This Is Our Story
Chapter One
“All right everybody, you’ve got your assignments. Remember, article deadlines for your next updates are this coming Tuesday. Oh, and we’re going to need to get some pictures from the state academic decathlon finals. Any volunteers?” Conner asked his crew.
Like he expected, the yearbook staff one and all directed their eyes anywhere but at their editor-in-chief. He’d been warned about this by his predecessor last year, when he’d been a lowly assistant editor. Everyone was happy to volunteer photography for school dances, football and basketball, pep rallies—the fun stuff. But ask that someone give up a few hours on a Saturday to get a few pics and a quote or two from an academic team… he may as well have asked if anyone was willing to pony up a kidney.
“Fine,” he said with a sigh when the awkward silence became too much for him. “Looks like I’ll be covering it. Again.”
“Attaboy, Conner—now you got something to do this weekend, eh?” gloated Jordan Lyons with his trademark smirk. Conner didn’t know how women could find the face of a guy capable of that insufferably smug expression handsome, but they did.
“Thanks, Conner,” said Heather before he could even attempt a rebuttal. Not that he would’ve. Conner was a writer, and his witty banter flagged under the pressure of immediacy. He was glad in this case. Making a fuss in front of Heather would just make him feel even lamer. Ah, Heather Blake. One look and two words from that mouth and he forgave the lot of them. She was the total package—straight A student, blonde bombshell, VP of philanthropy club. The only reason she wasn’t an editor herself was because she didn’t have the time in her busy schedule to take on all the extra work that came with the position, but failed to pad transcripts. Still, she could bat those eyelashes at him and he’d give her his title and do the work in her name.
Before he could formally conclude the meeting, the bell rang, signaling the end of the period, and since yearbook was last period, the end of the day. Everyone was on their way out the door, and Conner listened as they made plans to meet up at a coffee shop near campus. The editor-in-chief perked his ears up to see if he’d be extended an invite this time, but as usual, it was a closed small group affair. Just Don, and DeShaun, and Marissa, and Siobhan, and Heather, and six or seven of the others. So, basically most of the upperclassmen but him.
As he stayed back and tidied up the office, he forced himself to let it go. That group had been a clique since they’d joined up, and he’d never had any skill at breaking into social groups. It was fine. A positive, really. It meant the team got along and had low drama, and it was easy to form teams for assignments. That he was often the odd man out meant that his own work was done to his high standards. That was how he chose to see it, anyway. Conner had always been one to try to see things in the best possible light.
“Conner? What’re you still doing here?” came a voice behind him. Miss Coszic-Lewandoski—known by all as Miss C, for obvious reasons—was coming back to the room from their small computer lab; though she was the teacher of the Northside High School yearbook class, she generally let her editor-in-chief run the show. Miss C said she didn’t like to step on his toes and often used the period to tend to the rest of her workload. Still, the young teacher was always there if he needed support, and he knew her hands off approach stemmed largely from the trust she had in his work. She touched base with him to make sure all ran smoothly and otherwise spent her time instructing the freshmen writers and running the occasional workshop. (Conner suspected the latter was mostly so there would be some material to test them over.)
“Oh, just tidying up. Looks like I’m heading up to Indy this weekend to get pics of the academic decathlon, so I need to borrow one of the laptops and cameras.”
The young teacher put her hands on her hips—hips he might admire if she wasn’t his teacher and his mentor. At times, almost a friend. (OK, so he admired them sometimes, but only in the privacy of his own imagination.) “Conner. When are you going to start delegating?”
He forced a banal smile as he packed one of the department cameras in his backpack. “It’s OK—I don’t mind. Who knows, maybe I’ll meet one of those decathlete babes.”
She chuckled. “Best of luck, killer. Oh and hey, since you’re taking one of the laptops, you’re the first to know. We got that grant for some new software. Remember talking about that last spring? The customized package.” Conner nodded, vaguely recalling her mentioning it, but not much more than that. “I just got it installed on all the machines. You’re going to love it. Intuitive as heck. We’ll go over some of the features on Monday, but I think you’ll be able to figure it out.”
“Oh. Anything I need to know for the weekend?”
“Nah. Just use your school ID to log in, and it’ll prompt you to set up a password.”
