lola the liar

2

Lola

It was a Saturday night, late June.The sky was the color of a widow's shawl. Thick clouds of smoke wafted in the stenchy summer air through the four inch crack of my window. I quit smoking 43 times in the last five months but that was before I realized that I wasn't terrible at many things. Except quitting perhaps. 'Smoking kills.' was the wide black label stamped on the front of my pack of Marlboro but somehow I knew smoking wasn't the addiction that would kill me this summer.

Sitting on the edge of my table, I dangled my feet. The tiny adjust-fan overhead billowed out my white curtains dragging summer and smoke inside the room. Wearing a tattered Led Zeppelin t-shirt and a refreshing cucumber sheet-mask, I embarked on the seventh step of my elaborate skincare routine– cyber-stalking Declan Floyd.

Hell hath no fury like a teenage girl obsessed.
The name Declan Floyd has been between my lips far longer than a cigarette butt. And it was the kind of addiction I couldn't shake with mere nicotine patches and chewing gums. Worse, it was the kind of addiction I didn't want to shake.

I was thirteen when I first started harboring a silly school-girl crush on Declan Floyd. At seventeen and a half, I didn't need to lie face-down on a shrink's couch to know that this obsession of mine was unhealthy. But humans were creatures of habit, there was a Declan Floyd labeled crevice in the hypothalamus of my brain for the last four-ish years and I had no other jaded and popular highschool star QB names to fill that space with.

Declan Floyd sat at the pinnacle of my instagram search history. I should've been embarrassed that I didn't even have to type in his full username before his infuriating profile picture graced my phone screen. I should've been even more embarrassed that this was my idea of a Saturday night. But my thoughts now resembled the back of my AP chemistry notebook– 256 pencil scribbles of Declan Floyd with tiny doodled hearts beside it.

Seven posts, no captions. Declan Floyd in a football huddle. His crisp emerald jersey, the number 15 burning through it. Declan Floyd in a grayscale gym mirror selfie. A hazy sunset shot. In a classroom, leaning against a plastic chair, lips pulled up in a lazy smile, late-afternoon sun in his eyes. A flat-lay of a battered hard-cover of George Orwell's 1984. A black block. Declan Floyd's back against a pink sky, in a pink shirt. Declan Floyd climbing out of the Beverlys' second-floor window, from across my street.

A dirty-green plaid shirt dangling from his frame, baggy faded-black jeans. A messy thatch of chestnut hair sticking to his forehead. Squinting under the dimmed lamp-post buzzing with a fleet of moths. Declan fucking Floyd.
Not too faraway, a tire must've burst open, a loud series of screechy car-alarms went off. My heart climbed up my throat. A steady bead of sweat rolled down my temple. My phone slipped out of my clammy palms and landed face-first onto the carpet of grass with a soft 'thud'.

"Fuck!" A harsh high-pitched voice groaned, perhaps my own.

My house was a one-storeyed modern architecture atrocity with picket fences in chipped gray paint, bed of dead peonies in a perfectly pruned lawn that my mother paid the Beverlys' poolboy to mow once a week. It was small enough for just the two of us. Big enough for my mother to forget it was just the two of us.

I craned the upper-half of my body out of the window, trying to grasp onto my purple and pink Sanrio-esque phone-charm without toppling outside entirely. I wondered what a sight I made– pasty cucumber Korean sheet-mask stamped on my face, body tossed over the window sill in threadbare t-shirt. I wondered what a sight I made to Declan Floyd but then I remembered that I didn't exist in his world.

Crunch of light footfalls against the overgrown grass. Jimmy the Beverlys' pool-boy was doing a terrible job. Under the dimmed moonlight and the flickering lamppost a shadow darkened my vicinity. I tilted my head like a haunted contortionist, eyes falling on a pair of purple high-top Nike Jordans and the folded hem of dark denim.

Purple high-top Jordans ducked lower, lower till I could see the creased hem of green plaid, pearly white buttons two undone, a built chest with a small tuft of light brown hair. Defined jawline, a five o'clock shadow, a pair of incisors and full-pink lips trapped between. A slightly crooked nose and sparkly brown eyes that looked twice as demented under the pale moonlight.

Half of my sheet mask peeled off my face, curious brown against confused blue. He stared, I gulped. He stared some more, pebbles spiked against my skin. My heart was in my ear. Condescending brown against cautious blue, he stared till blue bled into brown and brown bled into blue, running together in a shade of murky green.

It was seven heartbeats before he bent down. My battery was at a measly 4% when my phone decided to leap out of my grasp, I prayed that with my depleting battery health and full-blown screen brightness, my phone would successfully die.

Except with my terrible luck, it didn't. He picked up my phone, my iPhone 12 mini even mini-er in his masculine palms. Tiny splinters of broken screen-protector stuck to his palms. The corners of his mouth curled up into a sly smirk, he parted his lips to say something but then shook his head and handed me my least favorite weapon-of-assault.

"T-Thanks..." I barely mumbled but was only met with the groan of a car engine and peppermint and Axe scented air. Only when I did look down, I found Declan Floyd splashed over my screen, a zoom-in of his washboard abs and a giant crack across the screen. He knew.

Dear Diary, Declan Floyd looked at me. Dear Diary, oh how I almost wished he hadn't.