A Crazy Little Thing Called Love

Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

Have you ever been woken up by an alarm? I suppose you have, if you’ve gone to school. Anyway, that’s beside the point. What I mean is, that have you been woken up by an alarm at the same time pretty much every day for months or years, or who knows how long throughout the weeks, and then, on the weekends, you turn it off? Yeah, I do the same thing. But have you ever forgotten to turn your alarm off on the weekends? Then you wake up to that annoying sound right in the middle of a really good dream when you really wanted to sleep in? Well, that’s almost what happened to me. By ‘almost’ I mean that, a morning a few weeks after my ‘date’ with Cole, I was woken up early, but not by my alarm. Oh no. I woke up a few minutes before my alarm would normally go off. And why? Because some idiot called me. On a Saturday, no less.

I had been in that half awake state when you can somewhat hear - but may not be entirely conscious of - the world around you, when my phone went off, very loudly, on the bedside table. Of course, I was instantly awake, though sluggish, and I turned to the table with a glare.

“The phone, the phone is ringing. The phone! We’ll be right there,” My ringtone blared the Wonder Pets’ song.

There was suddenly a thunk against the wall behind my head as one of my sisters threw something at the other side. I could hear her wall-muffled “Shut it off!” Before another thunk.

Wrinkling my nose, I reached out and snatched my phone off the table, hitting the ‘send’ button before pressing the receiver to my ear.

“What,” I spoke, my voice still thick with sleep and harsh with annoyance.

A hesitant pause did nothing to ease my non-morning person-ish attitude. “Alex?” The voice was clear and not groggy in the least.

“N-” I started to respond before I recognized the voice and it clicked into place in my brain. “Yeah?”

“It’s Cole,” Cole said. It was rather unnecessary though, since, like I said not three sentences ago, I had recognized the voice.

The two of us, being Cole and I (incase you didn’t get that), had hung out about three or four times since our introduction with me being Alex. Nothing really interesting, just him and me and a couple of guys I had soon realized were pretty much his posse. I had been welcomed into their little group in no time. Practically one of the guys. Practically. Can you sense the problem there? The problem was on my side, not theirs; they completely accepted me. But I am not a guy. Proof is in my possession of certain body parts. Like my brain. I never knew how brainless and foolish boys could be until I started hanging about with Cole and his friends. Not that the Jones boys weren’t brainless and foolish, but I guess I was used to all their quirks since I’d known them for so long. And, now that I think about it, not all boys are brainless and foolish, but they all have their moments.

Rolling over onto my back, I pulled my comforter around me and stared up at my ceiling. A pale grey light shone through the blinds in my window and left a pattern on the white surface that I studied lazily.

“Do you know what time it is?” I queried, keeping my voice low so that nobody in the house would be bothered.

“Uh...early?”

I ran my hand over my face, exhaling in a sigh, and answered him. “Too early.”

“Sorry,” he didn’t sound sorry, “but, hey, listen, man. Me and a couple of the guys, were going to head out and play paintball today, but Paul has work. So now the teams are uneven. You want to take his place?”

“Oh wow, I’m glad you thought of me first,” I forced as much sarcasm-y sounds into my words as possible.

I think I could hear Cole rolling his eyes. “Do you want to play or not?”