“Cool cool. Thanks, Miss C.” He carefully tucked the laptop behind the camera, then signed both out on the sheet. “Have a good weekend!”
“You too, Conner. And hey,” she said, placing her slender hand on his shoulder, so he turned. “Remember. You’re editor-in-chief. That means you’re in charge, OK? Don’t be afraid to start acting like it.” She gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze, and he let himself out into the empty halls.
Academic decathlon was every bit as exciting as he’d thought it might be—a bunch of four point something GPAs taking tests in closed rooms. He’d hoped to get the team together for a few shots at the start of the day, then see if he could coax a few posed shots out of individuals and head back home. It was nearly a two-hour drive each way, after all. Instead, the team had beaten him there and immediately scattered to half a dozen places around the host school. It had taken almost eight hours before the Northside decathletes finally reunited, only then his picture was interrupted by the start of the award ceremony, which went on for another hour and a half. When that finally ended, he managed to plead with the team to pose long enough for a single picture before getting back on their bus to head home.
Thanks to a hell of a rainstorm on his drive back, the two-hour trip became three and Conner didn’t get home until half past eleven. By then, he was so irritated and so exhausted that he went straight to bed.
“So how was the spelling bee thing yesterday?” his mom asked as he shuffled groggily to the table the next morning. “Must’ve been pretty groovy if you didn’t make it in until going on midnight. One egg or two?”
“Ugh. One, Mom, thanks. But ugh. You go to an academic decathlon meet knowing it’s got to be about the most boring thing in the world, but then you get there, and it’s somehow even more boring than you thought it could be.”
She set a cup of apple juice down for her son. “That’s too bad. At least you had time to get your work done, so you can enjoy your Sunday.”
He shook his head. “I wish. See, Hailey McManus was there. Remember I told you about her, how she’s, like, obsessed with me?”
“That’s the girl from the, what, the dance last year, right?”
Was it ever. Conner had gone with this girl Katalina; he’d been a junior and she a senior. He’d known his date was just a friend thing, and they’d really only gone to get dressed up and have some fun dancing. (Also Conner was taking pictures for yearbook, naturally.) Then in the middle of it, he’d found Hailey crying in a stairwell all by herself. Conner recognized the heavyset girl from a shared class or two over the years, but didn’t really know her; still, a crying woman was a crying woman. He asked if she was all right, and learned her date had dumped her for her pretty friend two days before the dance. She’d come here tonight to confront them, but the boy had just held up his nose and made a pig noise and told her to lose some weight.
Genuinely moved, Conner had sat down beside her and put an arm around her shoulder, saying whatever he could come up with to comfort her. He hadn’t meant to convey even the least romantic interest, but ever since then she’d been carrying a torch for him. For a while he’d had to pretend he had a girlfriend from a nearby school, but after a few months he’d accepted that while he was claiming to be in a relationship, he couldn’t date anybody else, Hailey or not. Now he just tried to avoid one-on-one proximity with her without being too rude about it—a feat which yesterday’s event had rendered impossible.
He hadn’t known she’d been on the team; if he had, he might’ve preemptively taken Miss C’s advice about delegating. Conner had brought along his novel for German, some pre-cal homework, and figured if he had time he could always check out the new yearbook software. Instead, he barely finished the reading. Every time she finished one of her tests, there was Hailey. She brought him drinks, showed a rabid interest in his schoolwork [that she was preventing him from working on], insisted on taking him to lunch… she wound up coopting the lion’s share of his day. At one point he’d tried hiding in a little nook behind a trophy case, but sure enough she’d found him. Like a hunting dog following a fox’s scent.
Conner didn’t dislike the girl, per se. There was no physical attraction, and she could babble a bit if she wasn’t stopped, but those weren’t the deal-breaker for him. It was simply that Hailey had no self-esteem, always running herself down and refusing to be talked out of it. Maybe that was an appeal to some guys, knowing a girl felt she had no choice but to tolerate whatever she had to in order to keep her man. For Conner, it just made him sad. Hailey was a smart girl, and in a handful of years he hoped her world would sort itself out. She’d use those smarts to land a career doing something that brought her happiness, develop some confidence. But this was now, not a decade hence, and like Hailey, Conner was grappling with the now.
