Between the Lines

- 14 -

14

Braden

 

I can’t get up. All I can do is lie here on my bedroom floor watching a solitary cobweb on the far corner of my ceiling ripple in some totally impalpable breeze.

She hasn’t texted back yet, and I’m not sure what that means. Maybe she hasn’t had time to respond.

Maybe I pissed her off. I seem to have a talent for that.

Maybe I’m not worth a reply.

Maybe, and here is a thought I really want to cling to, she needs me to come to her aid. Like she’s hurt or something. Or just alone and needs someone to talk to.

Maybe that could be me.

Maybe I’m a freakin’ moron.

That’s a certainty, not a maybe.

Whatever reason she has for not texting me back after five hours and fourteen minutes – not that I’m counting – all I can think to do is lie here and watch the cobweb wavering.

Why is Phil Collins playing over and over in my head? It’s not even the whole song, just one line, “against all odds,” and it won’t stop. Why does that happen with one stupid song lyric getting stuck on repeat, and what. the. HELL is with that wobbling cobweb?

I’m not even sure why my fascination is turning to fury at that dust web right now, but maybe it has something to do with Phil Collins. Maybe it has something to do with her. Maybe with me for being a total dork.

One way or another, I hate that cobweb. But I’m gonna leave it where it hangs.

I check my watch and see it’s past ten thirty. Freakin’ late, and there’s no way she’ll text me back at this point. Still, there’s this lingering feeling that maybe she needs me…

Okay. Fine. As I grab my shoes and slip them on without ever having untied them, I start to think of something that needs to be added to my matrices.

There obviously has to be a third matrix. This will be the Hot/Stalker Matrix. In this one, the hotter the girl, the more logical being a damn STALKER becomes. In my mind I see that chart. Kendal is a nine. Hands down, a nine. And I’m obsessed with her, which puts my stalkerhood somewhere past a forty-seven on a scale of one to ten.

I scoot down the hall and the stairs quietly, not like there’s really a reason. Mom and Dad stopped caring about me going out late when I was fifteen. Still, being quieter feels… important, somehow.

Once outside I fidget in my pocket for the heavy key that unlocks and starts my sad but quasi-trustworthy Buick. I fall into my butt groove and start up the beast. It rumbles to life and I will it to try to whisper a bit as I pull out of our drive.

This is not a hot car; its main color is primer, and it smells a little like fried chicken and a lot like feet. Even if it turns out I’m right that Kendal needs me, and not that I’ll see her steaming up Kyle’s windows in his nice new Honda, no girl would be happy to see me-or this-or me in this. That’s not the vision of heroism, it’s a reason a girl would go home and take a warm bath with a rusty razor blade while crying that her Prince Charming is Braden…in a ’79 Buick.

I’d kill myself too. And I almost do as I barely stop in time at a four-way stop. I was daydreaming and forgot to check where I was driving. Won’t do that again! I shake my head to clear it and continue driving towards Kendal’s part of town, rather displeased with the fact that I know where it is. Mentally, I notch myself up to a forty-eight on the stalker scale.