Stalkative

Sis Was Shooketh

Leo, his name was. And this girl next door? Well, she fancied him. No, she admired him. She didn’t just like him for his striking, cinnamon eyes or his silky, jet black hair. It wasn’t simply because his cheerful laugh could activate every merry cell in her body or that his distant presence had the faculty to scatter butterflies in her stomach. It was more than that. She was fascinated by his inability to hide the way he felt. His facial expressions were a passageway into his soul and she adored it. Standing 5 foot 8 feet above ground, he had meticulous irises that metamorphosed into a colour resembling the sunset’s sky when he became infuriated. Yet, they remained a simple, innocent, light brown when he was content. Basically, his eyes told a galaxy of stories. When laughter caught a hold of him, his milky skin, painted with a faint rosy pink pigment on his cheeks, was diffused with bright red, splashing across his nose and arched over the sides of his eyes. The boy was charming.

The girl next door favoured the contrast between his brilliance and his wits from a far. She loved him. If only he knew who she was.

Hazel was her name. Such a pretty name for a girl who stalks her crush, right?

She was nicknamed Nutty, not because she was crazy (allegedly), but because she was born with lines on her baby smooth hands like that of the outer shell of a nutmeg. She had hazel eyes. Curly, long, brown hair enveloped her cute, round face that contained a faint splash of freckles across her upturned nose.

She oddly preferred camera’s with strong zoom lenses, mostly because she could see the intrinsic details of Leo through them. Every evening, Hazel came from school, sat in front her glass paned window, and stalked Leo. She wrote down everything she observed about him, from his physical features, to his behavioural patterns. Was she in love, or was she obsessed?

One friday afternoon, Hazel was walking to her home, mentally preparing herself to observe her dream boy for yet another day. Strolling into her white, suburban, two story tall house, she set her backpack down in the living room, poured herself a glass of milk, and headed up to her room. She was an only child, usually alone in the afternoons because her parents worked until 7 p.m. Her camera was already set up facing her bedroom window, which lead into Leo’s. She waited, and waited for the gorgeous being to get home so she could unapologetically commit apodyopsis; a habit she was insanely proud of. But he never came. She sat there, daydreaming of how adorable he looked when he smiled down at his cellphone. How impressively focused he acted. How he was exactly her type. How - the doorbell rang. She never liked her fantasies to be interrupted, but Hazel looked down at her digital watch which read 7:00 p.m and immediately knew her parents had arrived.

With a disappointed sigh, she walked down the steps from her room. Her parents rang the doorbell, despite the fact that they had house keys. Why? Well, Hazel was peculiar. She hated when her parents shouted “We’re home!”. It made her cringe. Also, she didn’t particular like people just walking into her house without she knowing. It frightened her. Therefore, her parents knew to let her know they had arrived by ringing the doorbell. Her nutmeg hands reached to unlock her front door. Expecting the bear hug that she always got from her father, she closed her eyes and swung open the door. Quickly clasping her hands to her body, almost on impulse she pleaded,

“No, don’t hug me!”

And there it was. A simple chuckle. The sound to the inaudible laugh that she dreamt of every night. She slowly opened her eyes and her heart did a double-take. This wasn’t her dad or her mom. Hazel could feel guilt rising in her chest. Her rose pink, lower lip quivered and her knees wobbled as she stared, shook, into those beautiful, innocent, cinnamon brown eyes. Leo held the back of his neck, smiled and said,

“Hey.”