A now that, last night, had culminated in Hailey nervously asking him if she could ride home with him from the meet, and him replying in what was probably transparently bullshit that his mom didn’t let him drive with other kids in the car. Her capacity for rejection exceeded, she’d quietly nodded and made her way to the team bus, and he to his car. Conner hoped it hadn’t hurt her, even as he hoped she’d been hurt enough to back off.
“You oughta go ahead and give her a shot, man. You’re not exactly beating them off with a broom,” said his stepsister Angelica as she settled into the table. “Plenty of other beating off though, I bet…”
He glared. Her dad had married his mom just two years back, and their children had never learned to get along. Luckily she was away at college most of the year down in Bloomington, but she’d just gotten home for their fall break while he’d been at the tournament yesterday. “Well I’d tell you to date every jerk who shows an interest in you, but it looks like you already took my advice.”
“Kids,” his mom interjected before they got worse. “She does have a point, you know, Conner. It’d do you some good to do a little dating. You’re such a handsome boy, and it’s about time you gave the poor girls of the world a break.”
“Give me a break,” mumbled Angelica.
He wolfed down his eggs, glowering at his plate. “Thanks for breakfast, Mom. I’m gonna get some work done.”
“‘Work,’ he’s calling it now,” said Angelica with a grin.
“You’re up awfully early. Don’t your kind burst into flame in direct sunlight?” he grumped back.
Back in his room, Conner buckled down. The bulk of his homework only took a couple hours, slowed down somewhat because Owen wouldn’t stop pestering him to hang out. A promise to make an effort that evening was the only thing that finally shut him up. With Owen pacified and his homework complete, Conner finally got out his borrowed laptop and logged in.
He realized he hadn’t even asked the name of the new app, but it turned out to be obvious; it was named for the title of the Northside High School yearbook, This Is Our Story. The name had actually been Conner’s idea, the first time in its seventy-four year history the volume had been more than just “the yearbook.” He’d successfully lobbied Miss C during his junior year to call it something more personal to the students it was made for, and when she’d consented, the staff had unanimously approved his proposed new title.
This Is Our Story. This wouldn’t be another high school annual full of pictures, signed and forgotten. With Conner at the helm, this was going to be a book that captured the times and travails and triumphs of his class. He would include a piece of everyone.
Conner double-clicked the program. After a lengthy load time, a login box popped up. He used his default school login like Miss C had said, and from there a second box asked for his “user level,” with a bulleted list he could click. There was staff, editor, senior editor, faculty, and another one that he could type into.
Editor-in-chief had been a hard-won title. All across America, the top student position in yearbook was senior editor. The title of editor-in-chief meant that the student was the ultimate authority on the production rather than a member of the faculty, as was traditionally the case. Conner had joined yearbook in middle school, before there was even a class for it. Back then, one of his teachers had done it by himself for a small stipend. Conner had asked the faculty editor if he could join him in putting it together. Ever one for nostalgia and mementos, he’d grown up helping his mom with her scrapbooking and photography hobbies, and his interest had grown from there. Fast forward five years and he was the workhorse of the yearbook staff, always on call, always ready to get the quote, take the photo, write the spread.
While it wouldn’t be quite accurate to say Conner was gifted with foresight, he was at least keenly aware of the value of memory, and he understood too how they tended to distort and fade. For Conner Fishers, editing the yearbook wasn’t a mere hobby or a bullet point on his college applications. It was the preservation of the strangest and most wonderful, terrible, ephemeral years of these students’ lives. It was a chance to take their stories and tell them the way they ought to be told, and leave a record that would last forever.
It had been Miss C’s suggestion to elevate him to editor-in-chief. Dorky or no, it had been one of the young man’s proudest moments. With a fond smile for his teacher, he entered the title in the box and clicked enter.
Checking… said a new box, and the mouse turned into a rotating hourglass. “Checking for what?” he muttered, but let it do its thing. A few minutes later, a new box appeared.
Editor-in-chief privileges granted. User has override authority in regards to other users. Caution: this setting is still in beta test. Note that some features may not fully function or may cause unintended effects. Do you wish to use Editor-in-chief mode?
He could click yes or no. Beta test? Override other users? He wondered if that even included Miss C. It would be handy to easily edit his peers’ spreads, he supposed, though he knew his perfectionist tendencies could make him over-do it. Conner worried about the prospect of glitches, but figured the school wouldn’t have bought this software package if it was still that buggy. Conner clicked a confident Yes.
