Heart

Twenty

As Alan pulled away from the curb and drove me home, the cab stayed completely silent. This time it wasn’t a comfortable, companionable silence; we were both dieing of embarrassment, except that Alan hid it better than I did. Somehow he’d learned how to control his blushes. Mine, however, were out there plainly for the whole world to see. And no matter how hard I tried to think about something else--something funny, something sad, something mean--the blush would not go away. My brain had seared the humiliating moment right in front of my memory so that I had to keep reliving it and slowly boil my cheeks away.

Would it have been better if I hadn’t pulled back?

My heart fluttered hard, practically stopping.

Okay, maybe I’d made the right choice. At least at retreating, I hadn’t almost died of heart failure.

When Al finally cruised onto my street, a sigh of relief left me. At last, a break from this awkwardness. The fact that he wouldn’t so much as breathe a word about anything when he was embarrassed made the awkwardness much more profound. He had turned on the radio a few miles back to probably try and make up for that, but it hadn’t helped much.

He swung in the driveway and turned off the engine without a noise. Sheesh, he could make a mime scream.

I sat still for a second, not exactly sure what I was waiting for.

“Um. There’s probably leftovers from dinner. Want some?”

He shrugged, answering my offer by climbing out of the car and slamming the door shut. I quickly followed and led him towards the house, reaching for the keys. We both made sure our fingers were far apart from each other.

The door was unlocked when I tried the knob, so I stepped on in. The lights were off, which meant my parents had already went to bed. Coupled with the night outside, I could barely see in front of my face, but I knew where the light switch was.

“Okay, um, you know where everything’s at,” I said to Alan as we walked further in, “Let me just get comfortable, and I’ll, um, join you.”

I glanced over my shoulder to catch his nod of acknowledgment, and then I vaulted up the staircase. At the top, I took a moment to breathe deeply, trying to calm myself. I could not believe we both were acting so weirdly over something that didn’t even happen. I mean, seriously, we were teenagers. Teenagers have hormones. Those hormones didn’t know whom was friends with whom. They were only created for one purpose, and that was attraction. So, both my hormones and Alan’s hormones had a single, brief moment of completely natural attraction. And that was it. Nothing more.

I took one more breath and then squared my shoulders. I was determined not to feel awkward when I walked back down there.

But first, my pajamas.

Feeling a bit better, I felt my way through the dim hallway and found my room. I groped for the light switch, flicked it on, and quickly shut the door behind me. I started shedding my jacket and my shoes, hopping over to the dresser. I threw my shoes to the side and pulled open the pajama drawer, rummaging through the contents until I found something relatively cute. My p.j.’s basically consisted of oversized shirts mismatched with old sweat pants, but my mother did buy me pajama sets occasionally.

But why did I want to look cute?

I didn’t want to think about it.

I picked out the first pajama set I found and tossed it on my bed. As I was reaching for the button on my jeans, I saw something move from the corner of my eye. Instinctively, I looked up.

And screamed.

There had been a man dressed completely in back standing in the corner behind my door, but now he wasn’t--he was lunging across the room, arms stretched out in front of him. The impact sent me to the floor, spread-eagle on my back. He landed on top of me, but only stayed there for half a second. Before I could respond, he had grabbed me by the arms and hauled me up to my feet, only to shove me back onto my bed. I stared at him wide-eyed, still screaming for help, trying to take in his features. However, all I got was black--everything was black! He had even colored his whole face with blank paint, making him unrecognizable.