Paper Airplanes Read online

  “I know,” she breathed out. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  “Whatever,” I said, walking past her.

  I almost stopped short when I inhaled her vanilla scented body lotion. I don’t think I’d ever smelled something quite that intoxicating before. Dammit. What the hell was I doing?

  “Hey, so what are we learning today?” she asked, trailing after me.

  “We’re going to roll silverware,” I told her with just a bit of sarcasm in my tone. “Get excited.”

  I grabbed a plastic bin full of silverware and gestured for her to grab the large stack of paper napkins next to it and follow me. We sat down at a nearby table across from each other, and I started rolling. Hopefully she’d be a quick learner. This wasn’t exactly rocket science.

  “I am excited,” she said after a few seconds, as she started to mimic what I was doing. Knife, fork, spoon, tuck the end and roll. A monkey could do it.

  “Oh yeah?” I asked, not looking up at her.

  “Yes. This is my first job, and I want to do it well. This seems like a fun place to work, and I’m sure with a great trainer like you, I’ll be a master server in no time.”

  I looked up at her with obvious skepticism, and she rolled her eyes in response.

  “Yes, I’m sucking up,” she said sarcastically. “I want you to like me.”

  Cassie Witter wanted me to like her? That made no sense.

  My eyes narrowed involuntarily. “Why?”

  “You don’t say much do you?” she questioned instead of responding to what I’d asked.

  “Not really.”

  She let out a big breath of air. “Okay, well, the thing is, I don’t have any friends here, and I think it’s high time I made some.”

  Yeah, like I believed that. She was the freaking Homecoming Queen and was voted Best Smile senior year. She had friends.

  Okay, how the hell had I remembered that? I must have dug those facts out of the recesses of my brain, because I hadn’t given one conscious thought to Cassie Witter in the two years since we’d graduated high school. Of course, Scott had drooled over her for years, so subconsciously I’d probably filed away more facts than I cared to remember through osmosis alone, but still.

  “What about Nicole Daniels?” I asked her, and she gave me a funny look, possibly wondering how I knew they were friends. I probably need to hold back on the knowledge I had of her as to not make her think I was either interested in her or a stalker – either one would be bad.

  But then she shook her head, making me think her look meant something else entirely.

  “We’re not really friends anymore,” she said after a few seconds. Then she sighed and shrugged, and she looked so sad all of a sudden. “Sometimes things happen and people change as a result, and they realize that the friends they had maybe aren’t the people they should be friends with anymore.” She shrugged again.

  That was slightly cryptic, but I had a feeling I knew where it was coming from. I’d hoped to avoid this subject. I didn’t want to get into it with her, but it seemed like it might be inevitable.

  The shooting had changed me, and I was fairly sure it had changed her too. How could it not have? But I think what it did for me was make me realize how fragile life could be, and in a second it could be gone. I didn’t want to have any regrets in life. But I wondered if it hadn’t had an opposite effect on Cassie.

  She seemed more timid than I remembered her, almost as if she was afraid of living. She’d never been like that before. She’d walked around with confidence, she’d spoke up in class, and she’d commanded rooms. This was not the same girl sitting in front of me.

  “I actually do have a best friend – Marley Andrews,” she continued when I didn’t respond. “Do you know her?”

  I shook my head. The name didn’t ring a bell.

  “She lived here until we were fourteen, but then she moved to Seattle. She’s back there for the summer, but I’m hoping she’ll come visit me. We’re roommates at school.”

  I nodded.

  “We go to Coleman College in Wisconsin,” she said cheerfully, continuing to keep the conversation going even though I would have been more comfortable with silence. “Have you heard of it?”

  I started when she said that because everyone knew about Coleman College. It had been all over the news for weeks after the shooting. I wondered if that was Cassie’s way of trying to get me to ask her about the shooting. Did she need someone to talk to about it? I wasn’t sure if I was the right guy for that.