Once he was in, the software was pretty similar to what they’d used before, though it seemed more integrated. There was the list of student names indexed to their photos, which he could easily use to tag them elsewhere in the yearbook. There was a dizzying number of menus and options, many of them with some rather daunting jargon. (The Adjustments sub-menu under the Photo Assimilation sub-menu under the Integration tab allowed him to choose between over seventy different styles, half of which he had never even heard of.)
For now, Conner restricted himself to only those needed for his academic decathlon spread. After all, fanciness could always be added in later when he was more familiar with the functionality. He made a few notes on what he’d like to see in the full text—a quote from a member, from the coach, something about the seniors, any details about outstanding achievements.
From there, he organized the spread and inserted one of the photos. With the team roster in hand, he labeled the ones he recognized, then went back and used their names to look up ID photos to get the rest. Luckily school pictures had only just been taken, so people still looked mostly like their pics. (By the time prom came around, it was sometimes a crap shoot trying to match haircuts and fashion styles.) Most people dressed up and did their hair nicer for picture day, after all, and some cleaned up better than others.
As he added her name to the roster, Conner curiously brought up Hailey McManus’s class picture. There she was, doughy Hailey, her hair doing its best to overcome its stringy nature. Poor thing. Doomed to go through high school awkward and miserable. It was her further misfortune that immediately next to her was none other than Hayleigh McKnight. The comparison was inevitable; nicknames that Conner preferred not to acknowledge were the common method by which people distinguished the two. After all, although she was also a Hayleigh in pronunciation, it was there any resemblance ended. A copper-skinned goddess with an unlikely mane of pristine auburn hair that Conner swore was more at place in a shampoo ad than his yearbook; face of an angel’s hotter sister; an abundance of cleavage that even Miss C’s best editing efforts couldn’t expunge from her yearbook photo; a butt that made the boys of NHS want to cheer for any teacher who put her in the front of the room.
Hailey McManus, Hayleigh McKnight. A typo in creation and that could be her as homecoming queen, popular and beloved, envied, or feared by all. Conner was no fan of the prettier girl, either; if half the rumors were true, her reputation for being a world-class asshole was well-deserved and probably even understated. What might Hailey have been like had she shared a few more strands of Hayleigh’s DNA? With a pitying smile, he clicked and dragged Hayleigh’s photo where Hailey’s was. Confirm swap? It asked. Conner rolled his eyes at the unnecessary security and clicked Yes.
What the hell. For a few minutes, let Hailey be beautiful, even if only for him.
Only…
“What the hell?” he said aloud after tabbing back to the academic decathlon photo. He’d done a double-take after entering Yang Na’s name in its ordered place on line two. There, standing in the front row of the assembled team was none other than Hayleigh McKnight. She was most definitely not on any academic teams. Then why was she…
She was standing right where Hailey McManus had been when he’d added her name to the roster not ten minutes ago.
The roster still read the same. Line two, third from the left, Hailey McManus. But this girl was thin and beautiful and wholly out of place with such a pleasant smile on her face. He tried hitting ctrl+z a few times to see if he’d somehow hit a button or tapped a shortcut. There Hayleigh remained. As Conner studied the spread, it became clear that somehow, the program had edited the academic decathlon photo to show what, according to his photo swap, was the appearance of Hailey McManus.
This was insane. No matter how he zoomed in, he couldn’t see the slightest trace of editing. He was no pro, but he’d used enough digital photo editing programs to know how to keep things smooth. Zoom in 1000% and one could always see those tell-tale signs of tampering. Not this, though. This was flawless. Weirder, upon checking he realized it wasn’t even like it used Hayleigh’s school picture. That was a wry smile, head tilted off to the left; the academic decathlon photo was a toothy grin straight on. Could it be inserting a photo of Hayleigh McKnight from one of her own photos elsewhere in the yearbook? If it was, he couldn’t find where the image was stored. He’d assumed all their previous spreads were still saved to the old software and that they would have to be ported over. Nothing here suggested otherwise.
