Page 10 of Finding Her
By the time everyone was out, it was more than five minutes after Mrs. Dixon had asked us to be there. I was annoyed that I’d rushed to be on time when she clearly didn’t care about that, but mostly, I was annoyed that Poppy had also done the same, leaving me to speak with her.
I kept my head low as Mrs. Dixon led us over to the main building, where our lockers would be, hoping nobody would notice me in the crowd of girls. Not many people were out since everyone was still in class or getting their own locker assignments, but I didn’t need anyone to see me surrounded by a bunch of freshmen. I had some sort of reputation to maintain, didn’t I?
I was so focused on worrying about anyone I knew coming out of one of the classrooms near the bay of lockers we were in that I didn’t notice until it was too late how they were getting assigned. Rather than being pre-assigned based on last name, Mrs. Dixon was directing people to them based on who was standing at the front of our line-up—meaning that the people around me would have the lockers on either side of me. That might have been fine, if Poppy Wade wasn’t currently velcro’ed to my side, telling me some story about her roommate.
I tried to awkwardly take a step away, hoping that Poppy might not notice, but she moved with me. Seriously, it was like she was attached to me. And before I could even begin to think of an excuse to get out of here, Mrs. Dixon was calling our names.
“Miss Wade, you take the top locker and Mr. Barrett, you take the bottom,” she said off-handedly, immediately marking it down on her sheet and moving on to the next pairing, apparently not realizing exactly what she’d just done.
She gave me—the six foot, senior boy—the bottom locker. And she gave Poppy—the pipsqueak, probably barely five-foot girl—the top.
Wonderful.
“We can swap,” Poppy said immediately, clearly coming to the same conclusion I had. She raised her hand, even though Mrs. Dixon wasn’t looking our way, and called her name. I tugged her hand down quickly, thankful that Mrs. Dixon didn’t seem to hear her. But some senior girls down the hall seemed to, because they were glancing over at us with curious expressions. I tucked my chin again, hoping it was enough to obscure my face, and cursed myself for not bringing along a jacket with a hood this morning.
“I don’t care,” I told Poppy. “Just take the top locker.”
I glanced at my watch and breathed a sigh of relief as I realized that it was pretty much time for the second period anyway. It gave me a plausible excuse to sneak off right now, instead of waiting around for Mrs. Dixon to finish assigning everyone else’s lockers. Other classes were going to show up to get their locker assignments as well, and when they did, I didn’t want to be anywhere near here. If all went well, nobody would ever have to know that Hartwell’s star hockey player had been put in the freshmen girl’s gym class.
While Poppy was busy testing the combination on her new locker, I slipped out of the crowd, hoping nobody would pay me any attention. That plan was ruined almost immediately when Poppy called after me, “Bye, Bear!”
Even though I didn’t look back, I could just picture her standing on her tippy toes, waving a hand overhead, making sure everyone in the world knew that we had been talking.
I’d only known her for a day, but I could already say with confidence that Poppy didn’t understand the meaning of the wordsubtle. I gave it two days before the whole school would be speculating about how we knew each other—and I was sure the reasons were going to be very creative.
Maybe I could just avoid my locker at all costs. I could carry everything around in a backpack or leave my things in the gymlocker room. That had to be better than having to kneel under Poppy every single day to put my stuff away.
But the locker wasn’t my biggest issue right now. Ihadto get out of this class. Some way, somehow, I had to. I refused to spend an entire semester stuck with Poppy Wade.
CHAPTER 8
bear
“Please, Coach.”
“No.”
“But I?—”
“No.” He crossed his arms with a firm expression. “Now get back on the ice.”
I sighed but pushed away from the boards. I knew trying to ask him about gym class stuff during hockey practice probably wouldn’t go over well, but what else was I supposed to do? The guy was avoiding me. Every time I tried to go by his office, he was conveniently gone or on his way out the door. The one time I did manage to catch him, he hadn’t let me get a word in as he yelled at me for almost breaking a girl’s nose on the first day of classes and how he’d had to defend me to Mrs. Dixon when she suggested that maybe I shouldn’t be in a class of “young, fragile girls.” I’d wanted to tell him those girls weren’t nearly as fragile as she thought they were but I wasn’t sure if that would actually help me, so instead I’d suggested that maybe he should just listen to her and pull me out of the class. He hadn’t been amused.
Tino appeared at my side as I continued skating the rink. “You know, I think this is a little pathetic of you.”
I didn’t even glance at him. “Oh yeah?”
He didn’t need to tell me twice. Of course, it was pathetic that I was in the freshman girls’ class. That wasn’t what I needed to be hearing from my best friend, though.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, begging Coach in front of everyone—are you kidding?”
Oh, he was talking about that. Okay, I could admit that was also a little pathetic. But what other choice did I have? It was obvious Coach wasn’t budging on anything, though. So I was going to have to keep working on my alternative ways of getting out of the class. I’d looked through the rule book three times over now. Still nothing. I’d even asked Crossy to glance through it because his dad was a lawyer and had taught him how to read contracts well, so he might spot some detail I missed. But no such luck.
When that didn’t work, I’d tried looking at other gym classes I could switch into. I figured being with the freshmen wouldn’t be so bad if it was a boys’ class. But the problem became obvious to me pretty quickly—every other gym class that was running, and there were several, was at the same time as another mandatory class I needed. And since I was in my senior year, if I didn’t take classes now, then I’d be completely screwed over and I’d have to either take them in the summer or, even worse, repeat the year again.
“Maybe extra credit can replace it,” I mused. “Like Coach could run a special after-school program for me and whoever needs another class credit.”
Tino snorted. “You’d be worse off there than with the girls.”
