• Thanks to the lovely flusteredcheeks for the alternative cover! •
The next morning my eyes opened due to a shouting voice. It was only when I effectively woke up, when I allowed the power of reason to take over the subconscious that still possessed me in spite of my opened eyes, that I realized that the voice was my mother's and she was calling my name.
"What is it?!" I shouted. My loud voice paralyzed my own brain.
"It's one o'clock!" she shouted back as I felt the emptiness of my stomach, "You planning to get up today!?"
I rubbed my eye with my wrist. "Jesus, it's freaking summer! Who cares what time it is!"
But I actually kind of did. I mean, I hated putting the alarm clock, because I would always wake up feeling bad when that monstrosity rang, (not to mention that I would feel like the main character in the first chapter of a Wattpad fanfiction), so I would tell myself I'll wake up reasonably soon alright, but I almost never did.
And it's not like I enjoyed staying in bed the whole morning. During summer, when I managed to get up at, like, ten or eleven, I would read a book. And morning was always the best time for my reading, I don't know why, but every morning I would read some hundred pages just like that. I guess morning was the best moment for my head.
How unfortunate though, that this theory only applied to summer and waking up after ten, and not to school days and waking up at seven. Sorry about your damn luck, Peter.
So, anyway, every time I woke up after twelve, I would hate myself. Because I would feel tired, morning-less, hated by my mother and, beside all that, I would miss my breakfast.
And, indeed, that morning I had no breakfast, because my mom was already cooking for lunch.
I turned on the laptop and checked Facebook real quick. There was one notification and one message.
The first one I clicked on was the notification. "Frank Spears accepted your friend request".
Well, that was nice, but what about the Tiger girl? She was the sender of the message:
"Oh, hey you! Send me the request on my other profile. It's called 'Evelyn Trips', thanks"
At first, I didn't understand why she would tell me such thing, but then I searched that name and found her other profile. There was no photo of her in this one, only wrestling related pictures and some Harry Potter.
Well, alright, I thought, She probably doesn't trust me... 'cause she doesn't know me. So she's asking me to send her a friend request on the secondary profile.
At the time, I thought that was kind of a bitch move, but I realize that's actually smart (they don't warn us against cyber-stalking for nothing), so I sent her another friend request.
That day, after lunch, I decided to hang out with my maternal cousin Tyler.
He lived in New York, he went to NYU, and sometimes he would come back to Queens to spend time with his parents.
We met on the 69th, near Forest Hills' Jewish Center. He looked even more ripped than usual.
To me, ever since I was a child, he had always been the alpha male. The one I looked up to. My role model. His big, strong muscles, that he would let me touch from time to time, were as hard as stone, his jet black hair matched perfectly with his handsome five o'clock shadow and made his forest green eyes really stand out.
He used to go to the gym, play guitar, and study a lot for university. I don't know how he managed to do all that, and, furthermore, be good at it, but he did.
"What's up, Petey!" he greeted me with his deep voice and a big grin on his face.
I smiled. "Hey, Ty-Ry!"
He tilted his head and smirked. "I told you to stop calling me like that."
We entered a bakery. The white of the room made his dark features stand out even more. I wondered if it did the same to me.
"So when are you coming to the gym with me?" he asked with a twenty percent of irony in his tone.
"Definitely not now," I smirked. "I have other things in my mind at this moment..."
"Like what?" He smiled, allowing a dimple to appear on the right side of his mouth.
"You know... School..."
"Riight, summer's ending, uh?"
"Don't make me think about it." I sighed.
"Well, that's not too bad, right? You're starting high school."
"I really don't know how to take it."
"Kids in high school can be mean," His smile disappeared, paving the way for his serious, kind of frightening, expression. "My advice to you is to choose your friends wisely."
"Well, now I feel better!" I gave him a look of despair.
His smile reappeared. "C'mon, Petey! You're a slugger! You'll do just about fine in there."
"Well, I would hope so... At least I already have a friend in Andrew..."
"For anything, you know where to find me. I'll always be there for you."
"Are you going to kiss me now?" His words warmed my heart but I felt like cracking a joke since the discussion was getting a little too serious.
He laughed before taking a bite of his pie.
"So what about you?" I changed the subject, "Something new with Eleanor?"
"Everything's going great" he said. Eleanor was his girlfriend. She lived in New York. They met via social network, before he started NYU, the same university as her. "She's spending some time with her family too right now. We'll hang out next week."
"You're so lucky. I wish I had something like that too..." I rolled my eyes.
"Hey!" He caught my attention back to him, "You're still a kid. I'm sure you'll have something great in your life!" And he made me think about the opportunities of high school, but also about that E-Fed.
"And how's university going?" I took a step back into the conversation.
"Not bad," he nodded and cleared his throat, "It's pretty demanding, though, and, unlike you, I don't have some pause during summer. So you better enjoy these next four years, 'cause after that it's work work work."
"Like if I'm going to university! As soon as I'm done with high school, I'll go to Hollywood and become a movie star!" I said in a proud yet self-mocking way.
