Mr. McKee glared at me, his expression thoughtful for several seconds. “Do you want to stay here at Rosemont? Do you want to continue to play baseball?”
“Yes, sir.” My stomach constricted, and it was like someone was squeezing my lungs because air couldn’t go in or out. He was threatening me with baseball, the only thing I had to look forward to besides fixing cars at Doc’s garage. The next words out of his mouth were not going to be good.
“Then you’ll do this. Maybe a little school spirit, seeing the behind-the-scenes of what goes into the activities here, will help you remember that you want to be here.” He paused, swiping at the corners of his mouth with his fingers before resuming his pose.
“I really don’t want to kick you out of our school, Dax, but after all the fighting you’ve done since school started in September, we need to fix this. Your grades are surprisingly decent, and I just don’t want anyone to read your file and not understand where you’re coming from.” He glanced down at the papers for a few seconds, the silence tense with awkwardness. Who else would have their principal almost feel like a father figure?
Blowing out a breath, Mr. McKee nodded. “You’ll work with Senior Committee for the rest of the year and you won’t be in another fight—or else you’ll be suspended, or expelled. And that won’t go over well for your chances to play baseball in college.”
College? I had to hold back a smirk. The Strattons had never been to college. Most had never even graduated high school, which was one of the reasons I was still here. I wasn’t a quitter, and I was going to make it through this year. I just had to figure out how to control my temper in order to do so.
Mr. McKee wrote something on a paper and handed it to me. “Take that to your counselor so you can switch your schedule around. Fourth period is when the committee meets. I’ll be talking to Ms. Schiels about this, and if I hear anything out of line from her, we’ll have to take more serious action.”
So I would be toeing a line for the foreseeable future. Not the thing I wanted to worry about for the rest of my senior year, but I should’ve thought of that before I hit Trent.
“What was Trent’s punishment?” The curiosity was more than I could contain.
Mr. McKee glanced up at me with a no-nonsense expression. “I don’t think you need to worry about him right now, do you? Worry about yourself so your grandmother can see you graduate.”
And he went straight for the heart. My grandmother had secretly been counting down the days until graduation in the hopes that I would make it. She’d met the principal at one of our baseball games last spring, and they’d struck up an unlikely friendship.
I blew out a breath and stood, not sure whether or not I should thank him. I stepped out of the office and through the door before the secretary could turn and look my way. The bell had rung for classes, and since I had to change my schedule anyway, I decided to miss the first part of history and see my counselor. Maybe he’d let me get out of it altogether.
Chapter 3
Kate
Iwalked into Ms. Shiels’s classroom, breathing out a sigh of relief as I glanced around the room at the bright colors and the different forms of art. She was the only art teacher at Rosemont and taught a wide variety of mediums. It had been in her classroom my sophomore year where I realized how much I loved creating things. Whether it was on a canvas or something digital, it was like my own safe haven.
Ms. Shiels was the one teacher I could be real with, who gave me grown-up advice and let me choose for myself what to do. She never made me feel bad for those choices, either.
“Kate,” she said, glancing up from the desk. The bell rang, and the small group of students that made up Senior Committee chatted in the background as I walked up to her.
She held up a large poster, the design on it reminding me of the hours I’d spent creating it. We’d finally gone away from the traditional hay bales for Harvest, changing it to a glow-in-the-dark theme, and designing the banner had been so exciting. With the splash of colors across the black background, it looked even better printed out.
“You did an amazing job on this. Look at those skills you learned this summer,” Ms. Shiels said, flattening out the poster on her desk once again. It had been tough getting my mother to agree to let me take a design class over the summer months, when I should have been using my time to pad my resume for applications to college. But this was something I loved more every time I sat down to try out. I just hadn’t had the guts to tell my mom that yet.
I tried to hide a grin, the excitement bursting from me at her compliment. “Thank you. It looks even better than I thought it would.”
Ms. Shiels lifted her arm, the bangles she wore daily jingling together as she used it to emphasize her words. “So, the printers just dropped these off, and then they should have the invitations all done by tomorrow afternoon. Which means we can begin selling them next Monday,” she muttered to herself. A few seconds later, she stopped and said, “Let’s discuss this as a committee.”
I nodded and turned, taking the seat in the front right corner. When given the chance to choose a seat in any of my classes, I tried to pick the one closest to the door since I got called out often enough on SBO business. Less time disrupting whatever lesson we had at the time.
I loved being the student body president, getting to interact with all the students and do everything I could to make their experience in high school one to remember, but some aspects of it weren’t so great, like having to plan a ton of stuff while trying to maintain my perfect GPA.
“Okay, class. Let’s start the class period by getting these banners put up around the school.” Ms. Shiels pointed to a small stack of posters in a box at the side of her desk. “Get a group of you to go into each section of the school. We need hallways in front of the school, east and west wings, as well as the locker rooms and gym. Don’t forget to hang a few in the bathrooms, or as close to them as possible.” She grinned at them. “Don’t take too long. We need to discuss more about next week’s dance, and I want to make some decisions by the end of the class period.”
I ended up with Blair Castle and Cynthia Hart, the two who had just recently started dating, and they acted like they would die if they ever stopped touching one another. In some ways, they reminded me of a younger version of my mom and stepdad.
We, or I should say I, had hung up several posters on the second floor of the school when I heard a familiar voice call from down the hall.
“Kate!” My mother. She was probably just leaving some meeting with the principal or someone else in the administration. As head of the PTA, she made it her business to know everything about everything that went on at Rosemont High, making it so I couldn’t make a move without her finding out a half-second later. I loved her, but there was a reason I was checking out colleges hours away from home.
I turned and forced a smile. “Hey, Mom.”
The lovey-dovey couple took that opportunity to race for the art room, leaving me alone as I taped up the last poster.
“You’ve got everything you need for the dance, right?” She turned to look at the poster on the wall I’d just hung up. “Oh, those turned out nice. I can’t believe how well you’ve picked up that designing program.”