Slugger

21: We Need to Talk

We need to talk

BIG HEAD♥♥: 10:22AM

Shouldn't you be in class now?

YOU: 10:24AM

I am!

BIG HEAD♥♥: 10:25AM

Don't text me

YOU: 10:33PM

):

I'll pick you up after school

BIG HEAD♥♥: 10:37PM

It's really easy to seem calm and collected via text message. Dante must not know it but because of him, I cannot even function correctly in my biology class.

"Kennedy are you okay? You've been zoning out a lot today," My lab partner asks for the umpteenth time.

"Sorry, I'm just... thinking," I say sighing and almost touch my face. But then I remember that there's whitefish blastula residue all over my gloves from our biology project and I'm not prepared to be smelling of that all day, especially if Dante is picking me up after school. What does that even mean? It's not like he's done this before, so it must mean that whatever he wants to talk about is really important otherwise he could've just messaged me–

"You've zoned out again,"

I blink back into focus and look toward where my partner is standing with an unimpressed expression on her face. "Sorry?"

Nicole and Stacy are, of course, the most sympathetic when it comes to my plight.

"You're overthinking this," Stacy says abruptly while we're walking to the cafeteria. "He's probably going to tell you that you look like a – what was it? A glazed pretzel?"

Nicole laughs loudly, attracting quite a lot of attention. "Sparkly, Stacy. And then he's going to express how he can't live without her and she's going to cry,"

"Can we get back to the matter at hand here?" I ask, patting my suddenly warm face down. "This is a serious issue,"

Stacy rolls her eyes but then graces me with a sarcastic smile. "I'll be okay, Kenny," she says, the tone of her voice mirroring her facial expression. I should never tell my friends anything.

My nerves don't settle even when the end of the day comes. Tyler's reaction when I tell him the situation doesn't do much to help, especially since the still very heartbroken Chad is chilling with him when I break the news. He throws a condom from health class at me and I just about to manage to throw it back at him with slight shock before he runs away. Tyler really is too much.

It's not hard for my eyes to seek out Dante in the parking lot. It might just be me but he really sticks out, wearing his school baseball hat and leaning against the foreign object that is his car. He also has a twizzler poking out of his mouth as he looks down intently at his phone. He twists it around in his hands a few times just as my own phone vibrates.

Are you alive?

BIG HEAD♥♥: 3:22PM

Look up big head