  Or maybe she just wanted attention. I had a feeling she was just like Brooke. In fact, they’d probably be best friends once they met. They were both self-centered bitches in my experience, and I was the sucker who’d let one of them take me down. I wouldn’t let the other get the best of me. No, I had to keep Cassie at arm’s length. I’d train her, be cordial to her when we worked together, but that would be it.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” I said begrudgingly, hoping I wasn’t opening myself up to a conversation I didn’t want to have. “My brother actually goes there.”

  Dammit, why had I volunteered that information?

  Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. She had to have known I would have heard of Coleman, but the fact that I knew someone who went to school there had thrown her for a loop. I should have kept my mouth shut.

  “He does?” she questioned. “What year is he?”

  “He’s a senior. He’s graduating in August.”

  I watched a dark cloud pass over her face that I didn’t know the source of when I said that, but she forced a smile on her face and faked the cheerfulness in her voice when she said, “That’s so great. I love it there. What’s his name?”

  “Evan Lansing.”

  She shook her head. “That name doesn’t ring a bell. Is he in a fraternity?”

  I shifted in my seat, not loving how personal we were getting. “Uh, yeah. He is. He’s a Sigma Lambda Phi.”

  She nodded again. “I know some of them. They’re good guys. Have you ever visited him at school?”

  I wasn’t sure if that was meant to be a joke or not, but Cassie didn’t look like she was kidding. I raised an eyebrow at her, genuinely surprised that she didn’t know that I’d been involved in the shooting. Hadn’t she watched the news? I knew they’d focused more on the victims who’d lost their lives, but there had been some coverage on those of us who were injured too. It was how I’d known she’d been shot – especially since the media had really played up her story of being in a coma with her life hanging in the balance. They’d celebrated when she’d pulled out of it relatively unscathed.

  But then reality slammed home for me. She had no clue who I was. She’d never noticed me in high school. When I’d seen her name on the victim list, and recognition had dawned on me, she hadn’t had the same reaction at all in seeing my name. I doubted she’d even known my last name until I’d told it to her thirty seconds before.

  But could I fault her for that? No, and it was probably better that she didn’t know I was involved. I didn’t want to talk about what had happened that night with her. It was not something that would bond us together – solidarity in trauma. I was looking to move past what had happened, not relive it. I’d done that enough with my therapist.

  “I’ve been there a few times,” I said vaguely.

  “Cool,” Cassie said cheerfully, but it sounded like she was still forcing the cheer into her voice.

  I could tell immediately that she wasn’t as okay as she wanted everyone to think. And that made me feel sort of bad for her. Apparently I was just a nice guy when it came down to it, and no matter how much I’d disliked Cassie in the past, I couldn’t be an asshole to her.

  “So this is pretty easy,” she commented when I didn’t say anything else.

  I just nodded in response. Rolling silverware was a piece of cake.

  “It’s mundane, and we have to do it each day,” I told her. I’d been doing it for two years, so I was kind of over it. />
  “Thanks for training me today,” she said, still trying to keep the conversation going apparently. She obviously wasn’t as comfortable with silence as I was.

  I shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I train everyone.”

  “Well, I appreciate you taking the time to do it. Maybe I could buy you a coffee sometime to thank you?”

  I looked up at her in surprise. Had she just asked me out? No, that couldn’t have been it. She was just being friendly. Why was she being friendly – to me? Had she been serious when she said that she wanted to be my friend? Why was that making my heart pound?

  I tried to decipher what she was thinking, but I couldn’t read her expression. She wasn’t looking up anymore. She’d gone back to rolling her silverware.

  “You seriously want to be friends with me?” I asked bluntly.

  She looked up and met my gaze. Then she smiled. She had a really nice smile. No wonder she’d won that award.

  Dammit. I did not want to think Cassie Witter had a nice smile. And I didn’t want to be even the slightest bit excited that she wanted to be my friend. But I was. My hands were starting to sweat. I rubbed them on my khaki shorts.