Before he could make sense of it, Owen was back at it again, and Conner finally gave in and made his way across the street to his friend’s house. It was a basic understanding that Owen’s place was for hanging out; Conner’s was for fine dining. While Conner’s mom may be a pretty good cook, Owen had a finished basement that they had all to themselves. In all the years they’d been friends, he could remember twice ever when Owen’s parents descended into the “dungeon,” as they derisively called it. Once to use the circuit-breaker, and once because they’d turned up their music so loud that they had to be confronted visually. It was a sanctuary.
“Took you long enough, man,” Owen chided as he made his way down.
“Yeah, sorry. Miss C got—”
Owen interrupted him with a decidedly feline-like sound. “That woman is seriously fine. I know what that C ought to stand for. It’s—”
“No you don’t, and don’t be gross, and shut up. Anyway, she got this new yearbook software, and like… it’s weird. Like, I swapped Hailey McManus and Hayleigh McKnight, and it, like, swapped them out in another shot I’d tagged.”
“You got a pic of Hottie Hayleigh?” he asked, using the more flattering of the two girls’ alliterative nicknames. Suddenly he seemed interested. “Anything good?”
“No, the picture was of McManus, but, well, it became one of… look, just weird.”
“Dude, don’t turn this into another gripe session about Hefty Hailey’s McMan-crush on you.” Conner winced at the other nickname. Poor Hailey. “I’d rather listen to you bitch about Jordan again than that. At least he’s just another asshole; Hefty is just… sad.”
Conner frowned. “How is it that you’re single, again?”
“Better to die single than crushed under one of the hocks of Hefty Hailey, man,” Owen laughed.
“Oh come on, she’s not even that… You know, nevermind. I don’t know why I tell you stuff.”
“Because it beats writing more shitty emo poetry on the internet.”
“One time. One time! Queue up some PvP. I need to kill you.”
The boys settled in for a lively round, and much mutual killing ensued. Owen wasn’t as sentimental as his friend, but he sure knew how to take a boy’s mind off things. Conner’s curfew came up before either boy’s bloodlust was sated, but they knew they’d make time later. They always did.
Like that, Sunday gave way to Monday in its graceful way, and school was back in session. He saw Hailey in the hallway before school and gave her a little smile, but she didn’t even seem to glance in his direction. Maybe his refusal to give her a lift Saturday night had stung more than he’d thought. He supposed that, since he’d lied to her, she was entitled to be a bit frosty.
The day dragged on, all of it a tedious obstacle to the only thing he was really interested in, namely talking to Miss C about the weird bug in the software. That kind of graphic modification was unheard of in his experience, and for this program, it was just a feature! Because the program shortcut was named for the Northside High yearbook, This is Our Story, and didn’t seem to have an About Us in it that he could find, he didn’t even know how to look up more information on it. He couldn’t wait to pick his teacher’s brain about where she’d found such a treasure.
That is, until around 12:30. That Monday, in the NHS cafeteria, during lunch—some kind of pasta nightmare that called itself baked ziti—Conner’s life changed forever. It began in quite uncommon fashion, with a hand on someone’s butt.
“Owen.” His friend didn’t look up from the block game he was playing on his phone. “Owen. OWEN!” Conner snatched the phone and held it back. “Dude, look!”
After a moment griping about the theft, Owen finally followed where Conner was pointing. There in the lunch line stood Jayce Deacons, jock all-star and one of the richest kids in school. He was good enough looking that his money made sure he was in the in crowd for life… and he was standing there with his arm around Hailey McManus’s back, his hand resting inside one of the back pockets of her jeans.
“What?” Owen asked. “What, you mean the lunch lady wearing crocs?”
Conner conveyed how stupid his friend was being through an exasperated look. “Yeah, the crocs, you got me. Not, ya know, Deacons’ hand down the back of Hailey’s pants, you moron!”
Owen looked again, then back at his friend. “Yep. What I wouldn’t give…” He snatched his phone back. “Thanks a lot, you ruined my game, a-hole. Hope you’re happy.”
“What you wouldn’t give… what? To have his hand on your ass?”
“Har har.”
“No, seriously—that doesn’t freak you out just a little?”
Owen arched a brow. “Should it? He’s treated her like she’s his dad’s property since they started going out in sophomore year, man.”
