“How did I not remember that Quinton had a brother?” Kline demanded, looking horrified. “I nearly stalk the kid and I didn’t even remember that he had an equally as attractive sibling. Who goes to Harvard. I might not ever get over the trauma that this shock has given me.”
“You’re havin’ trouble?” Colonel replied, nodding with his chin in my direction. “Poor Tomatoes is lookin’ like she’s goin’ to die or somethin’.”
Norma sighed, shaking her head. “Come on, guys, why are we still talking about this? It happened, like, six hours ago.”
“And Tomatoes still hasn’t been consumin’ enough ice cream since,” Colonel remarked before leaning in closer to her to whisper in his too-loud Colonel style: “Norma, she’s had at least three pints. This is kinda scarin’ me. Next thing you know, she’s gonna be runnin’ ’round the house with her head doin’ three-sixties.”
“I resent that,” I told him, scowling over at him as I shoveled another spoonful into my mouth, chewing frantically. “I’m not stress eating,” I explained through a full mouth. “I’m just really hungry.”
“I’ll believe that like I’d believe you if you said Dick Clark died,” Peter snorted.
“He actually did,” Kline told him. “I saw it on the news the other day.”
“It’s 2012?” he asked, then shook his head and looked upward. “Well played, Mayans. Well played.”
I rolled my eyes and leaned back into the headboard of Norma’s bed, tuning them out. I barely even noticed as they all began to go into separate directions after a mutual decision that I was too spaced out to take a part in, too absorbed in my own flabbergasted thoughts to notice that there was probably plenty other things to do that was more interesting than staring into a pint of ice cream like it was going to give you the meaning of life if you stared hard enough, but then I figured that it was ice cream, albeit plain chocolate Haagan-Dasz, which might have been total sacrilege but this was a definite emergency. I sighed, stabbing my spoon into the ice cream, my smallish brain trying to sort out everything that had happened today into something that made sense and what was entirely insane. Needless to say, that wasn’t working the way I thought it would.
Well, in the end, accidentally meeting Mathieu Lancaster and asking him what the capital of Djibouti was didn’t even turn out to be the craziest part of my day. I learned that Cheers was actually a restaurant, Peter rolls down hills faster than Kline, Colonel was the one that suggested we go to Build-A-Bear, and Norma lived in a house large enough to comfortably house a small African village.
As the thought crossed my mind, I unconsciously realized that Norma was crossing the room to sit next to where I was curled up on the floor holding the ice cream desperately to my chest, staring into space thoughtfully, us being the only two left in the room. She settled down on the floor beside me and snapped her fingers in front of my face casually, waking me up from dreamland like this happened every day. Probably since it did, but whatever.
I jumped, turning my attention to her completely. She was smiling, amused.
“You doing alright over there, Lena?” she teased, raising her eyebrows at the marks my spoon assault had left in the ice cream. “From across the room, you looked to be a little shell-shocked.”
“And from close up?” I questioned.
“Now you just look crazy,” she told me, and we both giggled like the mentally-sound people that we were.
Our hyena-like laughter was interrupted by the sudden screaming of a war cry, and before we could even fashion on a WTF? face to welcome them in, Peter and Colonel were already bursting through the door and tearing through the room, giving chase on one another as they wielded a pair of Nerf guns like they were snipers. Or machetes.
From beside me, Norma emitted a delicate sigh.
“Meet the doom of Captain Doom, Evans!” Peter yelled, flailing the gun like a third arm with another loud war cry that sounded like someone was dying very slowly, firing blindly around at the room as he flailed.
I screamed when something hit me right between the eyes and fell back, squeezing my eyes shut. I opened one eye cautiously, my vision partially obstructed by the dart sticking out right between my eyes, the perfect kill shot.
“Am I dead?” I asked Norma.
“I think you’re going to make it,” she told me gravely before turning to face the disbelieving, wide-eyed teenage boys with the Nerf guns frozen in the middle of the room, deer in headlights. She crossed her arms over her chest and did her darnedest to look bossy—and boy was it terrifying. “Did I not tell the pair of you a million times before not to aim those guns at anything other than each other when you are inside of my house?”
