Page 7 of The Confidant
I pulled my backpack over my shoulder and glanced around the room one more time for Scarlett. But she still was nowhere to be found.
I headed toward her workstation to see if her things were still there, but they weren’t.
So for the first time all year, I left the journalism classroom alone.
I just hoped this wasn’t somehow an omen for more things to come.
3
HUNTER
“DidAva say anything to you about who Scarlett’s taking to the Valentine's dance?” I asked my friend, Carter Hastings, as we walked into the locker room after an exhausting practice.
His girlfriend Ava was on the girls’ basketball team with Scarlett, and if Scarlett was telling people about whom she’d asked, Ava would probably be one of the first people to know.
I mean, as her best friend I’d assumedIwould be the first to know about everything going on in her life. But apparently, I wasn’t the only one of us keeping secrets right now.
“Scarlett asked someone?” Carter furrowed his brow and studied me with surprise in his blue eyes. “Someone that’s not you?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” I shrugged as we turned a corner and walked to the end of the hall where our gym lockers were. “Addison said something about it when she asked me to the dance today, and ever since then, I’ve been trying to figure out who Scarlett might have asked.”
Usually my mind stayed pretty well in the present during basketball practice because exercise had a way of calming my brain. But since we’d been working on conditioning today, I’d had plenty of opportunities to stew over the question of who my best friend was trying to replace me with.
Was it someone I knew? Someone in one of our classes?
We mostly hung out with our core group of friends, and most of them were paired up with someone already. Our friend Nash was the only one besides Scarlett and me who wasn’t currently tied up in a relationship—but he’d told me just a couple of days ago that he had a group of freshman girls fighting over who got to take him to the dance. So I was pretty sure it wasn’t him. Plus, Nash was Carter’s half-brother, so Carter would have told me if Scarlett had asked Nash.
Could she have asked Evan? He and Addison had been spending more time with us lately—eating dinner with us in the cafeteria since the rest of our friends were day students and usually went home for dinner.
I hadn’t caught any vibes that Scarlett was crushing on Evan or anything, but he was a good-looking dude and had the more mature air about him that Scarlett liked in guys.
“Actually,” Carter said as if just remembering something, “Ava mentioned something a while back about Scarlett’s dad trying to set her up with a guy he knows. Maybe something happened with it, and she asked that guy?”
Her dad had been trying to set her up with someone?
And she’d told Ava about it but not me?
“So it might not even be someone who goes to our school?” I asked.
“I think this guy goes to Yale or something.”
“Who goes to Yale?” Our friend Mack asked, joining us by our lockers after his chat with Coach.
“Some guy Scarlett’s dad knows.” Carter looked up at Mack. “We’re trying to figure out if he’s the guy Scarlett’s taking to the Valentine's dance.”
“She’s not taking you?” Mack’s dark eyebrows knitted together, like it was as shocking to him as it was to me.
Which I was grateful for, because it showed that maybe I wasn’t as out of touch with everything as I’d thought. That maybe this really was coming out of left field.
I explained about Addison mentioning Scarlett taking someone else. And how Scarlett had apparently given Addison her blessing in asking me out.
“Well, that doesn’t fit into the plans you had, does it?” Mack asked, sitting down to take off his basketball shoes. Mack was six-foot-five and the tallest player on the team. And even though I had just hit six-foot-one—thanks to a growth spurt this winter—my size twelve shoes always seemed kid-sized next to his. “Didn’t you have some master plan to win her back as soon as we graduated?”
“Yeah.” I sighed and opened my locker to grab my towel. “Though that plan won’t work if she’s dating someone else…”
Since Pastor Caldwell had threatened to take Scarlett out of Eden Falls Academy if she broke his no-steady-dating-while-in high-school rule again, I’d been biding my time. I’d stayed close and tried to be okay with just being her friend while I silently counted down the days until graduation.
I’d assumed that if I wasn’t allowed to be her boyfriend, then it meant no one else would be allowed to fill that spot, either.
