Acknowledgements: This chapter is dedicated to AlexusBurns for the amazingly kind review she left for “Love, Inc.” in her critique board, which motivated me to write this chapter. She’s also a fantastic writer, so check her stories out if you love paranormal action books. From now on I’m planning to dedicate every chapter to one of my readers. A little promotion is the least I could do for those who are supporting my story.
---
♥ Chapter Two
Faces passed in blurs through the hallways. Shoes squeaked on mopped floors, and murmurs echoed down the long walls. The sounds in the busy traffic of the walking period were far away in Riley’s ears as she floated through the aisles like a ghost. Her face looked dark with the way the shadows angled in her downward stare, and purple blotches dotted below her eyes. Strands of hair stuck out from her head, like a doll that had been brushed with a spike comb.
She roamed the faceless halls in its muffled background noises until a voice echoed.
“Nice tumbleweed, Riley!” A hefty male in a polo shirt cupped his hands around his mouth, a megaphone for his holler. “Must’ve been a craaazy weekend!”
“Yeah,” Riley muttered, passing by him with her eyes still glued to the floor.
The yeller’s friend stopped walking as he realized no one was by his side. He turned around and gawked at the polo shirt man, who stood frozen in his tracks. His eyes were widened, his back stiff.
“What’s wrong, Nolan?”
The apple in his throat bobbed as he swallowed hard. “R-Riley said… ‘yeah’,” he stuttered. “She didn’t sock me in the gut, or dropkick me, or shout that she would shove her fist so far down my throat she would sock me from the inside of my gut while doing a dropkick. She just said… ‘yeah.’”
“Holy—”
The two scrambled their legs as they darted down the hallway and disappeared in the next corner, screaming for their lives.
Riley reached her locker at last through the blurs of students, and her head slammed against the door. She slid a calculator out from her pocket to check the screen again, just to confirm if the device had computed an error.
The calculator was not wrong.
-100.
That was the total amount of money Riley would have by the end of the month. Negative one hundred. She groaned, slamming her forehead against the locker once more. How was it possible to have money less than zero? By that logic, she couldn’t even enjoy free things—no, something free would be one hundred dollars more expensive than what she had!
Riley had already spent the entire weekend circling newspaper ads and bookmarking Internet sites for job offers, but responses were either slow or discouraging. She remembered already asking the cranky landlord for an extension last month, so a second time in delaying the rent would only infuriate that old hag even more.
There was no way she could make a hundred dollars by the end of this month. Even if employers considered her for a fraction of a second, Riley would ruin her chances at the interviews. Those nosy bosses always asked that dreaded question: what had happened in your previous job? The job before that? And the other job before that?
“I got fired for spitting in customers’ drinks,” she had said. “But those customers were harassing the blind man next to their table—they deserved it!”
“I got fired for punching my boss,” she had replied. “He rubbed his hand on one of our co-worker’s rack. That sleazeball had it coming to him.”
“Last week I saw a guy propose to a woman when he had proposed to a different one a month ago,” she had answered. “So I dumped water on his head.”
Yeah. End of interview.
“Arghhh! Why can’t I ever keep my mouth shut!?” Riley yelled and whacked her locker. The door bolted open, and her textbooks vomited out and spilled over the floor.
Riley sighed as she knelt down to stack her books and papers together. She reached for an envelope until her fingers nearly grazed the heel that stamped over the letter. Riley’s eyes trailed up the stilettos, to a fine-pressed skirt, to a girl’s curled blonde hair, which swayed over her shoulder as she turned her head from Riley, unnoticing.
“Thanks for walking me here,” she giggled, leaning over the locker next to Riley’s. Glittery stickers of crowns had been pasted over her compartment, making Riley’s neighbor the owner of the most obnoxious locker in the school.
“Don’t move too fast to the next girl when you go, okay?”
“Of course, Daisy,” Heath replied, and their faces inched closer to kiss.
Riley shuddered at the loud lip-smacking, as if bugs had crawled down her shirt. It was worse enough that Heath was the school’s biggest playboy, but his new girlfriend was Daisy, another serial dater. They’d been dating for two weeks, longer than their usual relationships. The weird thing about it was that, though they openly acknowledged their debauchery to the public, they still managed to have love interests rolling in like lottery coins. Riley supposed dating was just a playground for them, and people were their toys.
“Hey,” she called out, “you’re stepping on my stuff and I’m in a hurry to go to the bathroom to throw up.”
