Speak

Chapter 05 - He and She

He rushed around the corner.

Could she hear his heart beating from ten feet away?

He leaned back against a sign promoting some dance or other school function and squeezed his eyes shut.

He wanted to make her into art.

He'd realized about six seconds into their conversation that he was about seven inches away from a living tapestry.

She was a painting disguised as human being.

Henry was having trouble breathing.

He never felt this way when he talked to Penny.

He shook his head and pushed himself off the wall. She was just a girl. Just a random person he'd met in a random place at a random time.

Random.

Nothing special.

He ran a shaky hand through his hair and crossed down the hallway, feeling sort of drunk.

God, it was because of her. He was drunk on her.

Random, Henry. It was just random. She was nothing special and he was nothing special and he couldn't already be drunk on someone he'd only just taken a sip of.

But, boy was she intoxicating.

He wobbled to his first class, trying to focus on his glaring teacher and whispering classmates. The teacher's mouth was moving quickly, but the words were in the background, behind the voices in his head. They overshadowed any other noise, any other person or thing.

He sat down behind Penny and tried to distract himself with her glossy hair, pulled back in a ponytail, a slight curl at the end of it.

He told himself that the girl - Lucy - that her hair wasn't neatly styled, her fingers weren't perfectly manicured, she didn't have brown eyes or brown hair or anything he was usually attracted to in girls. Not like Penny.

In retrospect, Penny was his dream girl. Smart, sexy, popular. What any guy would kill for.

In retrospect, he shouldn't have been thinking of any other girl, any other person, even.

He stared at the back of her head, imagining a blonde one whipping around to face him. Two wide grey eyes staring back at him. Two flushed cheeks looking bashfully down at the books they'd just dropped.

He was crazy. Insane.

He'd just met the girl and was already pretending she was his girlfriend rather than the head cheerleader, his dream girl.

He leaned back against his chair, looking around the room. Despite himself, he found that he was looking for her, for Lucy.

He huffed. It was at this moment he realized his leg was shaking, causing the whole desk to rattle in turn. He quickly stopped it and turned to look out the window.

Outside, he saw a leaf falling from a nearby tree branch. He stared at it for the rest of the class.

-

"Mom?" he called out into the empty foyer.

There was no response, which wasn't a surprise to Henry, so he kept moving down the hallway to the small family room on his left.

He slung his backpack onto its rickety old couch and listened to it bend and creak before slumping down on top of it. He grabbed the remote off the glass coffee table in front of him and switched on the TV. Resting his head on his bulging backpack, he shut his eyes, ignoring the sound of NBC in the background.

Henry thought about girls and fallen books, and twisted his mouth into a deep frown.

How could he still be thinking about this Lucy seven hours after their meeting?

Her red ears.

Her faded Newsies t-shirt and beaten Chucks.

Her blue, blue eyes.

God.

He turned his attention, finally, to the television, which was now playing a rerun of Seinfeld. After watching half an episode, he switched it off, rubbed the day out of his eyes, sighed and resigned himself to the fact that he wouldn't be able to stop thinking about his mystery girl. Her.

He dragged himself down the hallway to his stuffy kitchen and pulled open the fridge. As he was scavenging for something - anything - edible in his messy fridge, he heard the front door creak open. He paused.

"Mom?" he spun out of the kitchen. "You're home early-"

But it wasn't his mom taking off her coat, grinning at him, saying, "Hey, Henry, how's it goin'?" It was someone else entirely.

Henry felt like his stomach had been replaced by a ton of bricks. This was certainly not how he'd expected his day to go, and not even close to how he'd wanted it to go.

His voice was thick and slow; it was molasses. "Dad?"

A/N:

I can't actually gather any information about the attached photo, but it is wonderful for Henry's view of Lucy. You can find this painting on http://imgur.com/gr1PyVa if you would like, for whatever reason. I found it on google. If you know anything about it, please don't hesitate to comment! The artist deserves credit!

sorry for the late update everyone! it was simply the result of writers block and exhaustion after a three-week long theater camp followed by a two-hour performance and a garage sale two days after that.

this certainly isn't my best writing, and it will be edited, I promise. but im just eager to get to Lucy's chapter already! (although I do looovvve henry, and youll get to know him better in chapter's to come).

-✌🏻️