“Dude,” Tyler said. “So we’re going to break into partners and finish this worksheet on Beatle-mania in the US of A. Got it?”
Most everyone had stopped listening at “partners” and had already started to push their desks together and break into rapid conversation like they hadn’t talked to each other in years instead of since the end of lunch about a half hour ago, so the rest of the speech was only heard by me and that weird kid who was totally eating glue over in the front row. Everything around me turned into a constantly moving chaos, and I just sat there awkwardly, hoping that no one would notice me, and that I wouldn’t be partnered with that kid eating glue.
Of course, Tyler moseyed on over nearly immediately, glancing around at the formed partners and frowning a little when he noticed that no one was clinging to me like we were best friends forever. “Hey guys,” he called out before I could tell him to stuff it and that I would rather work alone. The class’s attention flickered back to him. “Why don’t one of you break away from the norm and come on over here?” he tried to entice them, but it wasn’t so convincing coming from someone totally Zen and had no emotions in his voice. “Linny needs a partner.”
“Lena,” I corrected him as someone called, “I’ll be her partner.”
The eyes all shifted to the standing figure like they were watching a bad car accident, every pair of eyes but mine—I was a little too busy making sure I didn’t wet my pants to meet his eyes that I could feel burning a hole into my forehead.
“Righteous,” Tyler muttered before stepping away from the empty seat beside me. “Thanks for helping out the little dudette, Q.”
“No problem,” the voice said from his new spot in the chair now positioned across from me, and I wondered just how time it would take me to run to the first-story window, throw it open, and just launch myself out of it and see how far I flew before I belly-flopped onto the ice.
When Tyler turned away and managed to block my sight of the window, I figured that I wouldn’t quite be quick enough.
I glanced over at Quinton like I was about to look Death in the eye. If he noticed that I looked a little petrified, he at least didn’t allow it to affect the grin on his face.
“Nice tutu,” he told me, totally amused. “It really brings out your eyes.”
“Thanks,” I replied, staring a hole in the worksheet, but my words came out more along the lines of “THA?”
Quinton leaned forward on the desk, and in essence towards to me. The room got a little hotter as I glanced up to see if he was staring at me, and even when I looked at him he still didn’t look away. I felt my face turn as red as a tomato less than a second before I concluded that my stomach was going to blow up like a nuclear bomb. Why did this boy have to be so darn adorable?
As if he knew exactly what I was thinking—or he just noticed that I was staring at him in open-mouthed awe—his chest puffed out proudly. Boys.
“So I kind of expected you to be a little bit . . . different,” Quinton bluntly explained to me with a slow smile, “but you got hit a couple more times than I thought with the Different Stick. That and a rainbow, and maybe a couple of unicorns for good measure.”
Be still my heart, this boy was every shade of perfect. I laughed but it sounded maniacal and forced so I quickly shut up. I saw a couple of kids scoot their chairs a few more inches away from me nervously anyway.
“Yeah,” I replied lamely. “I guess my dancing should have been a bit of a clue, huh?”
“I will not apologize for art,” he announced proudly.
I laughed. “Nor should you. Your creeping is definitely as much of an art as my dancing was.”
“Self-expression,” he agreed, and then turned around to pointedly stare at a random student’s back. When they started to fidget after a couple of seconds, we both burst out laughing despite ourselves.
I was noticing a common trend with Quinton—he was either making me laugh, or he was making me want to throw up all over the place. It was always one or the other, and both of them made me want to run in circles screaming, but I guess the predictability of it being one of them was a little comforting. I liked a little bit of order in the middle of the craziest life I will ever live.
Resisting my sudden urge to flail my arms and froth at the mouth, I picked up the worksheet and waved it in his face. “Earth to Tarantino—we have work to do, and I intend to pass the greatest curriculum in existence with flying colors.”
He gave me a bizarre look. “You like the Beatles?”
“Too much,” I informed him simply. I looked down when I felt my face heat up. “Anyway, can we start?”
“Nope,” he answered immediately, popping the p. “Now I’m curious. You’re a total conundrum, and with all of those colors, it makes me a little curious.”