“I have a crooked eye,” Peter confessed sheepishly. “It’s one of my few faults. The other is my honesty.”
“You alright over there, Tomatoes?” Colonel called over to me, the big smirk on his face assassinating any possibilities of him actually being concerned about my wellbeing. I would have sighed if I still wasn’t a little confused.
I reached my hand up, touching the foam suction-cup dart in between my fingers and giving it a soft tug. It didn’t budge.
“Yeah,” a certain trigger-happy boy with few faults muttered uneasily, seeing my struggles. “Don’t freak out, but that’s not coming off.”
“Excuse me?” I demanded.
“Well, there may or may not be super glue on it.”
My hand dropped and my eye twitched.
Norma glared at the two of them with pure hellfire dancing in her eyes. They each shrank about a foot shorter under her gaze. I would have been a lot more amused about watching them nearly bow down to her if it wasn’t for the foam dart firmly unmoving from the almost dead-center of my face.
“What?” Norma finally verbalized in a shriek. They flinched. “You did what? Why? What if they got stuck to things and they wouldn’t come off, like Lena’s face? What are we going to do now, huh, geniuses? Since you got yourselves into this situation, surely you must have the mental capacity to get yourselves out of it. Go on. Say something.”
“Well, it was nice knowin’ ya,” Colonel told his best friend before laying down his arms and holding his hands up in surrender, bowing his head sheepishly. “I’m sorry, Norma; I surrender. But I mainly only surrender so I can go ’bout sayin’ that it was all Peter’s idea without betrayin’ him.”
“Dude!” Peter cried. “That was still a betrayal!”
“But I’m already feelin’ better ’bout it,” he argued, shrugging.
Norma threw her hands up and they both shrunk back like they expected the adorable girl who wears vintage to just start beating them. “That’s not the point, guys! Look at her face!”
The door was thrown open. “I couldn’t help but to hear Norma screaming about Lena’s face halfway across the mansion,” Kline told us, strutting into the room. She glanced over at me and smirked in the style of the Cheshire Cat. “Bro, you look exactly like a unicorn.”
“My dreams have all come true,” I replied sardonically, frowning. “So this better not be for forever. I have a reputation to maintain, as well as what is left of my dignity.”
“Sorry to say it, Tomatoes, but there ain’t none of that left anymore,” Colonel told me sorrowfully, grimacing even though his eyes were laughing, knee-slappingly so.
I glared at him. “Gee, thanks. You got anything else you would like to say to me to blow my self-confidence to smithereens?”
“Those curlin’ things in your hair are scarin’ the bejezus out of me,” he told me honestly.
“I didn’t mean literally, Colonel,” I sighed, closing my eyes. “Okay. When I open my eyes you will all be gone, and I will be in my bed and having a nightmare. This has all just been a dream and I am going to wake up now.”
“I hate to be the one to break it to ya, Tomatoes, but you’re still sittin’ there with a dart stickin’ out in between your eyes,” a certain southern boy shattered my momentary hopes of being invisible.
I groaned and opened my eyes. They were all gathered around me and staring at me like before, but now Colonel was chuckling, amused. Well, okay, more amused than before, I guess.
Peter flicked the dart, giggling when it rebounded into my face. “I don’t know, Lena, maybe you should keep it. It really brings out your eyes.”
I shoved my spoon into the melting pint of ice cream and it stuck there like Excalibur as I scrambled to my feet and—with all of my might—launched myself at Peter and tackled him to the ground.
He cried out in surprised when he landed flat on his back, me falling on top of him as I pounded my fists into his chest, letting out all of my anger and frustrations.
“I. Hate. You. Right. Now,” I said in between punches.
“Hate is an emotion stronger than love,” he argued, flinching with each of my hits. “Lena, this is really forward of you; I thought you didn’t even want to be my Valentine, let alone sit on me.”
I grabbed the front of his shirt and shook him. Hard. “Stop joking around—this is serious. I look like a unicorn!”
“An adorable unicorn,” he amended in a baby voice. I glared at him, a full on nostril-flaring kind of glare. He shied away from me a little, attempting to squirm out of my tight hold on his shirt. “Okay, I’ll admit that face is a severely irate unicorn, and I don’t want to be close enough for you to hit me when I see it.”
