Page 8 of Finding Her

“Everyone meet in the hall in ten minutes!” Mrs. Dixon called as we all filtered out. “I’ll be assigning your lockers for the year before you go to your next class.”

I groaned as I pushed my way into the locker room, thankfully alone as the only boy in the class, and flopped down on one of the wooden benches inside.

I hadn’t even thought about how being in this class would affect my locker assignment for the year—specifically that everyone in my first period class would have lockers in the same hall, which meant I would have a locker between thirty freshman girls.

Well, thirty freshmen and one junior girl who seemed obsessed with learning so much about me that I thought she might be trying to steal my identity.

What’s your full name? Where are you from? What dorm do you live in? How long have you gone to Hartwell? What colleges are you applying to?

She might as well have asked for my bank account number and mother’s maiden name.

I grabbed my phone to text the boys about it, but when I turned it on, the lock screen was filled with texts from the one person I did not want messages from.

Claire

Miss you baby xx

Why do you keep ignoring me?

We should meet up soon

My parents asked about you today and I didn’t know what to tell them

Call me later okay?

I just swiped all the messages away. I’d respond later—a while later, so she didn’t get any ideas—and tell her I’d see her the next time our families met up.

For some reason, my dad and her parents were obsessed with the idea that we would fall in love one day.

Of course, we couldn’t fall in love yet, since neither of us were supposed to date in high school, but telling two teens that then talking about how we were going to get married one day was some seriously mixed messaging.

The issue was one of us was much more interested than the other.

I’d tried to let her down easy a few times, but none of them seemed to stick. And since I couldn’t outright reject her without incurring the wrath of my father, I had to deal with texts like these.

I chucked my phone back into my bag, deciding I could text the boys later, then forced myself to stand and head for the showers.

Exactly eight minutes later, I was walking into the hall, dressed in my school uniform with my bag slung over my shoulder. Even though I was right on the time Mrs. Dixon had said, I was only the second one out here.

The first one, of course, being Poppy.

I pivoted on my heel, ready to shamelessly hide in the locker room with my ear by the door until I heard more girls come out, but just as my palm hit the swinging door, her voice called out.

“Hey, Bear!”

I pressed my lips together and let out a sigh of annoyance. So close . If she was anyone else, I’d probably pretend I didn’t hear her and go into the locker room anyway, but I didn’t trust that she wouldn’t follow me inside. The hallway was the lesser of two evils in this case.

I dropped my hand and turned to face her properly.

She was dressed in her uniform too and while I was happy she was no longer wearing the shortest shorts known to mankind, seeing her in her uniform wasn’t much better.

I kept my eyes high instead, focusing on her brown eyes that crinkled as she smiled at me.

“Is it me or was that gym class unreasonably hard?” Poppy asked. She leaned against the wall and crossed one foot over the other. “I thought I was going to die halfway through.”

I let out a long breath and looked around the hallway to avoid having to keep staring at her. I could have been nice and made small talk—I’d found it ridiculously hard too, after all—but I didn’t want her to think I was interested in being friends.

“I can’t wait to be done with gym class,” Poppy sighed.

She pulled a pack of gum out of one of the thousands of pockets on her backpack and popped out a piece.

“I know most people are done their gym credits by sophomore year but I’ve moved so many times that my classes are all a mess.

Honestly, I’m terrified I’m going to get to the end of senior year and they’re going to tell me I don’t have any of the right classes. Gum?”

I blinked and glanced at her again as I realized the last part was directed at me.

I figured she was one of those people who mostly spoke just to hear her own voice and didn’t need the other person in the conversation to respond, but now, she was looking at me expectantly with the pack of gum held out toward me.

I jerked my head just enough for her to take a no.

I thought she might look disappointed by the rejection but she just stuck the pack back in her bag with a shrug, still smiling.

Did this girl ever stop smiling? She claimed the gym class was hard for her too, but I swear the smile never wavered from her face the whole time we were in there.

That was probably why Mrs. Dixon kept pushing us harder and harder—if she’d been using Poppy as a gauge for how easy the class was, the smile on her face would have made her think she was going too easy on us.

Poppy kept chattering on as more girls came spilling out of the locker room but I mostly tuned her out, only reacting when she asked me direct questions.

She seemed strangely intent on getting to know me as she asked question after question but I never gave her verbal answers.

I was hoping that would get her to slow down and give me some time to hear my own thoughts but it was like the more that I ignored her, the more she wanted to speak to me.

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 word subtle . 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 gym locker 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. I had to get out of this class. Some way, somehow, I had to. I refused to spend an entire semester stuck with Poppy Wade.