Last Stand by Niki Burnham Page A

expects the sap and the kissy stuff that follows. Who am I to deny her?
     
    “Hey, Toby!”
     
    I look over my shoulder, through the crowd in junior hall, trying to see Griff. Griff Osterman’s been my best friend since we were seated together in first grade, so I’d recognize his voice anywhere. A moment later, he emerges from behind a knot of seniors with a huge smile on his face. His dark brown hair juts in every direction at once. In an effort to maximize his sleeping time, Griff clocked his morning routine last year. He told me it takes him exactly ten minutes to take a leak, brush his teeth, shave (right), and put on his clothes, then eight minutes to get from home to school. He decided to give himself two minutes of cushion when setting his alarm clock, just in case.
     
    When I asked where deodorant and flossing fit into his twenty minute routine, he shrugged.
     
    Girls don’t seem to care, though. He makes disheveled look billboard-model cool. Jerk.
     
    “I’m wiped, man. Didn’t get back from Texas ‘til yesterday morning,” he says once he reaches me. “My parents were stupid enough to want to drive instead of fly. So how’d cross country tryouts go?”
     
    “Fine. Hot.” I set my sax case on the floor. Can’t wait to get the thing into one of the band lockers so I don’t have to schlep it through the halls. “It was in the high nineties all week.”
     
    “I meant how’d it go for you, dumbass.”
     
    I almost died from heat exhaustion
. I shrug. “Made it.”
     
    “Sweet.” He says it as if it’s no big thing. Of course, he made the team without even attending tryouts. He was one of our top runners last year (yes, as a sophomore) so when his mom explained to Coach Jessup that Griff would have to miss tryouts to attend an out-of-state family wedding—and that they’d be gone the entire week—the coach didn’t care.
     
    Told him to have great time and watch out for the bridesmaids.
     
    “How’s Amber?” he asks. “I think I saw her maybe twice all summer.”
     
    “You’re not the only one.” I step sideways to let a group of gum-cracking senior girls walk by. “She was working fifty hours a week at Friendly’s. More, sometimes. Made good money, though.”
     
    Griff looks past me and grins. “Yeah, and she put some of it to good use. Damn, she’s smokin’ in that shirt. It’s gotta be new, ‘cause I’d have noticed
that
.”
     
    I turn to see Amber threading her way through the hall, eyes focused right on me. Be still my heart, ‘cause Griff is right. She looks frickin’ fabulous. She’s wearing a pair of loose, cocoa-colored shorts that hit just above her knees, and a short-sleeved pink T I’ve never seen before, one that shows off her assets, but in a casual way that makes you wonder if she realizes just how well-fitted a top it really is—at least from a guy’s perspective. I elbow Griff. “Eyes to yourself.”
     
    “Like you could stop me. Catch you at lunch?”
     
    “Sure.” He says hi to Amber as he passes her in the hall, then looks back and mouths a “hot damn!” to me. I ignore him.
     
    Junior hall runs along the back of the main building. One side is lined with lockers, and the other with windows that start at waist height and go all the way up to a very high ceiling, so there’s tons of sunlight in the morning. As Amber approaches, I decide that the architect must’ve been thinking of exactly this moment when he designed those windows, because the way the light is streaming in behind her makes her dark hair look like it’s ringed with a halo.
     
    Hot damn? Oh, yeah. But not in the do-me-baby way Griff thinks. There’s something ethereal and fragile about her, something that makes me want to take care of her, yet at the same time always has me questioning deep down inside if she’s for real. That’s what makes me think
hot damn.
     
    She stops a whisper away from me, nearly kicking my sax case. “I have something for