“I’m not acting out,” I announced too loudly, drawing the attention of everyone within a two person area. I turned bright red and sunk back into my seat, glancing back at Quinton. “Well, I’m not.”
“I believe you,” the boy next door told me. In no way did I believe him. “Oh, I’ve got a good question for you: Do you normally use your underwear as an accessory?”
“Why does everyone keep bringing that up?” I demanded, throwing my hands up. Quinton laughed a little at my theatrics, leaning back casually in his chair as if to watch me from a better angle. The thought was a little unsettling, and certainly did not do wonders for my self-confidence.
He was still looking at me like that when he told me, “Well, it could have something to with the bet running among the males about whether you’ve worn them before. But it might not.”
I gaped at him like a fish out of water, my mouth moving even though no words were coming out. He roared with laughter.
“Your face!” he laughed, pointing. “Your face!”
I might have looked like Colonel’s nickname for me, but I still pursed my lips and stared him down, and I tried not to begin searching for a hole to curl up and die in.
“That’s not funny,” I snapped when he was almost literally ROFLMAOing. He buried his head in his hands, and when he emerged twenty seconds later, he had this silly grin on his face that made my heart all melty.
“It’s only funny because it’s not a hundred percent true,” he informed me. “Word around the locker room says that some of them sure are wondering, but as far as I know no money has exchanged hands, so it’s not technically a bet. Not unless they are wagering their dignity.”
That didn’t make me feel better, and the thought of boys actually gossiping in the locker room just wasn’t quite enough to distract me from what he just enlightened me with. I stared at him in horror.
“Why can’t they just leave my purse alone?” I demanded, clutching it to my chest. “This kind of judgment is taking a toll on poor Marvel’s nerves.”
“You named your purse?” Quinton demanded incredulously. “I can understand cars some of the time. It’s a stretch, but I can at least understand it. But purses? That’s taking it a step too far.”
“Stop hatin’,” I told him, and then laughed because this whole conversation could not possibly be a part of real life. “Marvel resents this insult to his integrity.”
He hit his head into the table and mumbled, “You’re a strange one.”
“Thank you,” I told him sincerely, smiling.
He looked up and grinned at me, but before he could say a word the bell rang in a metallic scream, and the room burst into constant sound—desks scraping, voices ringing, footsteps emanating. Tyler looked on at the mayhem calmly from his spot in the front of the room, smiling, mellow.
“Turn that in tomorrow, guys,” he called out as people began to mosh out of the room and into the hallway like wild animals. “See ya later.”
Quinton dragged me up to the front of the room, and Tyler looked at us questionably as we passed by before he suddenly grinned.
“Bye, Linny,” he told me.
“It’s Lena,” I sighed, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t even remember if I subliminally tortured him to. Quinton nudged me slightly with his arm, and I caught the amusement washing off of him in waves.
“Later, Tyler,” Quinton called over his shoulder, poking me in the back lightly to urge me forward. “Hurry now, Lena. Class awaits us.”
Unable to understand how the boy who walked into class tardy cares the least bit about punctuality, I let him lead me out of the classroom by the shoulders, trying not to hyperventilate about his hands being on me and how I could feel the heat of his palms against my skin as if there totally wasn’t a shirt there, and I was about four seconds away from screaming and jumping out the window. I let him push me forward until we rounded a corner and left the classroom out of sight, and he let his abnormally warm hands drop. He looked at me, wearing a wicked kind of grin.
That’s when I realized that there was no one else in a hallway that should be swarmed with students.
Quinton pulled his iPhone out of his pocket and teasingly wiggled it in my face, still wearing that same grin. As I watched, he used his thumb to press down on something on the touch-screen.
The sound of the bell crashed in at us in the narrow hallway, but the classroom doors did not open. The sound shut off, but class wasn’t over yet, and Quinton had not stopped laughing.
I looked at the boy next door, and he was grinning like he just had the best moment of his life. He looked like a little kid with an ice cream cone. “Gets them every time,” he remarked, flipping his phone in his hand before shoving it into his pocket with all of the skills of a cowboy in a western.
