Winging It by Cate Cameron Page A

conversation. I felt trapped, like my brain wasn’t moving fast enough to avoid all her snares. “Can you just leave it alone now ? Like, don’t call her back and change her mind, but don’t do any more of whatever you’re doing, either?”
    “Do you really think you can make this work without my help?”
    “I’m not even sure I want to make it work. But if I do, it should be because I want it, not because you got bored and decided to start playing with people’s lives.”
    “It’s not going to do you much good to decide it on your own if she’s already hooked up with Scott, though. Is it?”
    “It wouldn’t be permanent. She’s not running off to Gretna Green to get married!”
    “Oh my God, I knew you were reading those books! You pretended the whole time you were too manly for Jane Austen, but you kept moving my bookmark. I knew you were a secret romantic.”
    I tried not to laugh. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. The point is…” What was the point? Was I trying to argue that I wouldn’t care if Nat and Scott hooked up? That I could just swoop in and pick up where he left off, without any hesitation? Shit. I should be able to. I was a modern guy; I didn’t have some big hang-up about how girls should be virgins until they dated me. I should be just fine with the idea of Nat and Scott spending a bit of time together and then Nat and me hooking up. But this was Dawn I was talking to. “I’d fucking hate it if Nat and Scott got together,” I admitted. “It’d be like she was choosing him over me, and that’d be hard on my pride, for sure. But also…I don’t know. He’s Scott . He’s an asshole. He doesn’t care about her, not really, so he won’t be as careful with her as he should be. And I don’t want her to get hurt.”
    “Okay,” Dawn said, her voice softer now. “But, Cooper? The thing is—it’s not fair to talk about it in terms of her choosing him over you. Not when she doesn’t even know she has that choice. You know? If you’re really interested in her, you need to tell her so. And you need to do it pretty soon. And if you decide you’re not really interested? Then let it go. Stop getting in fights at your game because he’s talking to her in the stands. If you’re not interested in her, then it was good that he was talking to her. Right?”
    “You weren’t even at the game—” I started, but it was no use arguing. Dawn knew everything that happened to everybody in Corrigan Falls, usually about two seconds after the event. “I need to think about all this.”
    “Yeah, you do. But you need to do it pretty fast. Got it?”
    “At some point we’re going to talk about why this is important to you, right?”
    “Probably not,” she said and hung up.
    I stared at my phone for a while then headed downstairs to find some breakfast—hopefully not at a table full of thirteen-year-old girls. Usually when I needed to clear my head, I’d work out until all I could concentrate on was not puking. But with a game that afternoon, I couldn’t take that option. Maybe I’d call up some of the guys and see if they wanted to play Xbox or something. Or maybe I’d get the guts to call Nat. But until I knew what I wanted to say to her, I should probably try to play it cool.
    “Cooper!” one of the thirteen-year-olds squealed when I walked into the kitchen. “We’re making pancakes! Do you want pancakes? You must be hungry, right? I can make you pancakes! How many do you want?”
    Okay, a big part of me wanted to grab a box of cereal and a jug of milk and go eat in my room. But I’d been looking for ways to turn my brain off, and sitting alone upstairs wasn’t going to do it. Besides, my mom was there by the stove, and she could keep me safe, and Wendy was giving me a kind of heartbreaking look, like she was bracing herself for me to be a jerk to her friends but was really, really hoping I wouldn’t be.
    I sat down at the table and said, “Pancakes sound great. I