Daisy wrinkled her eyebrows at Riley before stepping off the envelope. Riley snatched the paper and stood up, heaving a glare. She noticed the blue eyes peering from behind that girl’s head.
“What is that, a love letter?” Heath asked. His face hadn’t turned into a sneer like Nolan would have made, and his voice sounded the same as it did when he had asked if she needed help last week in front of the restaurant. But with preposterous words like ‘love letter’, Riley hardly believed his sincerity and replied with a snort. Daisy turned back to Heath and continued murmuring sweet nothings in his ear.
Riley ripped open the letter from the middle and found a bright colored ticket in her hands. A picture of a basketball swooping inside the net had a date marked for next Saturday. Riley raised an eyebrow, fishing through the envelope to find a note. She unfolded a half sheet of binder paper and squinted at the squiggly handwriting printed.
Hope you can make it. – Will
Riley’s eyebrows almost shot off her forehead.
“So it is a love letter,” Heath said, his lips quirked in a triumphant smile. Riley scrambled to shove the ticket back inside its envelope.
“Yeah, right,” she scoffed. “It’s probably a lame prank by Nolan. I’ve never even talked to Will.”
Riley wrinkled her nose at the note. Nolan must have been more dimwitted than she thought, wasting his money on tickets and using another student’s name to make the joke legitimate. Riley blinked as a shadow hovered over the note, and she almost dropped the paper from surprise at Daisy’s close proximity.
Daisy’s eyes scanned the paper like a copy machine. Her face had changed, the corners of her lips turned downwards.
“It’s Will,” she said in such a hushed tone that Riley had to lean forward to listen. “This is his handwriting. He always writes like he’s sitting on a laundry machine.”
“No way. It’s Will? The guy everyone calls Wimpy Will?” Riley searched for any name that might prove he’d written this for another girl. Nothing. The note was exactly as she read it. She scratched her head, stumped.
What would a guy like that ask her out for? Riley muttered to herself as she both creased the envelope and her forehead in confusion.
Daisy glazed over her neighbor for a moment before pulling the books out of her locker and shutting the door with a snap. Strands of glitter from the crown stickers sprinkled to the floor.
“I want you to walk with me to class after all,” she said, locking Heath’s arm in her own. He replied with a ‘sure’, but turned his head back as they strode down the hallway, eyeing the floor.
When she returned to her apartment that afternoon, Riley taped the letter to the wall. She spent most of her nights for the rest of the week ogling the ticket, wondering whether she should trash it or not. Her mother would sometimes walk by the room and ask why she was glaring at the wall.
“How sweet,” she said after listening to Riley’s story. By the glistening in her eyes Riley knew her mom would start tearing up from relief that there was actually a boy who Riley didn’t scare away. “A boy asked you out on a date. It must be the first time that’s happened!”
Riley was too baffled to be flattered, as she still couldn’t believe that a guy asked her out, much less Wimpy Will. She only met him at the beginning of the school year in biology class, and after the first week he had transferred to integrated science. Her classmates said that the frog dissection the teacher demonstrated had made his face turn green and so he changed classes right away. Afterwards, Nolan coined him the nickname “Wimpy Will”.
That was the only time Riley saw him. She scanned the hallways during walking periods for the rest of the week, but still could not catch any sight of Will, especially when she barely remembered what he looked like. The thought that this could all be a prank circled around the front and back of Riley’s mind, but as the end of the week approached, she had to make a decision eventually.
Riley snatched the envelope and tickets off the wall on Saturday morning. She tied her sneakers and ambled towards the nearest bus station. In a few minutes the vehicle pulled up to the sidewalk and she walked on the steps.
Riley wrapped her hand around the pole. Barely anyone attended the bus this morning, but she felt too fidgety to sit down anywhere. If she did, she’d end up shaking her leg restlessly, like the guy sitting across the aisle was doing. She watched him twiddle his thumbs, his face bobbing up and down in anxious tics. As if he was sitting on a laundry machine…
Riley did a double-take. The guy’s lanky figure and mousy hair settled in her recollection of the first week of school.
“Will!?”
He shot his head up and stared at her with widened eyes. Then he squinted, as if he were searching for her name in the crevices of his memory. “Riley…?”
The bus rode in steady motion, so she glided over to his seat and fished out the envelope from her handbag. “Hey, you dropped this in my locker, right?”