“What am I going to do?” I demanded desperately. “How do you get it off? You do know, right?”
“Are you asking me?” he questioned back, oblivious to the level of urgency to this issue. I could feel the panic building up in me like anxiety but he hardly even seemed to think that I was that concerned. He shrugged. “I know nothing about super glue. Leave it alone, maybe it’ll eventually wear off or something.”
“It’s super glue,” I screeched. “It’s super for a reason, Peter!”
I raised my fist threateningly and he squealed, making these girly little shrieks as he attempted to wiggle out of my grip, trying to pry my fingers from his shirtfront. Little did he know that my brother used to terrorize me daily when we were kids, and I was used to holding idiot boys in my clutches just long enough to drag them to the nearest adult.
There was a sudden loud knocking on Norma’s bedroom door, and we all totally froze. The wailing from Peter’s struggles finally silenced as another knock sounded, and a voice soon after.
“Norma?” her mother called through the door nervously. “Is that Peter in there screaming like a girl?”
“Yeah,” Norma called back, shrugging even though her mother couldn’t see her. “There’s nothing to worry about, Ma—Lena’s just trying to kill him.”
“Oh, that’s good then,” her mother replied cheerfully, and we immediately heard the sound of her heels tapping as she walked away, leaving Peter at my mercy.
I looked over at Norma, my eyebrows up. “Does Peter normally die in your room?”
“Not always,” she replied. “But when he does, he prefers Dos Equis.”
“The most interesting man in the world,” Kline whispered, her eyes widening.
Peter took the opportunity of my distraction to suddenly break from my clutches, retreating behind Colonel to hide. He peered out from around our friend, looking at me a little fearfully.
“Don’t worry about it,” he told me casually, and that was enough to suddenly make me worry a lot about it. “I’ll deal with it, just you wait. I’ll Google it or something and you’ll be good to go.”
“I’ll get the pliers,” Kline announced before flitting out of the room, calling back behind her, “I’ll grab the funnel too in case something goes wrong.”
“They’re not being serious,” Norma tried to tell me when she noticed my look of alarm, but her comforting words were hardly out of her mouth before she was grimacing. “At least, I don’t think they are.”
I gulped.
~*~
I don’t quite know how this happened, but all I knew was that I somehow managed to get stuck in the middle of it. Again.
“Alright,” Kline called eagerly from her spot in the circle between Norma and Peter, her smile large and devious as she looked around at us. “Truth. Or. Dare.”
I grimaced uneasily, glancing around at my friends nervously around the circle, noting their reactions. From the minute I learned that I couldn’t say no to a dare, I had taught myself how to be able to sneakily get out situation that might lead to some major daring. Such as this one. But I couldn’t think of anything—everyone looked rather eager, probably because there was nothing like a game of truth or dare to make your friends put something into the open that is as embarrassing as possible.
I bit my tongue, watching Kline make her choice and hoping to the gods above that she wouldn’t be choosing me.
“Norma,” Kline said, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “Truth or dare?”
“Truth,” she told her, and then made a face. “I know both are going to be horrible, and I’m not in the mood to injure myself today.”
“Unlike Lena,” Kline snorted, and Peter gave her a high five.
“Hey,” I chided Peter. “Don’t encourage her—I only got hurt trying to get the dart off of my forehead.”
“And it didn’t even work,” he pointed out, nodding to my face. “It’s still there, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know how to get super glue off!” I protested, shifting the bag of peas on my knee covering my booboo as I frowned at him. “You were the one that had the great idea to yank on it as hard as you possibly could when we were in close proximity to the top of the stairs. This wasn’t my fault.”
“Excuses,” he accused.
“Guys, shush!” Kline snapped at us, making us fall silent immediately, turning our faces from each other immaturely. “I have to give Norma a question now.”
Norma shifted nervously, obviously anticipating something horrible.
And it was.
Kline asked her something very unprintable, and Colonel choked on the chocolate cake that he had previously been housing down without qualms.
“Kline!” Norma cried, turning bright red in horror as Peter guffawed. I didn’t quite know how to feel about that so I just kind of turned red and stared at the couple in horror. “You can’t just ask people that! That’s sick!”
