Perfect Couple (Superlatives 2)

“Hey,” said Sawyer.

“—and have both of you sit behind the desk at the same time. Kaye, sit in Aidan’s lap.”

“I don’t like Aidan enough right now to sit in his lap,” Kaye said. “Anyway, we would just be reinscribing the traditional patriarchal hierarchy of a man being in charge and a woman infantilized in his lap.”

“Yeah!” came Sawyer’s voice.

“Shut up,” she told him.

“Scoot over, Aidan,” I said. “Both of you sit on the edge of the chair and share it.” I would have given anything to be told to pose like this with Brody. It was sad that Aidan and Kaye were still dating but didn’t care anymore about the golden opportunity of sitting together in a chair. “Parliamentary procedure. All in favor?” I asked. “Aye—and my opinion is the only one that counts. I am on deadline with this shit.”

“Cussing in the principal’s office!” Sawyer managed to make his voice sound horrified even through the padding of his costume.

“I liked you better when you wore glasses and took orders,” Aidan told me.

Without adjusting the settings, I brought my camera up from its strap and snapped a quick photo in Aidan’s general direction. “There,” I said. “I’ve got a shot of you with your eyes bugged out and your mouth wide open. That’s probably all I need.” I turned to leave the office.

“You look great without your glasses,” Aidan said promptly, “and this newfound assertiveness becomes you.” Kaye was laughing.

I waited for them to get into position, then started taking pictures. I was focusing on their faces and snapping photos so fast that I almost didn’t notice the light had changed and a sunbeam streamed white through the window. It took me a few frames to realize the light was actually Sawyer’s white costume. He’d walked behind Kaye and Aidan. All the shots had a giant pelican in the background.

A picture in the yearbook of Sawyer photobombing Kaye and Aidan would have said volumes about our senior class. But Aidan would resent it. Kaye would be hopping mad. And Kennedy had a sense of humor about his own projects, not mine.

“Sawyer!” I barked. “The white pelican is about to become an endangered species.”

He put his hands on his padded hips. “That is insulting,” he said, his voice thin behind the foam head. “All our large waterfowl are in danger because we’re destroying their wetlands. It’s not something to joke about.”

No topics were off limits for him to joke about. I suspected I’d found, for the first time, Sawyer’s sensitive spot. He was an animal rights supporter. Sawyer, sensitive!

That was okay. I was sensitive too. Kennedy had called me disorganized last Friday, and I was determined to prove him wrong. I pointed to a chair in front of Ms. Chen’s desk, where I assumed Brody sat when he got lectured for playing practical jokes and sentenced to on-campus suspension. I told Sawyer, “Sit down and shut up.”

He commanded everyone’s attention as he sat, wiggling his bird butt to fit it into the chair’s confines. He casually crossed one big webbed bird foot on the opposite knee and opened his copy of Crime and Punishment. I wasn’t sure which part of the bird head he saw from, but he appeared to be actually reading.

I snapped ten pictures of him. One of these would be perfect.

11

WHEN I FIRST GOT HOME from school, Mom was wearing paint-stained clothes and carrying a ladder, but then I lost track of her. I closed myself in my bedroom, sat down at my desk, and went right to work on the race photos for my website. I’d made a lot of progress on them the last two nights. I wanted to finish that night and send out an e-mail to the 5K racers saying that their photos were available for purchase.

Then I could get back to processing the Superlatives photos. I’d scheduled my last few photo sessions for tomorrow during school. I could continue fixing the photos over the weekend. I assumed I would meet Kennedy and our friends at the Crab Lab after the game Friday night. He’d also invited me to a jazz concert in the park on Saturday, which sounded suspiciously like we would be the youngest ones there. That happened on a lot of dates with Kennedy. But if Tia was right about Kennedy’s pattern of picking a fight with me before our dates, we wouldn’t go anyway.

I suspected I knew what the subject of the fight would be too. My photo of Brody, Will, and Noah took up half the front page of the day’s local paper. PHOTO BY HARPER DAVIS was printed in the bottom corner. I was so proud. And I was afraid my admiration for Brody shone through in that shot. Even if it didn’t, I’d gone out on my own and sold my work to a publication outside school, something Kennedy had never been able to do, despite all his attempts to submit movie reviews and peevish columns about tourists. Either way, he was likely to be pissed with me.

So be it. Frankly, I was getting pretty disillusioned with dating. My boyfriend annoyed the crap out of me, and the guy who made me feel like heaven didn’t want to be my boyfriend. Anyway, if Kennedy decided to give me the silent treatment again, that would free up plenty of time for me to perfect the yearbook photos and turn them in to him by Monday. I would get the rest to him on a rolling basis, as he’d requested, so he could complete his (awful) layouts. At the end of the week, he would have them all, and he could put the section to bed by the deadline.

That was my plan.

My dad was shouting. I blinked at my computer screen and glanced at my bedroom window. Night had fallen. My heart sped as fast as it had when he’d reprimanded me on the phone. He was yelling at Mom. He said she wasn’t giving them a chance. She was going through with this ridiculous divorce to punish him. No, he would not shut up just because he was disturbing the guests at her Goddamned bed and breakfast.