Conner shook his head, then even rubbed his eyes. Nope, he wasn’t seeing things. He pointed again. “Are you freaking near-sighted or something, Owen?! That’s Hailey McManus, not Hayleigh McKnight!”
At last Owen reacted with the alacrity the situation called for, snapping his head around to witness the scandal. A moment later, though, he turned back to the front and rolled his eyes. “Very funny. Now quit it with the pointing. Deacons sees you eyeballing his girlfriend’s ass like that and he’s gonna make you pay.”
In fact, Conner realized Mr. Rodriguez, a math teacher who was also a lunch monitor, had also seen his pointing, and followed it to the target. He pounced in true teacherly fashion, striding quickly over to the couple. They were too far away to hear, but when Jayce and Hailey turned to face their accuser, he finally got a look at her face. Yep, definitely McManus. Not that there had been any doubt. She’d styled her hair differently, he thought, but otherwise…
The two of them both glared at Mr. Rodriguez but complied, then clearly made some uncharitable remarks about him once he’d turned his back and headed back to his post near the side doors to the cafeteria. Once they seemed to have gotten it off their chests, Jayce leaned down and gave Hailey a quick kiss on her puckered lips. Her self-satisfied grin was the last he saw of her face as they turned back toward the front of the lunch line.
Owen went back to his game. Conner, meanwhile, watched the lunch room to see when there would be some kind of outburst. Other people pointing, or a burst of laughter from Deacons and his friends when they decided to stop toying with Hailey. But nothing. They bought their ziti, sat at the usual popular table, enjoyed banter that seemed genuine from where Conner was sitting. It was like nobody found it the least bit strange that…
Hailey was standing in for Hayleigh.
Conner was on his feet in the next second. Scanning… scanning… There. There she was, Hayleigh McKnight, wearing a pair of loose-fitting overalls and sitting by herself at the end of a table in the dimmest corner of the cafeteria. She was staring intently at a tablet, probably reading the e-book she’d been trying to interest him in at the academic decathlon competition Saturday. Or, rather, that Hailey had been. It struck him that in all the years he’d known her, he couldn’t recall seeing Hayleigh without people around her.
This couldn’t be happening.
Owen took no notice as his friend made his way across the expansive room to the young woman. There was no plan here, not even a firm grasp on the world around him. By the time he’d walked up to her, he’d only managed as far as…
“Hi, um, Hailey.” Hayleigh? Even with the same pronunciation, saying it made him feel like he was going cross-eyed.
She looked up, blinking in surprise before breaking out in smiles. God, but she was beautiful. “Conner! Hi.” He was instantly sure this vision of a girl didn’t have the old Hailey’s voice; this one was a soft, warm purr.
“Do you mind if I, um…?”
The real Hayleigh McKnight would’ve told him to get lost (if she didn’t just sic Jayce on him), but this version smiled like she’d scratched off a winning lottery ticket. “Sure, have a seat! Did you have a good weekend?”
“Yeah, just, you know, normal stuff.” Except for maybe inadvertently engaging in witchcraft.
“Sorry you had to waste half of it on dumb ol’ ac dec. We didn’t even win. Still, got my medal, that was cool. Did you see? I didn’t see if you were around during the awards show. I was looking for you but the lights are in the back so when you’re sitting in the front you can’t see anything behind you. Which makes sense, I guess, but I’ve never really liked being in the spotlight. And so… um yeah, I’m talking a lot, aren’t I.”
This couldn’t be real. The same old Hailey McManus stream of consciousness pouring out of the lips of Hayleigh McKnight. (Good lord, those lips!) What could be happening? The most plausible explanation was utterly insane—but the most available explanation seemed so impossible. He had to be sure that this wasn’t the world’s most bizarre prank.
“No, I was there. And remind me, you won…?”
“Physics. I didn’t even think I did that well on the test, but some of them you can just reason through without doing all the work, ya know? Like there was this one question. You have two trains of a certain mass—and it tells you the mass but I don’t remember, obviously—anyway, they’re on the same track moving in the same direction. If the front train was moving at eighty kilometers per hour and the back train was moving at a hundred and ten kilometers… was it miles? No, that seems too fast, at least for a typical American train. Did you know in China they’re building…”
Conner blinked. There was no way Hayleigh McKnight could do such a stunning impression of Hailey McManus. Everything was perfect—the cadence, the babbling, the way she was too shy to make eye contact… Even the unabridged science problem with marginally related tangents was trademark Hailey.
