Relying On Ben and Jerry (Waltham #1)

Chapter Twenty-Three: When It Happens

“Try to do what?” I replied, and he glanced away from me, looking back down at his feet. I tried to tell myself that it was too dark for me to be able to tell, but I was almost completely sure that he was blushing.

“Never mind,” he said, but I knew I was going to be up all night wondering what he was going to say, and what I wished with all of my might that he would have. I shrugged and looked back ahead of me, keeping my eyes on the corner of the street and away from him, hoping that he couldn’t see just how on edge I was.

For a long moment, we went back to that peaceful silence.

“Lena?” he asked.

“Yeah?” I replied so quickly that it could have been a part of his question. I winced, feeling like an idiot, but he acted like he didn’t even notice. Which was rather sweet of him.

He stared off into the distance as he said, “I have a million questions I want to ask you. I just can’t figure out which one to start with at the moment.”

“Well,” I said, gesturing to myself, “fire away.”

He took a deep breath, letting in and expelling it, before he turned to look at me, his eyebrows pulling together. “I’m sure this is going to sound really redundant, but why do you wear all those crazy clothes? Don’t take that the wrong way—it’s totally you, and it’s awesome—but . . . I don’t know. I don’t think there are a lot of people in the world that would have the confidence to be able to do it, I mean. With all of the judgment in high school and whatever.”

I was silent for a long, thoughtful moment before I said, “I guess I mainly do it because I’ve always been invisible.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean . . . Like, there are so many kids in school, right? Aren’t there times where you sit down in a class and look around, or when you’re walking down the hall, and a kid you’ve never seen before in your entire life is standing there going about their day as usual, but you swear that you’ve never seen them before in your life? Well, I was just kind of sick of being that person. Of being the kind of person that no one even knew existed.”

“I doubted that no one noticed you,” he told me, and I looked at him.

“Before I came here,” I said slowly, swallowing heavily, “I wasn’t much of anyone.”

“You’re Lena,” he replied sternly, narrowing his eyes, and waiting until I turned to him to continue, “and that’s the only person you should ever be.”

I blushed and quickly looked down, away from his gaze. I sucked a nervous breath into my lungs. “I know that what I’m talking about is kind of weird and irrational or whatever, but there’s this urge in humans, this instinct, that makes us desperately want to fit into something. Into a group of friends or into a team or into a family. We just want to belong. And I guess, even though it was a mixture of a couple of things, I guess I just kept up with it because . . . because who I am now is someone who belonged better than the person I ever was.”

“But that doesn’t make you different people,” he argued, and I closed my eyes.

“Quinton,” I said slowly before I laughed. “If I didn’t dress funny, you never would have noticed me. I would have sat next to you in Tyler’s class for months before you looked over and realized I was there, only to forget my face just as quickly. If I hadn’t have left such an impression on people, no one would have noticed me.”

“I would have,” he murmured softly into the night, and I shook my head.

“I don’t think you would have,” I whispered back painfully. “No one else had.”