His eyebrows went up at the familiar orange ticket. He looked at Riley again, then nearly knocked the back of his head against the window as he pulled back and clutched his head.
“Oh, man! I put it in the wrong locker!”
“I figured as much,” Riley said. “Here. You can take it back.”
Will shook his head. “No, it’s fine. You went through the trouble of coming, and the ticket’s only for today. We should go.”
“You sure?” He nodded, and relief lifted up her shoulders. She was glad that it hadn’t been a prank, or much worse, an actual date.
Riley plopped herself on the seat next to him. She glanced at her partner, but his eyes were only glued to his shoes, which he still kept tapping.
“We were in the same biology class in the first week of school, right?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I had to transfer because I couldn’t afford the lab fee.”
“Really?! Everyone thought it was because you got queasy at frog dissections.”
Will rubbed a hand over his shoulder. “Well, that too,” he admitted. “I was kinda glad I transferred. I already applied for financial aid, but I won’t go back, or else I’ll throw up in that class for sure. And um, Nolan intimidates me a little.”
“Don’t mind Nolan,” she scoffed. “He may be a jock, but his stomach is like a baby’s, way too easy to land a punch in.”
Riley folded her arms and frowned at the passing buildings that whizzed past the window. She felt empathy with his financial situation, which made sense that they were both taking the bus together, but the questions still itched the back of her mind. She tightened her handbag, which contained a first-row ticket to a national basketball game that would air on television. Something didn’t quite match up.
Even as they waited in line at the packed food stand, Will took several minutes scrutinizing the menu and checking the folds of his wallet. A five-dollar bill with some sparse coins. More or less the same as her coin purse. Riley complained that sports games sold too much overly priced food, and Will agreed, as they bought the cheapest nachos and walked towards the seats lined at first row.
Riley swirled her nacho in a cup of cheese. “So I’ve been wondering,” she said, “who was that girl you were supposed to ask to this game?”
Will fidgeted in his seat. He barely touched the nachos in his tray.
“I meant to drop the ticket in Daisy’s locker.”
Riley sputtered out cheese as she clutched her chest. Bits of nacho flew like darts to the guy who walked in front of them, but his feet dodged the yellow arrows. Riley wiped her mouth as her eyes trailed up to the guy in the dress shirt and jacket, and if she hadn’t spat out her food already, she would already choke at Heath’s grin.
“Learn to chew with your mouth closed, yeah?”
“What are you doing here?” she hissed.
He placed his hands on his hips, eyeing Riley and Will and smiling at the sight of the odd couple.
“Daisy and I were so fascinated by the prospect of you two dating that we wanted to see if it was the real deal,” he said. “Seems like it is! Care for a double date?”
“No. Now scram before I shoot more cheese darts at you.”
He laughed and continued passing through the aisles. Riley narrowed her eyes as Heath turned into a speck that made his way to the broadcasting room. She shook her head, giving up on wondering why he would go there.
“He’s so annoyingly laidback that if his date said she was cold, he’d probably say something like, ‘Good thing I have a jacket, yeah?’ and still wear it.”
“So his date is Daisy,” Will murmured.
Riley glanced at Will, whose leg stopped shaking. His back had stiffened, and he stared down at the floor littered with gum wrappers and spilt ketchup. She sighed.
“Sorry about that,” she said, patting his back. “Maybe you dodged a bullet. Daisy doesn’t seem like your type anyway.”
He was so quiet that Riley could hear her own nachos cracking as she tossed the chips in her mouth and chewed. When he spoke, she stopped eating to hear his murmured words.
“I know you think Daisy is some spoiled brat,” he said. “When people look at her, their first impression is that she’s another ditzy blonde. But that’s not true. She’s very intelligent. She’s even taking advanced science classes in school.”
“Wow, seriously?” Riley gawked. “How do you know this?”
Will bent forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He clasped his hands together, and a soft look passed his face, as if the nervous tics had disappeared.
“We were childhood friends. She was my neighbor ever since we were little. We played hopscotch on the street and ran around in each other’s backyards. She moved away in the beginning of middle school when her dad got a job promotion. A huge one. He ended up owning the company.”
Will leaned back in his seat and looked at Riley this time.
“We haven’t talked since then. We’re in two different cliques. She’s in the popular crowd, and I’m… you know, Wimpy Will. But, even though people think Daisy is another rich girl, they don’t know the Daisy that I know.”
