Most Likely to Succeed Read Online Free PDF

butt.”
    “It’s hard to hide attitude,” my mother said. “Yours won’t earn you much of a teacher recommendation, which was supposedly the reason you ran for vice president in the first place.” She crossed the kitchen, took down a plastic container, and started transferring the cookies from the cooling racks so I couldn’t eat any more. “You may care about the dance today. The real test is, who will care in twenty years, or five years, or even a year from now whether you held this one dance in high school? The answer is, nobody.”
    A year from now I would be a college freshman in New York. That did make a Florida high school homecoming dance sound insignificant. Trouble was, I couldn’t picture what I’d be doing on a Friday afternoon in mid-September on the campus of Columbia. But I could picture the dark dance I was supposed to have two weeks from tonight in the high school gym, with a boy’s hand creeping down my hip. And in my mind, my dance partner wasn’t Aidan anymore.
    My mother was still talking. “You need to be smarterabout picking your battles. This dance isn’t worth the trouble. When we agreed you should increase your extracurriculars for college admissions, I never intended for you to get involved in a time-consuming activity that would distract you from your studies. Cheerleading is bad enough. If, on top of that, you’re taking on the responsibility of moving an entire dance, I can only imagine what’s going to happen to your AP English grade, and there goes valedictorian. Don’t you have a paper to write on Crime and Punishment this weekend?”
    These last words I heard as an echo down the hall. I’d left the kitchen while her back was turned. I tiptoed up the stairs and through the master bedroom to the smaller front porch on the second story, which we referred to as Dad’s “office.” Most days he wrote his books and articles here, where he could see his dock through the palm trees, and his sailboat, and the lagoon that served as his escape route to the Gulf of Mexico.
    “Hey, my Kaye,” he said without looking up from his laptop. He sat in his cushioned lounge chair, sunglasses on, iced tea beside him. Barefoot, he wore board shorts and a holey Columbia T-shirt that he might have owned since college. He would still be wearing this when my parents left for the airport tonight. My mother would look him up and down with distaste and tell him to change. In response, he would put on flip-flops.
    “Hi,” I huffed, plopping into the other chair.
    He examined me over the top of his sunglasses. “Why so glum?”
    I told him in a rush how Aidan had canceled the dance and my mother had told me I should have shut up and let Aidan run over me.
    As soon as I said “Mom,” Dad started making a noise— rrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnt —like I was a big loser on a game show. “You know I don’t like that kind of talk between my ladies,” he said.
    “You asked,” I said bitterly.
    He stuck out his bottom lip in sympathy. “Come on now. Your mom just wants to make sure you don’t bite off more than you can chew.”
    “Oh, ha!” I sneered. “Funny you should say that. She won’t let me eat Barrett’s cookies, either.”
    He rubbed his temple like I was giving him a very familiar headache. “Kaye. Your mom sees her baby only once every few months. She couldn’t sleep last night because she was so excited to see him today. She misses him desperately. And she’ll miss you desperately too. When you go off to Columbia and come home again, she’ll bake you cookies and get mad at me for eating them. Promise.”
    I doubted it.
    “And as for Aidan,” Dad went on, “I know you’re spending tonight over at Harper’s, but you’re making some time for Aidan in there somewhere, huh?” He gave me a cocky grin.
    “Yeah,” I grumbled.
    “The two of you are a little high strung, we could say. You might have let Most Likely to Succeed go to your heads a bit. You need some space for a few hours.