Have you ever had that feeling where the moment you see someone, you want to burst into full-on, sucking-air tears?
Yeah, that’s me right now.
“Lena, you have to open your eyes,” Kline told me impatiently, starting to sound annoyed. “You can’t walk around with your eyes closed forever.”
“I can try,” I replied, my hands partially muffling my words from where they were firmly clamped over my face. “People can live blind. I’ll get a dog and I’ll learn to read Braille and I’ll be set for life.”
“Why are you so pathetic?” she demanded, and although I couldn’t see her I was pretty sure that she had thrown her hands up dramatically. “Lena, seriously, I can’t take this anymore. You have to face him like a man.”
“Tomatoes ain’t a guy,” a familiar voice protested. “And not to be changin’ the subject, by why’s she hidin’ her face in shame?”
“You get three guesses,” she told him.
He laughed, but it kind of sounded like he didn’t think it was funny at all. “Oh, right, this all ’cause she was kissin’ Lancaster.”
I moaned in horror. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Have you gone and looked at yourself in the mirror at all this mornin’?” Colonel demanded. “’Cause I ain’t a fashion wiz, but I’m thinkin’ that shirt is on backwards.”
I looked down and squinted. He was right.
“You shouldn’t be ashamed,” Norma assured me, and I jumped, not even having realized that she was there. I shook my head at her general direction.
“I’m going to pretend like nothing happened,” I explained. “It’s for the best.”
“It’s lookin’ like somethin’ happened,” Colonel argued. “Somethin’ like you gettin’ your face pecked off by a whole bunch of birds.”
“Oh, don’t exaggerate,” I mumbled through me hand-wall of shame and despair.
“So you’re not just going to go over and talk to him like a normal person?” Kline demanded, her eyebrows probably going up to touch her hairline. I nodded dutifully, waiting patiently for her to finish her rant.
Instead of speaking, she just pushed me down the stairs.
Okay, fine, so we had been standing in front of the school, and the stairs were somewhere between a flight and a stoop, but I still think that it was fully understandable that I screamed like pure ax murder all the same.
The worse was that I bowled someone down with me.
We sprawled onto the concrete and I winced as my skin scraped painfully on my arms and legs, my whole body feeling numb after colliding with the part-ice, part-concrete landing pad. I jumped up off of the warm body like I was being electrocuted as my face flamed oh-so attractively, my expression probably just as horrified as I felt with the twisting of my stomach.
“Oh my god, I am so sorry,” I gasped, reaching up and covering my mouth in a very le gasp way.
“It’s alright,” they assured me, sounding like they were hiding their pain, but my adrenaline-fueled brain figured that one out almost immediately. My eyes widened and I wished I could have told myself that I was dreaming and that I hadn’t just fallen down the stairs and taken Quinton Lancaster with me.
“Quinton, I am so sorry!” I exclaimed, still sitting on the ground helplessly staring at him as he tried to get to his feet, wincing. “Kline just pushed me and I guess I lost my balance and I didn’t even notice you were there and I am so, so, so sorry; are you sure that you are alright?”
“I didn’t understand a word that you just said there, you said it way too fast,” he confessed to me, wincing as he straightened his back fully, but he covered up his pain by leaning back down and offering me a hand to help me up from where I was still sitting on the ground like the idiot I am. And no matter what temperature it was outside, it seemed like his hands were always running warm . . . like, really, really warm. I tried not to hold onto it like some sort of stalker by refusing to let it go when I was on my feet, so instead I let it go maybe too quickly, watching as he took it back to his side, staring as he shoved his hands into his pockets.
I shifted nervously on my feet as the first bell rang, signaling for students to get into the building. The migration began and, because we happened to be standing right where they needed to go, I rested assured that I would be able to get away from giving him an explanation by sneaking away Jason Bourne-style.
Needless to say, I failed out of spy school on the first day.
The moment that I went to make my break away, his super warm hand caught me before I could take off, anchoring me to him. My stomach flipped as I glanced down at his hand softly holding my wrist, so big compared to mine.
“Can we talk?” he demanded, something strangled and tortured in his voice. And because this was the boy that made me weak at the knees, I nodded my head like an overly eager bobble-head.
He softly tugged me away from the crowd a little bit, coming to a stop where we were on the front lawn between the front door and the bike rack. He turned and looked at me nervously, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck in way that made him look like he should be on the next cover of GQ or something.
“So about yesterday,” he started, making me flinch.
“I’m sorry about that,” I interrupted him, my words drawing him up short. He blinked, confused.
“Wait, are you still talking about today?” he asked me, confused. “I’m really not mad. I’m well aware that Kline Stonewall is rather . . . spontaneous.”
I shook my head. “No, I’m talking about yesterday.”
“You’re apologizing about yesterday?” He was still confused.
I nodded.
He blinked. “Why?”