  “Well, yes. I want to be friends with you and Scott, I suppose, since he’s actually friendly to me, and you two seem to be a packaged deal.”

  “We’re not,” I told her and then looked back down at what I was doing.

  I could do it without looking, but I had to force my gaze from her, because I knew I’d keep staring if given the opportunity. And I didn’t want to stare. I didn’t want her to elicit any more of the weird twingy feelings that were swirling in my stomach, because I knew they were one-sided.

  She didn’t want to be friends with me. She wanted to be friends with Scott because he was nice to her. I’d been terse and unwelcoming, and because she thought Scott and I were a packaged deal, she thought that meant we had to be friends too. But I didn’t want her to feel obligated to be nice to me or to be my friend. I didn’t need her as a friend. Of course what I needed and what I found I suddenly wanted were two very different things.

  Cassie stopped rolling her silverware and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Jared.”

  I liked the way my name sounded on her lips. Seriously, what was wrong with me? I’d hated this girl thirty minutes earlier and now I was getting all excited when she said my name? I was such a fucking idiot. It was like Brooke all over again.

  “Jared,” she said again when I refused to look up at her.

  I looked up and met her gaze but didn’t say anything. She just shook her head.

  “You know, I’m actually a nice person. You could at least try to get to know me before you write me off.”

  I didn’t say anything, because I was fearful of what might come out of my mouth. Current confusing feelings aside, six years of hatred for her and her friends could spill out in a waterfall of emotion, showing her just how vulnerable I was after being picked on for most of my life by the people she’d called friends all throughout high school. And what sucked is that I’d thought I’d gotten over it, that I’d risen above it and let go of high school, but apparently I hadn’t. Sitting across from one of the most popular and beautiful girls I’d ever known, the things I used to feel in high school when one of her friends called me a loser or shoved me in the hall came flooding back. All I’d wanted was for them to leave me alone, but they never had.

  “Look,” she continued, “I have no idea what impression you have of me, but I can tell that you don’t like me for some reason, which means I had to have done something to you. And whatever that was, I’m sorry. I know I wasn’t the nicest person in high school. I get it, but things change. People change. I’ve changed, and I’m asking for a chance to show that to you.”

  I sighed. I could give her a laundry list of the things her friends had done to Scott and me – calling us fags and homos, slamming our heads into lockers, tripping us, mocking us as we uncoordinatedly suffered through gym class, beating us up just because they could – the list was long. And it would probably make her remember exactly who I was. I knew she had no clue. I’d changed a lot in the two years since we’d graduated. But if I told her, she’d definitely remember, because although she’d never done anything directly to me or Scott, she’d stood by and laughed while her friends had treated us like lepers and she hadn’t said a word about it.

  But maybe she had changed. Maybe she’d grown up. Maybe going through something as traumatic as a shooting spree caused her to gain some perspective. It happened all the time. People went through a life and death experience and came out of it a different person. Maybe that happened to Cassie, and maybe that was why I felt inclined to give her the chance she was asking for.

  I still had no clue why she’d selected Scott and me out of all the people in our town to be friends with, why she’d want to be friends with two ‘losers’ like us after never giving us the time of day in the past, but she seemed adamant. I figured it wouldn’t do me any good to question her intentions. I probably didn’t want to know. But I could see that she looked so desperate and vulnerable sitting across from me that I couldn’t be a jerk to her, no matter how much my sixteen year-old self wanted me to be. It just wasn’t in my DNA. It never had been. I was an eternally nice guy.

  “You know Scott has a massive crush on you, right?” I said instead of delving deeper into where she’d started to take our conversation. I wasn’t ready to go there with her.

  Of course I’d just blurted out something Scott may or may not have wanted me to share. He was either going to kill me or hug me when he found out. It could really go either way. I’d just have to apologize and beg for forgiveness if he was upset.

  “I know,” Cassie said as she looked down and started to roll her silverware again with more vigor than before, so I knew Scott didn’t have a chance in hell. She wasn’t interested in him, and that sucked, because he was a good guy.