Riley mulled over his story for a while. “I see,” she murmured. “Yeah, I guess I shouldn’t have judged so quickly.”
“But now she’s dating a bunch of cool guys, including Heath. I can’t compete. He’s way better than me, and I’m not much of anything in the first place.”
“Hey, don’t knock yourself down like that,” Riley said, nudging him on the shoulder. “You’ve tried, and it didn’t work out. Maybe it’s best if you move on.”
Will nodded slowly. The rest of the game continued, and the blaring buzzer drowned out any other possible conversation.
Not like it would have mattered. For her first time at a game, Riley found herself hooked in the ball dribbling and the shoes squeaking in the basketball court. She swung her fist in the air and chorused with the crowd’s yells each time the ball swooped in the net. Riley didn’t know which team to cheer for, but that didn’t stop her from shouting at the top of her lungs.
A player in a purple jersey dribbled the ball so fast the orange turned into a blur. His sneakers screeched against the waxed floor as he leapt on his feet, inches away from the net. Riley gasped and nearly choked on her breath when an opponent in red darted forward and knocked him to the floor. The ball spun back and bounced off the court lines.
A whistle rang, but not before Riley screamed.
“Foul play! That was foul play, you wuss!”
She jumped off her chair and grabbed the handrails, shaking an angry fist in the air. The player in red tossed her a strange look, and Will had to call out for Riley to sit back down. The bell for intermission rang, and the crowd shuffled from their rows and poured out the doors.
“Oh man, I guess I got too into that last round,” she wheezed, leaning back so children could walk past her seat. “I think I dropped my bag, too.”
As the traffic in their row disappeared, Riley bent over her chair to pick up her handbag. The open flap revealed that some of the contents had spilled. She sighed as she grabbed for her coin purse, and Will helped find her cell phone.
Riley wrinkled her nose as she tried lifting the tickets from the sticky floor. She pulled the envelope with a snap, and turned the letter on its backside, grimacing at the oily stains.
“Ugh, gross.”
“Yeah, you might want to throw that away,” Will said.
Riley stopped as her eyes followed the dripping soda trail. On the back of the drenched, wrinkly note, where Will had written his message, was a smeared ink blot.
A drawing of a crown.
“The trash cans are over there,” Will said, pointing at the last row of the stadium. “We should get a refill on that soda—”
“You liar,” Riley muttered.
“What?”
Riley flashed a glare at her seatmate and shoved the note in his face.
“You didn’t drop this in the wrong locker. No one could make that mistake. Daisy’s locker is the only one that has crown stickers on it. Even a blind man could be cured from seeing all that glitter.”
Will widened his eyes. Shaky knuckles tightened over his jeans, and the saliva seemed to dry out in his mouth.
“I couldn’t do it,” he spoke hoarsely. “She’s too good for me… I wanted to surprise her with those tickets, but what if I find out I don’t match up to her after all? I’m not cool enough. I’m not good-looking enough. I—“
“You moron!”
Riley threw the note at his face. Her body shook as she stood over Will, her hands balled into fists.
“How can you throw away money like this? Money that you don’t even have! If Daisy’s more than a rich girl like you say, then some stupid tickets aren’t going to change anything. You deserve to be called a wimp!”
Will gripped his armrests. He leaned forward and argued, “You were the one who told me to give up. Now you’re reprimanding me and calling me a wimp—”
“Because I found out you didn’t even try!” Riley spat. “You never approached her directly. All you did was second-guess yourself before even stepping forward. Next time you want to be a coward, don’t involve me in it.”
Riley sneered and spun her heel to stomp up the stairs. She slammed the doors behind her, leaving Will alone to hang his head in admitted guilt.
---
Author’s Note: Thanks so much to everyone who has commented, fanned, voted, and added “Love, Inc.” to their library. Your support helped the story peak at #131 on the “What’s Hot” list in its first week. Maybe someday it’ll go up in the top 100! … No? Okay.
I know there hasn’t been much Riley and Heath interaction lately, but they will definitely have a few moments together in the next chapter and you’ll learn more about their characters.
Along with a dedication each chapter, I wanted to have a “question of the week” for commenters to answer, too. I think it’d be fun to be interactive with readers. So, going along with this chapter’s theme, here’s my question: what are some things about yourself that you tend to doubt and second guess? Leave your answer in the comments below so Riley can yell at you. :P