CATO'S POV
"This prompted the government to try to..." Mrs. Burns' voice droned on about one civil war or another.
"Hey," whispered a smooth voice beside me. I turned my head to the left and my nose filled with Andie Lewis's signature cinnamon scent.
"Me?" I asked. Andie giggled and slipped her hand off her sparkly blue history notes inked onto lined paper and into the gap between desks to meet mine halfway, slipping a piece of paper into the palm of my hand. She bit her lip and returned her attention to the teacher.
I sat up straight and unfolded the note, mildly conscious of the people in the row behind me watching. Walk me home this afternoon? I raised my eyebrows. I hastily scrawled a response onto the bottom and was about to pass it back to her when the fine point of a new Sharpie hit dead center in the back of my neck, right where I knew there was a lone brown freckle. I turned behind me to inhale Clove Kentwell's very own strawberries-and-vanilla scent.
"What do you want?" I hissed.
"You could do better than Andie Lewis," she said simply. Is she kidding? Andie is this smoking hot, blonde beauty: the girl all the boys want but can't have.
"Seriously?" I demanded under my breath.
"Yeah," she said without looking up. She drew a small red star next to September 8th, 1803 (presumably the death date of some important war general, I don't know, I never paid attention). Her hair was loose today, I noticed, rather than her usual ponytail that I was fairly certain must have hurt her brain for how tight she pulled it. She ran a long-fingered, pale hand through it and looked up and saw me staring. "What?" she scoffed. I shook my head to indicate it was nothing and she rolled her eyes and returned to her notes. She scrunched her nose a bit as she wrote and rewrote the same name three of four times before deciding on the correct spelling, her freckles shifting like tiny stars under her shiny teddy-bear brown eyes. More like grizzly bear, I thought scornfully, but whatever it was about Clove Kentwell most people found terrorizing, I found fascinating.
And so I turned back around and erased the you got it :) I had written on Andie's note and changed it to sorry, I'm gonna be at the vball game.
Because that afternoon I was going to watch Clove Kentwell lead our sophomore girls' volleyball team to a victory against Liddell High. And maybe, just maybe, I would talk to her after. Because, truth be told, I could do a lot better than Andie Lewis. And "better than Andie Lewis" was sitting behind me with a satisfied smirk on her face when I got called out a moment later for passing notes.