  “He’s a cool guy,” I said, feeling the need to defend my best friend.

  “I know,” she said, and even though she sounded sincere, I also knew she wasn’t going to change her mind. She just rolled the silverware packet in front of her tighter and then squeezed it between her small fingers. When she looked up at me, my heart started pounding again. “I’m not really interested in dating anyone this summer.”

  Then she got a faraway look in her eyes as she fingered the triangle charm around her neck. I watched her for a few seconds as she battled with something inside her, but she didn’t volunteer what was on her mind. I went back to rolling my silverware, pretending that nothing was wrong. If she didn’t want to talk about what was suddenly bothering her, I wasn’t going to pry.

  After a few minutes, she spoke up. “Why don’t you like me, Jared? Seriously, did I do something to you?”

  I sighed and shook my head, not looking up to meet her gaze.

  “Did I?” she prompted, and I knew she wasn’t going to let it go.

  “No,” I said, hoping it would be enough, but I should have known better.

  “You’re lying,” she said, shaking her head.

  How she knew I was lying was beyond me. I’d mastered the ability to mask my emotions, but it seemed like she could see right through me.

  Finally I looked up and made eye contact with her. “We sat next to each other in English our senior year of high school, and you used to try to cheat off my quizzes. And in pre-calc, you sat two seats behind me, and then in American History, I sat next to your boyfriend, so close that I could read all of the dirty notes you passed him. And I’ve been your neighbor for almost three years, yet you have no idea who I am. To top it all off, I was a punching bag for your friends all four years of high school, so no, you didn’t do anything to me directly.”

  She looked appalled for a few seconds, and I wondered if I’d been too harsh, shared too much.

  “My friends beat you up?” she questioned, and I wondered if she could be that naïve. Those assholes beat everyone up, but Scott and
I were their favorite victims.

  “Yeah, they did,” I said curtly, not wanting to relive the humiliation I’d faced too many times after having my face slammed into a brick wall or a metal locker.

  “Why?”

  “Because Scott and I were easy targets, I suppose. I honestly don’t know,” I said, running my fingers through my short dark hair.

  Cassie still looked like she couldn’t wrap her head around that concept. “But you’re really built,” she said her gaze shifting to my exposed bicep. “Didn’t you fight back?”

  I shrugged. “Not back then.”

  I’d said it so resolutely that she must have known this was a sore subject. I hoped she’d drop it like I wanted her to, but she was still watching me. I could see it even with my head down.

  “I didn’t sit next to you in English,” she said after a few seconds of silence, the disbelief in her voice palpable. “I sat next to this short, punk kid who needed to wash his hair, use some zit cream and stop shopping at Goodwill.”

  I looked up and raised my eyebrows at her, and her mouth dropped open as she realized she’d just described the guy I used to be and not in a very flattering way. And not that she wasn’t accurate in her description, but she didn’t have to be such a little bitch about it. I guess she was showing her true colors. So much for thinking she’d actually changed.

  “No, that wasn’t you,” she said quickly, shaking her head.

  I smiled, but it was full of sarcasm.

  “No way. That guy was short – shorter than me – and skinny and weird and not at all hot. He was such a loser,” she said, digging the knife in deeper and twisting it just right so that it made my chest burn.

  I was well aware of how I’d looked for most of my life, and because I’d been shy and insecure and bullied because of my height, my confidence had been shit back then. I’d grown my hair long in high school so I could hide behind it and did what I could to be invisible.

  And I hadn’t shopped at Goodwill. At that point in my life, Austin and I had been living with Scott’s family after our dad left, and my clothes had all been courtesy of Scott’s mom. She realized when we moved in that Austin and I didn’t have much since our father had drank away most of our money after our mother left him. And what little money I made back then had been used to pay for Austin to play football, since our father wasn’t going to do it, and Austin loved the game. I didn’t use my money to buy clothes.