I turned back to David. “I just don’t think it’s . . . necessary to use those words in polite company when there are so many perfectly good euphemisms.”

David stared at me. “Dear God, what planet are you from?”

I threw up my hands. “Forget it, okay? I wouldn’t expect you to understand anyway. Just like you don’t understand why the Grove is important to me, or why I might not want my personal issues blasted all over your stupid newspaper, or why I might have wanted to eat lunch by myself for once.”

Oh God, I was doing it again, that shouty, kind of scary thing I seemed to do whenever I had to talk to David for more than five minutes. I needed to go. This idea had obviously been a bust, and there was still plenty of lunch left to hang out with Ryan.

Speaking of whom . . . I pulled my phone out of my bag and saw that, sure enough, Ryan had sent me a text message five minutes earlier. “Where R U?” Then another one from three minutes ago. “R U OK?”

“I gotta go,” I said, but David caught my arm before I got very far.

This close, I could see the faint blond stubble on his chin, and when he opened his mouth, I noticed the tiniest chip in his front tooth. “Harper, look, I just want to say . . . earlier today, that whole thing with . . . what I called you, and—”

“No problem,” I said, waving my hand, my eyes still on my cell phone as it started blaring “Sexy Back,” Ryan’s ringtone (he had picked it himself). I didn’t really want to answer it when I’d be seeing him in just a few minutes. Plus I didn’t want to lie to him in front of David, giving him even more ammo against me. I could just hear him. “Why did you lie to your boyfriend about where you were? Why are you really out here? Did you by any chance murder Dr. DuPont?”

Okay, so that last one was a long shot, but I was not in the mood to deal.

I looked at David, not even trying to hide my irritation as “Sexy Back” finally stopped. “It’s fine, okay? I shouldn’t have said that stuff about the school board and your aunt. I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

My phone started ringing again. Ryan must’ve been really worried. “Now, I really have to go.”

But David wasn’t letting go so easily, not of the subject and not of my arm.

“Fine, but what was up with you not hitting me? It didn’t look like you didn’t want to, it looked like you couldn’t.”

Great, so he had noticed that. “David, look, we can talk about this later, but my boyfriend is looking for me, and I have to go—”

“Harper?”