“Whittaker?” Noelle said. “He's . . . Whittaker. He is a class unto himself.” She looked around at the other Billings Girls and slowly smiled. “In fact... you should meet him.”
She got up, grabbed my wrist, and started pulling me across the clearing, all in one motion--all before I could get out a word of protest.
“Whit! Hey, Whit!” Noelle shouted, gesturing with her bottle. “This is the girl I was telling you about.”
She used her tremendous arm strength to practically whip me at Whittaker. The sudden velocity took me by surprise and I stumbled, bracing my hands against his large chest to stop my fall. All the guys, of course, cracked up laughing. Whittaker put his hands gently on my elbows and steadied me.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
He had very warm brown eyes.
“Fine,” I said, embarrassed.
Wait a second. Had Noelle said I was the girl she had told him about? What the hell had she been saying?
11
“I'm Walt Whittaker,” he said, offering his hand. “But my friends call me Whittaker or Whit. Your preference.”
“Reed Brennan,” I said, shaking his hand. It was unbelievably soft and warm.
“So, Reed. You're new to Easton, I understand. Welcome,” he said.
The timbre of his voice made my skin tingle in a pleasing, humming way. It was comforting. Familiar, somehow.
“You're not?” I asked.
Again, everyone laughed. Even Whit. “No. No. My family has been a fixture here for generations,” he said. “I've just been on holiday with my parents. We did a tour of East Asia. China, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines. . . . Do you travel, Reed?”
Not unless you count all those trips to Hershey Park back when I still wore pink sneakers.
“Not really,” I said.
He looked at me for a long moment, as if what I had just said did not compute. I started to grow warm under his scrutiny,
“That's a shame,” he said finally. “You can't truly know yourself until you've seen the world, you know?”
I was struggling to formulate an answer that wouldn't make me sound naive and unworldly when Gage slapped his hand down on Whittaker's shoulder from behind.
“Dude! Get over here! We were just talking about the Legacy. You gotta tell us what you know.”
Whittaker smirked. “Ah, the Legacy. So it begins,” he said.
12
What was this Legacy thing? I wanted to ask, but it seemed like one of those things that all of them already knew about, so if I asked about it, I would just be making it abundantly clear that I knew nothing--thereby reminding them of what an outsider I was. I decided to keep my mouth shut and hope I'd be able to overhear all about it in time.
“Perhaps we can catch up later?” he said to me.
“Uh . . . sure,” I replied.
Gage pulled Whittaker off for a private confab with the boys and Noelle stepped up next to me.
“So? Work your spell on him yet?” Noelle asked.
“You told him about me?” I said.
'Yeah. I thought maybe you guys could get to know each other,“ Noelle said with a shrug. 'Whit could be good for you. He's very. .. cultured.”