Chapter 2
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If there was an emotion Andrew could banish to the deepest and darkest portions of nondescript galaxy somewhere far, far away, it would be this gut wrenching, pulse-quickening, and mind-blowing abomination of inexplicable chaos thrumming through him.
Feeling mad, sad, and glad is just peachy, because he masters these emotion, but he could never stand it when his emotions are too confusing for his own good.
Let's not forget the added stress of final exams. If he were honest he'd admit that it's eating at him a lot more than he's letting on, but he's perfectly content with lying to himself, if only to keep his sanity intact.
Lisa has always had this unique ability to render all six feet of him inexplicably incoherent, from the whirring of his thoughts to the fumbling of his feet. It sent butterflies down his stomach once. Now it just makes him want to dry heave, and he doesn't think the other crammers in the library around him would appreciate the sight of his breakfast all over the wooden floors.
Lisa, on the other hand, is stuck on her side of the library wishing she had a waffle-to-go. She never usually went without breakfast, but she woke up late (which never really happened), misplaced her books (even rare of an occurrence), and forgot her wallet (just the third time ever).
Now she's sitting across someone when she really rather just let the ground swallow her whole, so all in all it's turning out to be an absolute wonderful day.
Her stomach grumbles and she wonders if it's laughing at her sarcasm.
Andrew notices the way her hand flies to her stomach, and he flinches as a particular memory shoves its way to the forefront of his thoughts. She had the appetite of a lion once, and he's tease her mercilessly about taming her growling stomach with food.
But now her hallowed cheeks and too-thin arms made him feel a pang of loss, as if he were responsible for it.
He shook his head. That was an absurd notion. If anything her revived advocacy of trying to like the perfect Barbie doll is her own doing.
Or rather, undoing.
It still hit him though. Right where it hurts. He thought he'd finally gotten through her thick head that the amount of food digests doesn't have a direct correlation with how she fared in the beauty scale.
Apparently not.
He doesn't know that she doesn't do it on purpose, though. Not anymore. He did get to her, like how everything he ever did and say and thought got to her, practically crawled under her skin and wrapped around her like a blanket, clutching at her and vowing to pursue the art of never letting go.
Lisa, on more than one occasion, itches to strip it all off, but she doesn't bother fooling herself by thinking she ever can. Andrew had never done things by halves, and whether he's aware of it or not, the memory of him and his entire being is ingrained in her, almost as if they're one and the same. She may have shoved it inside of the dark recesses of her mind, but it's there and she hates it and wants it gone; but it stubbornly stays as if it belongs there, as if it were home, and maybe that's why sometimes she finds herself opening the metaphorical door and letting the feelings down her - because it feels a lot like home.
A home Andrew and Lisa both left.
She shakes herself out of the path her thoughts had taken, blinking it all away with renewed focus. She has an exam to study for, and so she lets the numbers in front of her comfort her the way she wishes a real, concrete, heart-beating person can. The way Andrew once did.
Her movements irk him to no end. He tries not to notice, not to look, not to mind, but he does and it's killing him. He just wants to touch her again, to feel if her skin is still smooth, to feel if her hair is still soft like he once remembered them as.
So basically it's kind of useless to study right now, but Andrew very rarely gets the chance to see Lisa, so whether he's willing to admit it or not, he'd like to take this opportunity life has served him. Life probably did it just to spite him. Or mock him. Or cajole him.
Whatever. He won't really give life the satisfaction of seeing him break down. It happened once, and he swore it would never happen again. So he sets his mind to stay right where he is, straightening up in his seat and perusing his textbook with a renewed vigor that seems highly unlikely for him, even if he's spent the past months fixing up his studying habits.
Lisa would have been proud. If she knew, that is. All she sees is a boy studiously ignoring her, and calls him immature in her head, resolving to ignore him in exactly the same manner.
They look ridiculous, really. They sit not a mere foot away, too stiff and forced for it to look natural at all. They used to be lovers who just happened to grow apart from each other, but they never really understood what happened to them after that.
They couldn't fool anyone who bothered to look, but just like any normal day, the people around them are too busy minding their own lives. But where the other tables and people scattered around the pair are as black and white as they can get, the two pop out in bursts of too-bright color. They have all these nervous tricks that set them apart, like Andrew's gnawing at the eraser top of his pencil, or Lisa's tapping fingers on the desk.