“So the answer is a no?” she inquired, totally calm.
“Yes,” Norma said, then shook her head before Kline could take that out of context. “Yes, it’s a no. You’re totally sick. I’m going to commit you to a center if you keep having these moments.”
“Oh, shush,” Kline chided her as Colonel continued to choke a little, a shade red so dark that I was sure it wasn’t healthy in the slightest. Norma stared at her in contempt for a long moment before she shook her head and looked at her boyfriend, waiting for him to gain control of his airways.
“Truth or dare?” she asked him, and he shook his head at her.
“No way am I goin’ and takin’ one of your dares,” he told her. “They’ve nearly gotten me killed.”
“That’s because when you sneak into my parent’s bedroom, you have to do so very quietly,” she scolded him, sighing. “Okay, fine. If there was one government in the world that you would overthrow, which would it be?”
“Canada,” he told her, shrugging. “They ain’t doin’ anythin’ interestin’ up there. I gotta get the party started.”
“Dear lord,” she muttered.
“Alright, Peter,” Colonel said, turning to his friend. “Truth or dare?”
I thought Peter would have chosen dare and then chickened out, but he didn’t even get as far as saying dare for him to chicken out.
“Truth,” he replied, grimacing when Kline and Norma snorted. Colonel tapped his chin, really thinking about it.
He snapped his fingers, and I almost felt bad for Peter. Almost. There was still the super glued dart between my eyes to consider, of course. “So who are you thinkin’ ’bout askin’ out next Tuesday again?” Colonel asked his best friend, this gigantic smirk on his face.
Peter went so pale that he could have been one of the Cullen boys.
“A girl,” he replied before he grinned and turned to me, giving the groaning Colonel the cold shoulder, seeming a little proud at his cryptic answer. He looked me over, smirking widely.
“So, Lena,” he purred. “Truth or dare?”
“Dare,” I muttered, glancing at my hand.
“What was that?” he demanded, his eyebrows soaring. I looked up at him and raised my own eyebrows in response.
“Dare,” I told him clearly.
Colonel clapped his hands sharply and hollered out a shout of laughter. “There we go, Tomatoes!”
“Ooh, Lena with the first dare!” Norma narrated, pumping her fist excitedly, grinning widely. “Here we go. I want to hear this and see this very clearly.”
Peter chewed on his cheek, looking me over thoughtfully, looking a little bit at a loss. My heart beat a little bit quicker in my chest at the thought that I might end up getting off easily but it was very easily shattered when Kline tugged on his arm and forced him to lean over, whispering excitedly into his ear with her genius plan. His eyes lit up and a smirk crossed over his lips, and I knew from that moment on that I was totally screwed.
“That’s an amazing one,” he told Kline before looking back at me, his eyes lit up with enough lights to cover a Fourth of July sky. “I dare you on Monday to kiss Quinton Lancaster.”
I stared at him as my heart sunk.
Norma and Colonel burst out laughing and Kline high fived Peter, sniggering evilly as the four of them fell over each other with laughter, thinking that they knew me and that I wouldn’t do it, thinking that it was a good idea but it would never happen. I was the one sitting on the sidelines with the blood leaking out of my face like a faucet turned on high, my stomach twisting uncomfortably.
They didn’t think I would do it, but I knew that there was no way for me not to.
On Monday, I was going to kiss Quinton Lancaster.
~~~~~~~~~
Worth the wait? ;D
There have been some people out there supporting me so much by liking chapters, and the amount that you guys are voting for, when I looked at it, really and truly made me cry. Thank you so much for all of your support, you all and everyone else here, whether this is on a reading list or you are a silent (but deadly) reader! You all make my day so amazing, and I love every single one of you every day for it!
200 VOTES? YOU GUYS!
RIP Dick Clark :( When I found out, I was heartbroken. It’s not going to be New Years without the poor bloke. (Mayans quote in the chapter provided to you by my darling sister lol)
I came up with a new short story idea . . . I really am uncontrollable when it comes to my imagination. But I think this one is going to go places which is a change.
So I’m going to be a little busy lately what with AP exams and everything . . . So don’t wait up.
x Riley