I stared at him like he had lost his mind, which he must have if he was wondering why there was something I needed to apologize for. I’m pretty sure he was there, seeing as I couldn’t get the look in his eyes out of my head, and the way I wondered all night long if he had been watching me when I walked away. A little concerned, I reminded him slowly, “Yeah, I’m sorry I just kissed you yesterday completely out of nowhere. That was a little out of line.”
He still looked like he didn’t quite understand, so I sighed under my breath.
“You’re sorry that you kissed me?” he demanded.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, but they dared me to and—”
The look on his face stopped my words immediately. It looked like he was burning man.
“Oh,” he said flatly. “You kissed me because of a dare.”
I quickly realized that I had said all of the wrong things, and I scrambled to pick up the pieces. “Well, yeah, I figured that it wouldn’t put that much of a rift between us, you know? Since we’re friends and all that.”
“Yeah. Friends,” he said.
I hesitated, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions and say that something about this conversation was really bothering him, because I didn’t have enough room left in me to hope like that.
I smiled at him, hoping that he wouldn’t be able to tell how quickly my heart was beating. Slowly coming alive, his lips tipped up slightly, his eyes warming up. But he still didn’t quite look like Quinton.
“So we’re good?” I asked, feeling uncomfortable. He let out a breath I hadn’t even realized that he had been holding.
“We’re fine,” he assured me. The problem was that I didn’t really believe him.
From behind us, the warning bell rang, giving us two minutes now to get to class. It surprised me that one of the longest moments of my life so far in reality had only been five minutes. I glanced back behind me at the building, a little surprised. Not to sound cheese-tastic, but sometimes when I was with him it felt like the world stopped moving.
He watched me nervously, like I was a ticking time bomb that was going to explode at any moment and do something unexpected. I guess I couldn’t really blame him for that.
“Babies aren’t dishwasher safe,” I informed him.
“Words from the very wise,” he noted, and then the smile that made my heart all flippy-floppy appeared back on his face, making me a little happier and optimistic about the day ahead. He gestured toward the front door before unleashing those deadly dimples on me, nearly making me swoon at his feet.
“After you,” he said, and I flushed in embarrassment.
“Are you sure you want to walk up the stairs with me in front of you?” I demanded. “It didn’t exactly work well the first time. I could use you as a landing pad again at absolutely any time.”
“I’ll take that risk,” he told me, a laugh in his voice as I pulled the front door of the school open, the voices rushing out to meet us. He took hold of the door from me, smiling charmingly at me. I almost forgot how to move because I was too busy gaping at his smile. I slipped inside, thanking him bashfully.
“I’ll see you in Tyler’s class, then,” he called to me before he turned and walked away, his head hanging for a long moment. I watched him walk away until he picked his head back up, playing the game, moments before he turned the corner and disappeared from sight.
With a sigh, Kline appeared beside me, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Now you’ve done it,” she sighed, shaking her head at me.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” she said, her voice echoing down the hallway as the bell rang, but neither of us moved as she continued, “you just possibly permanently gave him the friend card by dismissing it like that. You just totally and ignorantly rejected him, dude.”
“What are you even talking about?” I interrogated her. “It sounds like nonsense. I’m not even going to ask how you know what just happened between us, but you’re still talking crazy.”
“One of the hottest boys in the school, possibly even in the town, probably really wanted to talk about that kiss with you, and you just went ahead and told him that was a dare, which also told him that you didn’t do it because you liked him but because someone else told you to do it. Now, he thinks you’re not interested.”
“I’m not,” I lied.
“I believe that like I believe Peter and his conspiracy theories,” she replied curtly. “And that is not at all.”
I sighed.
“Face the music, Lena,” one of my best friends told me. “You just rejected the guy that you’re smitten with.”
I bit my lip, considering everything that she had just said.
She patted my shoulder. “Good luck with convincing him otherwise, dude.”
“I don’t like Quinton Lancaster,” I tried to convince her, but it wasn’t enough to convince me.
“Okay,” she told me skeptically and started down the same hallway that Quinton had followed to the end, heading to class five minutes late and not looking like it bothered her in the slightest. “Think about it, Lena. Believe it, too, while you’re at it. That boy likes you. A lot.”
I sighed, shaking my head.
“And you like him back,” she called knowingly before she disappeared around the corner, vanishing into the thin air.
Alone in the hallway, I let out the long breath I had been holding, releasing only one of the pressures in my chest.
“What have I done?” I demanded to no one in particularly before I sighed, hiking my backpack up onto my shoulder and heading to class, my head filled with thoughts of Quinton Lancaster and how I really needed to learn when to shut my mouth.
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So what did you guys think? Was it awesome? Is Lena as much of an idiot as she obviously is? What would you have done?
Who wants to study? I don’t want to study. Go away, review book. No one likes you.
x Riley