The second Bryan leaves the house I call Mariah and tell her everything that just happened.
“Hallelujah! It’s about time!” She yells.
I think she missed the part where I told her that I didn’t want to go tonight.
“Can I come over and take pictures?” She asks.
Seriously? We’ve just started talking and she’s expecting me to go with him? I did say yes, but that was when we were together! It’s not like we agree to be friends and then bam, everything’s okay again, and we love each other perfectly like nothing happened!
“Mariah, you’re ridiculous.” I tell her. “I’m not going.”
“What? But you haaaave to!” She whines.
“Why did I call you?” I ask, more to myself than her.
I can just imagine Mariah’s frown. “Because you love me, and I don’t think you understand.” She tells me.
“Oh, really? Enlighten me, then.” I respond sarcastically.
“If you call and cancel, do you think that Bryan’s going to appreciate it? Because I highly doubt it. I mean, he said that you were friends, and people go to homecoming together as friends all the time. Calling and cancelling is just going to cause more tension. Besides, you have to give him your project sometime, and it’s going to be painfully awkward if you show up to give it to him later because you cancelled your homecoming date.”
I don’t say anything for a moment because I know she’s right. It would really be better, in the long run, if I just go with him- but I can’t stop myself from not wanting to.
“But I have nothing to wear!” I tell her, grasping at straws.
I hear Mariah sigh.
“You’re going, I know you are. And I also happen to know that you have a perfectly suited dress for the occasion hanging in your closet that you’ve never worn. I watched you buy it, remember?”
It was for my aunt’s wedding that I never went to. But yes, Mariah has seen it, because she was the one who helped me pick it out in the first place.
“Fine. I’ll go.” I say disdainfully. “But don’t expect too much.”
I hang up the phone and walk over to my closet. I’ve got a few hours before Bryan comes back to pick me up. If I want to finish my project on love before he comes and get ready, I don’t have time for a nap.
Dang.
I go to my computer and begin looking up pictures of love. After accidentally running across a few racy ones, I decide to just pull the pictures from my own photo album. Opening up different files on the computer, I find a few. There’s a picture of Bryan and I having a cat fight when we’re little (since we weren’t that close back then), and then a few recent photos of us. One picture of us kissing, one of us holding hands, and then one of him carrying me when I’m sleeping. I don’t know who took any of the pictures, but they work well nonetheless.
I slide them all together in a sheet protector after mounting them on cardstock, and then write my short essay on what love is. I talk about Aunt Laura and Charis, and my sisters and mom. By the time I’ve finished talking about them, I’ve still got another page to fill. I know who the page should belong to, who I should be writing about, really… but I don’t want Bryan to read about how much I love him and get false hopes, because, if we’re being honest here, I still love him as much as I did when we were together, if not more.
After wasting fifteen minutes staring at the half-filled white page on my computer screen, I remember that I’m on a time constraint and I better get going.
YOU ARE READING
Finishing Crazy
Teen FictionKyra and Bryan have known eachother their whole life, but it wasn't until recently that they've become really close. After spending every single morning biking mile after mile with eachother, Kyra confides in Bryan that she wants to race in the Iron...