He was staring in shock as she rambled on to a close. “… so I didn’t have to do the math to know the right answer was b. I mean, the front train speeds up and back train slows down. Duh, right?”
“No, totally, yeah, duh,” he agreed. Holy crap, was he mindlessly agreeing with Hailey? That was a trap he fell into in those rare occasions he was working with a really pretty girl, like when he and Heather tackled an assignment together and the fragrance of her shampoo shredded his capacity to form independent thoughts. When had that been? Last week? A minute sitting here basking in this gorgeous creature’s smile was like a year.
Suffice to say, he had never had this problem with Hailey before. One more thing to double check. She answered to Hailey/Hayleigh, but he had to make sure Owen’s accepting the big girl on Jayce Deacons’ arm as McManus wasn’t a fluke. “Oh, and yeah, I was working on the academic decathlon spread for yearbook, and wouldn’t you know it, I totally forgot how to spell your last name.”
She cocked her head to the side. “Don’t you have access to a student roster?”
“Oh. Yeah. Just, I didn’t, um, have it at home with me. You know, when I worked on it. At home. Over the weekend.” Stop having such perfect hair, damnit Hailey!
“Um, well you’re back in school now, so I guess you’ll have to look it up.” She burst into giggles a moment later. He recognized that laugh only too well. “No, it’s McManus. Spelled mick not mack, and only one ‘n’. People screw that up all the time. You’re so lucky. I bet nobody ever misspells Fishers. Though I guess there’s Conn-OR and Conn-UR, so that’s probably an issue. Does that ever happen to you? I guess most people writing your name are probably teachers and stuff, but they have rosters too and most teachers are pretty good spellers. Oh my gosh, except Mrs. Radcliff, from seventh grade. Did you have her? She was so…”
Conner had stopped listening at No, it’s McManus. There it was. This woman, this gorgeous, perfect, goddess of a woman was somehow Hailey McManus to everyone… but him. And nobody was acting any different. This couldn’t be a hoax. People like Hayleigh (the real one) and Jayce didn’t go to such lengths to prank a nobody like Conner Fishers. He wouldn’t put it past them to conspire to ruin his day if he butted his nose into their business, but otherwise, he was but a fly on their walls.
Somehow, as impossible as it sounded, swapping those pictures in the yearbook had swapped the actual appearances of the two girls in the real world. Hefty Hailey McManus was now dating one of the most sought-after guys in school. Hottie Hayleigh McKnight was now a social pariah with an enormous crush on none other than…
Holy shit.
“Hailey, do you wanna go out sometime?” he blurted. Conner winced at his own over-eagerness, like his brain shot out the ask before anyone else could realize what was going on.
The look on Hailey’s new face was priceless, an adorable combination of surprised, elated, nervous and overwhelmed. “Really? With you?!”
Conner nodded. “Of course with me.”
She clasped her hands together, immaculately manicured and pink-painted nails interlaced. “Yes! That would be amazing! When did you wanna do it? I mean, ’cause I’m free pretty much any time. Well not any time, ’cause like, I do have things sometimes, but I mean…” She paused for a breath. “I just mean I’m flexible.”
As a girl who’d shed the better part of a hundred pounds overnight, he’d bet she was flexible. In fact, Hayleigh had been on the cheerleading squad until late last year, when word had it Jayce had taken issue with his girlfriend flashing her panties to strangers. Owen had been crushed, and had sworn off sporting events ever since.
“How about tonight?”
The bell rang then, drowning out her first attempt at a response as three hundred kids began shuffling out of the cafeteria in unison. “Sounds great!”
The two parted ways then, and it was only midway through next period, his mind reeling from this turn of events, that he received a text from her reminding him of what he’d forgotten.
Are you picking me up? My address is 6326 Opal Park Way, behind the east side grocery store. What are we gonna do? Do I need to dress nice? Bring anything? Thereafter was a torrent of bright smiling emojis.
Conner stared long at those words before responding, and when he did, he wasn’t proud to say that the response was written primarily by the raging hard-on he’d been sporting since the moment she’d said yes.
I’ll pick you up at 6. Wear something sexy.