Am I Pretty Yet?

Chapter Two

This chapter has been edited 07/28/16.

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"A little to the left," Harrison called out. I blew a chunk of hair out of my face and took another careful step up the tree trunk, finding footing in a crook of the bark. I reached up and threw the string of softly blinking lights around a random branch of leaves. "Careful!"

"I'm fine," I replied.

"With the lights." I looked down at him, glaring. He grinned widely at me, throwing his hands up in the air. "Joking!"

Grumbling a string of curse words to myself, I carefully made my way down the tree trunk only to find myself stopping in place to take a look at Harrison. It hadn't always been like this, feeling like the ground was spinning and I was undergoing continuous lapses of deja vu whenever I saw him. Something in my gears had simply magically shifted about six months ago, when Harrison dumped Tasha Hu.

"We just started drifting," Harrison had told me over a box of pizza, half cheese for him and half pepperoni for me. We'd been sitting on the carpet floor of my living room, with my mother still back at the shop finishing up orders for wedding bouquets that were due the following morning. "She got consumed with her studies. I got busy with basketball. That was that."

I'd punched him in the arm, a horrible habit that would never truly go away due to this being how we'd met in middle school. I'd socked him in the face after he had hurt a girl's feelings in my class. I'd punched him so hard, he said he'd seen stars. Thus, I was Punches and he was Twinkles. My bravery left an impression on him, strangely enough so that for the following three and a half years we became attached at the hip. It was the most unexpected friendship, yet everything fell into place as if the events that led up to us were only inevitable.

"People don't just involuntarily drift," I'd said through a mouthful of stuffed crust.

"Sure they do. Tasha and I drifted. Rosie and I drifted. Janet and I drifted."

"If you're going to add Mary Kate and Ashley to that list, I honestly wouldn't be surprised." He'd made a silly face at me for that, and I'd laughed.

I remember him leaning back against our couch cushion, casual as can be. "Sometimes I wish the girls I dated were kind of like you."

I'd stopped in mid-pizza-chew. "What?"

He'd shrugged his shoulders, settling his own slice back into the box. "In case you haven't noticed, you're the only girl I'm with twenty four seven because I never have to worry about our relationship having some sort of ticking bomb time limit." He'd paused, sending me a smile that caused the hairs on my arms to rise. "It's just you and me, on a road that never ends."

I'd swallowed my pizza bite down so quickly that I started choking a bit, having to uncap my can of Dr. Pepper and chug down a mouthful of it to clear my passageway.

"Just a thought," he'd added, trailing off absentmindedly and resuming eating his slice of pizza. I remember squirming in my seat on the floor, no longer feeling hungry or thirsty or on the verge of choking to death. It was like a spotlight had been shone upon Harrison, and now he was no longer just a boy who constantly came over to my house or to the flower shop. He wasn't just someone who occasionally tied my shoes for me if my hands were full or knew my family better than I even did. He was something entirely different, something a little brighter and special, something that made my heart feel like it was going to shoot out of my chest and land in his hands. He could have it. It was all his.

After that, he'd never brought it up again. But I couldn't help wondering what it would be like if Harrison did ask me out. If I got the chance to become his girlfriend, to be taken out on dates, to be loved because I was Nina, not just Flora Gregory's unfortunate looking daughter.