four

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four

Colby Gardener was an interesting boy. I had known him since pre-K, and our moms were fairly close. When it came time to choose a high school, my parents had already picked Barnes Academy for me. Colby and Colby’s parents were on the fence between Barnes and our local public school. In the end, they chose Barnes, because if it was good enough for Emily Albert, then it must’ve been good enough for Colby. So the two of us set off for Barnes together. But despite our families’ associations with one another, when we got to Barnes, Colby and I acted like we were more than strangers. “More than strangers” in the sense that we actively didn’t know each other.

During our freshman year, we were placed in a few classes together, but we only interacted if we had to. There was an unspoken mutual agreement between us that we were to keep our distance. Colby wanted to make friends without having the burden of helping me make friends, and I wanted to drift by without having to worry about how Colby was drifting. Our relationship (or really lack thereof) worked, and it wasn’t until sophomore year (when we had both established our given friend groups) that Colby cut the crap and decided to talk to start talking to me again.

I had never had an issue with Colby Gardener. He liked to play basketball and soccer and baseball, and academics weren’t really his thing. During our shared awkward family dinners over the years, we didn’t really talk much, but we didn’t not talk, either. Usually, we would just go down to my basement (looking back, I didn’t even want to know what my parents thought we were doing down there) and flip through some channels until we found a documentary or a sports game to watch. Even when we were younger, we were never really friends. We were both just kind of there and only interacting out of convenience and to make our parents happy. So when Colby started speaking to me during our second year at Barnes, it was safe to say that I was worried about his mental health.

Colby and I happened to possess nothing in common, as we had discovered years ago. I liked to read, and he compared books to the literary version of waterboarding. He liked to be the center of attention, while I preferred the shadows surrounding the spotlight. I neither had nor wanted a lot of friends, and he both had and wanted a lot of friends. He got straight C’s on his report card one semester during seventh grade; I settled for nothing less than an A. I was a girl, and he was a boy. We were basically polar opposites, which was why I was so terribly confused about his newfound interest in me about a year ago.

I couldn’t even remember when it started. Maybe September? October? It could’ve even been as early as late August. Whenever it was, Colby began to weave himself into my life again. He was a good friend of Thalia’s (she was a good friend of a lot of boys in our grade), so he would often swing by our dorm (boys were only prohibited from dorm rooms at night), just for a quick chat, using Thalia as his excuse for popping by. But as I slowly learned, he wasn’t interested in buddying up with Thalia—he was interested in getting closer to me, for whatever bazar reason.

At first, I didn’t really understand it. This was the same boy that I had known since I was three, and only now was he taking notice of me. It made no sense, but I went along with it, because this was Colby Gardener, and the boy was harmless. Or so I thought. Because there was one thing that I often forgot about Colby Gardener: he was a teenaged boy. It was his fatal flaw, like Achilles’ heel, and if I weren’t for that, maybe our short-lived friendship could’ve exceeded a mere season. But then Colby decided to ruin our random talks about how he was failing Algebra and about how I wasn’t the one that he should’ve been talking to about failing Algebra (I was barely surviving Algebra II, myself).

It was during the middle of November, right before Thanksgiving break. I was in my room alone with Colby, because Thalia was in urgent need of a cup of hot chocolate and our room sadly didn’t include a hot-chocolate-making machine. So it was just the two of us—Colby and me. It was kind of like those awkward times after dinner at his house or my house, except this was even more awkward, because he was here by choice, and he didn’t have any intention of leaving so soon.

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