”
“If anyone catches us, I’ll say I peer pressured you into it,” Kane said. “You know they’ll believe that.”
She laughed. “You really think everyone thinks I’m that suggestible?”
“Well, aren’t you?” he teased her.
Maybe she should have been angry with him for the implication, but it did sort of feel good to be teased by Kane. It felt like he was acknowledging the relationship between the two of them. He was telling her that he knew her, even if the version of her that he was talking about now didn’t feel like who she really was. She felt comfortable with the joke he was making. It was all right.
“Okay,” she told him. “You lead the way. Let’s see this shed of yours.”
The shed, it turned out, was one Taylor had seen many times before, but she had never given it much thought. It was a sports equipment shed situated on the far side of the running track. There was a padlock on the door, but it hung open.
“This is never locked during the day,” Kane explained as he eased the door open so that she could go inside. “It’s opened early so that anyone who needs to can get their equipment out. But almost no one comes in during the day. They get their stuff for before school practices, or after school practices, and Coach Carson gets everything he needs in the morning. So it’s a good place to hide out.”
Taylor stared at him. “This is where you go when you cut class? To a musty old shed?”
He laughed. “It’s a good place to get high, or to hook up, if that’s what you’re into.” He gestured to a pile of crash mats. “Have a seat.”
Taylor couldn’t imagine sitting down on them, knowing that this was where people came to hook up. “I’ll stand.”
“Oh, for…” He shrugged out of his jacked and handed it to her. “Here, you can sit on that.”
She nodded and spread it out, crossing her legs to sit down on top of it. It did feel a little less gross, though she was still aware, in the back of her mind, of the fact that a lot of her classmates had probably made use of this space in all kinds of ways. “If you’re going to get high, I’m going to leave,” she told him. “I don’t want to breathe all that. And I definitely don’t want to hook up.”
Immediately, she was embarrassed that she’d said it. It wasn’t like he’d asked her to hook up with him, for God’s sake — what had she been thinking by bringing it up?
Fortunately, he just laughed. “Noted,” he said. “No hookups. Got it. But you’re the one who wanted to come and talk, right? So let’s talk. What’s up?”
She played with her sleeve for a moment. “This party you’re talking about,” she said. “It would be the usual sort of thing? We go out of town onto some of the farmland out there, do a little drinking, maybe some of you guys smoke a little, all that?”
“Sure,” he said. “We’ll get a couple of kegs and a few bottles of something or other. I’ve still got my fake ID, and Bradley has one too.”
“There’s no way Bradley is going to buy,” Taylor said. “I mean, you might get him to throw in money, but he won’t be in charge of actually getting the liquor. Not anymore. He’s way past being willing to do that. And honestly, Kane, he should be. Do you know the kind of trouble the two of you could get into? It’s always been too big a risk. I’ve always thought so. That’s why I never got a fake ID, even last year when Maddie’s brother was making them for everyone who wanted one.”
“I always thought that was a little crazy of you,” Kane said. “You’d be better off having one, even if you never did decide to use it.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Taylor said firmly. “What if I got pulled over for speeding or something and a cop saw it? It’s a crime to have a fake ID, Kane. I mean, we’ve all played it pretty fast and loose with this stuff for years. It’s felt safe to drink beer in cornfields, and there’s always been a sort of security to the idea that even if we did get caught, there were so many of us out there that nothing too horrible would happen.”
“We’ve had parties get busted before,” Kane said. “Nothing terrible has ever happened.”
“Right,” Taylor agreed. “And the thing is, we need to acknowledge the fact that part of that has been luck, Kane. We’ve been very lucky. We need to stop doing this crap, because we are all about to make it to the next part of our lives.”
“You sound exactly like Bradley.”
“No, listen to me,” she said seriously. “This isn’t about me. This isn’t about me trying to protect my future, okay? Because if it was that, all I’d have to do would be to not show up at your party. Which I don’t plan to, by the way.” Oh, but that was a hard thing to say. She wanted to go to the party. She wanted to spend time with Kane. It wouldn’t be long at all before their lives spun them in different directions, and despite her feelings for him, she knew that she didn’t mean much of anything to him. They’d probably never see each other again once she went off to college — she couldn’t count on it, anyway. Skipping one of the last big opportunities she’d ever have to spend time with him felt crazy.
Crazy, but it had to be done. Going to this party was a bad idea, and she knew it. It wasn’t as if Kane was her boyfriend. It wasn’t as if she was choosing between a future with him and her future off at college. Only one of those things was real, and she had to prioritize it.
But she didn’t want to let him destroy himself.
“I don’t think you should have a party,” she told him.
“Oh, God, not you too. Is this why you brought me out here?”
“Kane, listen, okay? The school I got into — I know everyone made a big deal because I was the first in our group to get an acceptance, and because I’ve been talking about nursing school forever. And I’m not saying it’s not a big deal for me, because it is. But it’s also… it’s a state school.”
He looked at her. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean it’s not that difficult to get into.”
“Taylor, you know I applied to colleges and got rejected.” She was one of few who did know that, actually, because she’d seen the envelopes fall out of his locker one day and had said you didn’t get in? She had recognized what those small envelopes meant. She had never mentioned it to anyone else, of course, and as far as she knew, neither had he.
“I could help you,” she told him. “If we brought your grades up, if you wrote really good essays — and I could help you with that — and got letters of recommendation from a couple of teachers…”
He laughed wryly. “Which teachers do you think are going to recommend me for anything besides an overnight in county?”
“Kane…” How could she tell him that she knew he was better than the man he was becoming? How could she put into words that she saw so much better for him than he clearly saw for himself? “We could do this,” she said. “We could get you in. We could go to school together. It would be fun.”
The look he gave her was almost pitying. “You’d better get back to study hall,” he said. “I might want to smoke in here after all.”
It was as clear a rejection as Taylor was going to get. A part of her felt embarrassed.
But a part of her knew that Kane was the one who ought to feel bad. She had offered him a second chance… or really, more like a third or fourth chance. So many people had offered to help him so many times, and he had always pushed them away.
Taylor wanted him to be better than this. She wanted him to be the guy she had fallen for.
But if that wasn’t who he wanted to be, she supposed there wasn’t a whole lot she could do about it.