They try to throw furtive glances at each other, except it's too glaringly obvious from the way their eyes dart away as soon as they come into contact, like they've burned each other from just a simple gaze.
But it isn't - and never was - a simple gaze.
That's at least one thing they have in common: when they look at each other, it's never just a look. Never just a smile or just a frown or just an angle of lips curled in whatever degree of direction their emotions fancy.
It's always something heavier than that, as if there are messages in every muscle ticking their way, whether it be through a blink or quirk or a stretch. They've learned each other well, too well some might say, because where an average friend would classify the body language as familiar, they would classify it as normal.
But where they would have once ridden on the same waves of thought, they now travel through them differently, missing each other so completely that one could wonder if they ever knew each other at all.
Take Andrew for example. He sees the knot in Lisa's brows and the door pen clenches her fist, thinking she's gotten stuck on some problem she couldn't solve. He quickly concludes that at least that part of her hasn't changed the way everything else has - she's still easily frustrated by things she can't understand.
But he's wrong, for once. Not about her frustration on things she can't understand, because Lisa could at least admit that much to herself, but about why she's frustrated in the first place.
He is getting to her, still getting to her, the same way he has always and probably forever will to get getting to her, the way he got to her so completely and easily when no one else did. Then she sees the way he slumps in his chair, long legs stretched out and shoulders relaxed, making her wish that chair would disappear and drop him right on his ass so he'd feel as uncomfortable as she does.
And she's wrong too, the time not 'for once' like Andrew is, because Lisa tends to be wrong on most accounts. Not because she is intelligent or observant, because she is. Highly so. More so than Andrew, even. It's just that Andrew is a very good actor and she hasn't had a lot of practice reading him lately.
Andrew can smile genuinely and cry genuinely and laugh genuinely and never mean it much at all, and right now he's relaxing genuinely and not meaning it all at once.
She said it was scary, the way he's switch emotions and discard feelings as if they were unwanted shirts out for donation. He'd promise to always be honest, to never put on masks for her, so in return she promised to trust him.
They both lied. Like all people, all human beings, all couples in-love one moment and in-despair the next, they lied, because sometimes it's easier to lie in all things that were bound to hurt you, to protect yourself from yourself.
It's not like Lisa doesn't wear masks either. She does. That's what drew them into each other in the first place; it takes one to know one.
The only difference is that she doesn't know what she does, of course she doesn't, because she's spent all her life trying to be perfect, trying to find something in her to love so that other people can do the same. It's unnecessary, Andrew had told her. Completely and utterly unnecessary, because people will love her regardless, the same way Andrew did.
Except that was past tense now, wasn't? "Loved her," not "love her," as if one small insignificant letter had the power to break a heart all over again.
And it did.
Lisa set her pen down with a snap. Andrew's eyes shot up to her, and she tensed as she met his gaze. His expression is so closed-off, so unreadable and unfamiliar, that it makes her want to hurl her textbook at him. It reminds her of everything she used to have, and everything she now doesn't have, and if by his expression he means to take a jab at her then she hates that it's working so well.
On Andrew's end, he flinches and hopes she doesn't notice. The murderous glare she sends his way stabs him in the chest, because she has never looked at him like that before. She had done her fair share of glaring when they were together, that much he's sure about, but never this glare that spoke volumes and bled feelings so transparently.
He almost smiles at that reminder, because this is the Lisa he knew; harsh on the outside, soft in the inside, like holding cold, hard glass and knowing well it could easily break, transparent and fragile in all available surface.
Andrew doesn't realize he's actually smiling now, and it throws Lisa off so much that her glare falters. Her brain does a quick inventory the way it always does when Andrew smiles, because it happens so sparingly, even when they were together, that she's becoming automatically wired to catalogue every time it happens.
Lisa blinks like a camera's shutter, noting the crinkle at the edge of his eyes and his dimples popping out from the side of his mouth. His teeth peek out from the confines of his lips and his nose does this little twitch as he visible huffs with the kind of amusement that is entirely too inappropriate for the situation they're in. His mouth slowly pries itself open, barely an inch, and Lisa's heart beats a mile a minute in her chest, because to her it looks like he might just say something.
It's way too heavy, this feeling that bubbles in her chest - it almost looks like hope.