Before I could say anything, before I could burst out laughing, before I could give the adorable and devious neighbor boy a high five, a sigh echoed through the hallway, reaching back to us.
“Man,” Tyler said to the air. “Not again.”
~*~
Quinton only got us out of class just over five minutes early, so his celebration didn’t last too long, but certainly long enough for us to died of laughter a couple of times and walk to my next class, him showing me the way like a gentleman in a book or a movie or some other form of pop culture that made a romantic weak at the knees. We stopped just outside of the door and leaned against the lockers flanking the outside, waiting for the real bell to ring. I glanced over at him, more than a little crazed in my own mind and nerves to realize that hanging out with him was more fun than I felt I would admit out loud, but he beat me to the punch, his eyes gazing vacantly off into the hallway.
“I can’t imagine what it would be like,” he told me, his hands buried deep in his pockets. “Moving here, in the middle of the winter, when you’re from Florida and it’s so different. The people are different, the area is different. Hell, even the weather is different. Change sucks, and that’s too much change to even think about.”
The boy took the words right out of my heart and made them real. I felt myself starting to smile a little—a small smile, a real smile with all the vulnerability in it, a smile that was just me. I turned to him, and I saw that he had turned to look at me again, and that he had this funny look on his face.
As his eyes watched me carefully, I shrugged. “I understand why we had to. But I guess I still wish I wasn’t really here.”
He nodded slowly, and even though his hands were in his pockets, I could have sworn he was making fists. “I know the feeling,” he muttered, but that was all that I got out of him. I turned to glance at him curiously but he let nothing show, just kept up a mask to cover everything he didn’t want people to see. I could have been reading too much into this because I was unquestionably a girl with some major emotion instabilities, but I could have sworn that something about this was hitting close to home with him, and yet I didn’t think that we were even friends enough for me to feel secure in asking him.
So I didn’t. But I kind of did. “I guess we all have a way to relate to something like that,” I said, and he nodded, frowning a little before he suddenly snapped out of it and grinned over at me, back to normal Quinton again, wearing bits and pieces of a mask that had almost completely come crumbling down.
It was just enough to make me curious. As if I wasn’t already falling all over myself to spend a moment with him and fawning all over him and hoping he didn’t notice, this happened and made me want to ask questions, made me want to talk to him even more. Now there was a little tug at my heart when I looked at him, and I thought that maybe no one was really perfect. Maybe not even the boy next door.
He shrugged at me as I continued to watch him, and I wondered if I made him nervous. “Good luck for the rest of the day, Lena,” he told me, glancing at the class I was about to enter and grinning. “I had Tuck last year, and you may or may not survive this class.”
“Thanks for that,” I told him, sending him a glare, but all it made him do was laugh, and there was nothing deep and emotional about our situation anymore.
The real bell rang, and everything around us started moving.
Quinton and I stood still. For a long, long moment, we were still in a constant flow of motion.
And then he smiled at me and said, “Well, later,” and he disappeared in the hallway before I could even lamely lift my hand up to wave goodbye at him. I watched his back bob before it disappeared into the sea of people, and I felt a sigh of a thousand years surge through me, like I was a million years old.
“Yeah,” I whispered to myself, sighing. “Bye.”
So I took his lead—I squared my shoulders, turned around, and marched on into the rest of the day.
~~~~~~~~
My friend Steven actually did that thing with the bell on his phone, and everyone left class and didn’t go back when we realized it was him lol it was an amazing day.
So I know this update is a tad bit late, but my cat is sick . . . I’ll spare you the gory details, but this cat is like my small child and I’ve been trying to take care of him even if he kind of hates me at the moment haha. I’m that kind of person that freaks out when their cat doesn’t feel good. My same friend with the bell incident constantly looks at me and goes, “. . . You really need a boyfriend.” LOL
So I should be updating tomorrow, unless I don’t update tomorrow. Then I’ll be annoyed, but oh well.
Did anyone catch the Llamas With Hats reference?
x Riley