He laughed. "Well, first you gotta learn to comb your hair like mine!" He passed a hand on his perfect quiff, the one I inspired mine to.
"I won't need that!" I raised my eyebrows, "I will have assistants doing everything for me!"
We both laughed. I loved spending time with Tyler. When I was with him, I could really be myself. Because I'd known him for a very long time and he was family, all my shyness disappeared the moment I had a conversation with him.
I don't care if you find it sad, but he was my best friend.
• — • — • — • — • — • — • — •
That afternoon flew away just like that. Summer was coming to its skull crushing ending way too fast.
Tyler drove me back home, where my mom was waiting for me at the table. My father, as usual, was eating on the couch, in front of the TV.
I sat at the table and started eating as my mom spoke.
"What did Tyler tell you?"
"Nothing much..." I said after taking a sip of water, "We talked about everything and anything."
"How long's he going to stay? " she asked, looking a bit distracted.
My mom really loved Tyler. She used to be his nanny when he was a kid, before she had me, so he was almost like a son to her. Which made him almost like a brother to me, and that's really how I felt about him. My father admired him too, even if showing any kind of emotion was near to impossible for him.
I'll admit that, at times, I was kind of jealous of him. Because he was this sunny, handsome, successful young man, who knew how to talk to people, and I... well, I was me. The exact opposite of him. And, as I said, my father didn't exactly admire me, he probably thought I was a loser, so that's why.
"He said he's going to hang out with Eleanor next week..." I answered my mom's question, "So I suppose that's when he gets back to New York."
"Man..." She sighed staring at the blank wall behind me. "Time flies. Seems like yesterday when he was a little boy running around the house. Now he's living on his own in a big city and he's getting married..."
I almost spit out some water. "Jesus, mom. What is this, 1950? He's not getting married!"
"You know, I mean, in the future. He will get married, eventually."
Her mentality was really stuck in an old age. Maybe that's what went wrong with her relationship with my father. Maybe they got married as soon as they got together. Nothing that I could know, though, for every time I asked her about how they met and their relationship, she would give me vague answers.
"Whatever..." I stood up and went to my room.
When I turned on the lights, I realized that one of the wrestling action figures I had put on the shelf had fallen off. So I picked it up and put it back on the shelf.
I had put that little collection of action figures between some other gadgets I owned, like a little TARDIS from Doctor Who, the V for Vendetta mask, the Toy Story Signature Collection Buzz Lightyear, a Batman statue and some other good stuff.
My eyes fell under that shelf where, framed on the blue painted wall, there were some mint condition vintage comic books, like The Amazing Spider-Man #121, the one where Gwen Stacy dies, or Fantastic Four #48, the first appearance of Galactus. I won't even tell you about the crazy fights I had to have with my mother in order to have them on the wall.
My mom thought my room was messy just because there was a lot of stuff in it. In her troubled mind a neat room was an empty room. And that pissed me off from time to time.
I looked at the other shelf, the one with the books. I had quite a few, some were manga, but the one that caught my eye's attention in there was The Perks of Being a Wallflower, because it was a little bit dragged out. It was the one I was reading at the moment, and I was loving it.
I was a so-called wallflower myself. All my life, it was a recurring situation. In every kind of social convention, whether it was a birthday party or dinner with family, I would always try to be invisible. I would stay quiet and lose myself in my own thoughts, letting others socialize around me. And sometimes I did think that maybe I shouldn't act like that, that maybe it was an inept way to live, that I couldn't be jealous of Tyler if I didn't even try. But that's just the way I was. Sometimes, I didn't even notice.
Because of that, my mom would often tell me that I was anti-social. That it was no wonder people didn't want to hang out with me, as I was always the one sitting at the table at parties and never even looking at people.
And maybe she was right. Maybe I was indeed anti-social, maybe I loved being alone and hated human contact, or maybe I was simply shy and didn't like the too active kind of people, maybe I was just waiting to find someone like me to talk to and relate to.
Maybe I was just waiting for another wallflower with a weird name like me to barge into my life and keep me company on the wall, and maybe talk about space and aliens and other things that normal people would find dumb.
With my head still full of thoughts, I grabbed my computer and went on Facebook.
Once again, one notification and one message.
I checked the notification first. Evelyn Trips accepted your friend request.
I felt a kind of relief, then I checked the message. It was her again.
– Hey uuuu! Don't forget that we have the match tmrw. I'mma kick yo ass! :DD
Of course, I didn't forget. It was a constant thought in my mind. I typed a message too:
– You don't know what I'm all about, Ms. Tiger, but I'm gonna show you tomorrow. Peace.
Meanwhile, on the group chat, there was a lot of euphoria. Evelyn was sending messages that didn't even make sense, written lIkE tHiS!1!
I wondered if she was drunk, as she wrote her last message:
– g00dn1ghts attaboy$$
– the girl's crazy lol 0.0
The latter message was Frank's and, in that moment, I agreed with him. Evelyn Tiger was nuts.
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