Free Most Likely to Succeed by Jennifer Echols

madder than me getting angry with him . “This is exactly why you need to resign. Using that language and talking about your sex life in the school parking lot!”
    “ My sex life!” I exclaimed. “Weren’t you there?”
    He looked up at the dark blue sky, gathering self-control. Then he said, “Don’t try to argue your way out of this. I’m not changing my mind.”
    “ Your mind?” I asked. “Since when does a student council president get to decide that other elected officials should resign?”
    “That’s what’s best for the school,” he said.
    “I’m not resigning.” Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. What would my mother say?
    “We’ll see, after I talk to Ms. Yates again,” Aidan sneered.
    “And after I talk to the parliamentarian,” I shot back. “There are rules for trying to make your girlfriend resign just because you’ve broken up with her.”
    “Oh.” Aidan rolled his eyes and shot me the bird.
    Speechless for the first time, I stared at him, trying to get my head around the fact that my longtime boyfriend, the one I’d thought I would marry, had broken up with me and was now shooting me the bird. If that’s how mature he wanted this breakup to be, I wished I had my mother’s entire container of homemade cookies to throw at him one by one.
    Finally I said, “Thanks for confirming that I’ve wasted the last three years with you.”
    He stalked away. A few band members who’d stopped to witness our fight were watching me and talking behind their hands.
    I wondered if Sawyer was listening. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of turning to look.
    No, I took the only possible course of action in this situation. Blinking back tears, I went off in search of Harper and Tia.

5
    WAY ACROSS THE PARKING LOT, Will stood beside one of the band buses. He wore his uniform pants but had already ditched his coat. He pulled his T-shirt off over his head, wadded the cotton into a ball, and reached upward with it.
    Tia stuck her head out of the bus window and laughed with him, then accepted the T-shirt and lobbed another out the window at him. At the last second before the shirt fell to the pavement, he snagged it from midair with one of his drumsticks. He shook it out and pulled it over his head. Then he reached up to the window again.
    Tia put her hand out the window. They held hands for a few moments while she smiled down at him and told him something. I was still half a football field away from themand couldn’t hear anything they said, but I knew they were stalling, milking another minute of excitement out of seeing each other before he walked away to make sure all the instruments safely traveled the distance from the truck to the band room. He and Tia would be separated for only fifteen minutes. They were ridiculous, acting like they wouldn’t see each other for a month.
    That’s how Aidan and I had felt about each other when we were fourteen.
    Now Aidan had told me he wasn’t sure I was good enough for him because I hadn’t upheld his high standards of running an election correctly—even though I hadn’t been allowed in the room when the votes were counted.
    It had finally happened. My mother had told me a million times that because I was a woman, I had to work twice as hard as a man for the same amount of respect. And I was black, so I had to work four times as hard. To get twice as much respect, I had to work eight times as hard, and that’s what she expected of me.
    But she’d been wrong. I worked as hard as I could, eight times harder than most people, probably fifty times harder than Tia, who didn’t work at all, and Tia was still acing the tests and ruining the curve in calculus. My mother might want me to have twice the respect of other people, but shegave me none. She demanded perfection. I wasn’t perfect. I would have to work sixteen times as hard, and I just couldn’t do it anymore.
    My tears blinded me. I didn’t notice Will had come across the parking lot to meet me