Disclaimer: Chapter title from ‘Better Together’ by Jack Johnson. It’s one of my favorite songs, period. I was trying to keep from repeating artists, but I may use one of his songs again because I honestly adore his music. I recommend basically any songs from his Inbetween Dreams album.

A/N: I know I started off this story with a fairly good updating routine, but…stuff gets in the way. :D No worries, I’m fine and everything—you’ll likely know if I’m not because I have this bad habit of writing to purge when I’m depressed—but friends and school and work take up life as well. Suffice to say, I’m so pleased that you all like this so much. I hope you continue to stick with me. Love you.

“They’re at it again, eh?”

The voice comes from somewhere next to me, breaking my paralyzed silence in one fell swoop. The shock I receive from the realization that someone is intruding on me intruding is enough for me to whip my head away from the horrible, horrible images forever burned into my brain and towards the source of the interruption, ready to embrace my savior with open arms.

I nearly meet Seth’s mom nose-to-nose, mouth-to-mouth.

…That would have been awkward.

“Uuuuum…” I say. Awkwardly. I’m not sure what I can say that will excuse my behavior—good God, I must look like some sort of creepy, twisted Peeping Tom. Carrying…cookies. That might rescue my reputation. Nobody hates girl scouts, right?

“Sorry.” She coughs. The sound of an electric guitar starts off in the background, muted by a wall or some other sort of building. An insect buzzing happily near my ear is louder than the screech of vibrating strings. “That was probably inappropriate.” She grins an open-mouthed, open-handed grin, inviting me to share the joke. I see where the humor could be in the small lines at the corner of her eye and the white in her hair and her staid button-down shirt over a stomach that used to be slim but is now beginning to grow a pot-belly.

I smile shyly, laugh shyly, apologize shyly. I’m always so shy-shy-shy.

But not so much around grown-ups, for some odd reason. I don’t know why. I don’t particularly enjoy the company of grown-ups any more than I enjoy the company of kids my own age or little kids, who I think are more grown-up than some kids my own age that I know.

It could be, perhaps, because I don’t feel the need to impress grown-ups, to make them like me. Because with adults there don’t seem to be the labels of ‘jock’ or ‘druggie’ or ‘geek’ or ‘freak’.

Because grown-ups aren’t part of my world.

“No, no, I’m sorry.” I cough, still embarrassed, as I yank myself up to my feet. “I, um…” I decide not to offer an explanation. It could possibly make things worse.

She tilts her head to the side, also pulling herself up, slower than me. I imagine I can hear muscles and bones creaking, stiffer than they were thirty years ago, and briefly her salmon pink shirt ripples lovingly around folds on her belly when she bends over to push herself into a standing position. “I’m sorry, have we met?”

My answer comes out like a question. “Yes?”

“I thought so.” She smiles at me. I smile back at her. We smile at each other for a bit before clearing our throats and looking around for a distraction—something that we can point out to break the awkwardness, like ‘Hey, look at the cloud shaped like a cartwheeling eunuch over there!’ Then we realize that the only distracting thing around is the couple going at it in the house behind us, so we cough some more.

In desperation, I thrust the cookies at her. “Um. I…I’m really sorry about Brady.”

She gives a little jump, looking at me with a bewildered expression, then jumps again. “Oh! Oh! You’re—!”

“Yes.”

“And...!”

“Yeah…”

“Ooooh!” Seth’s mom composes herself, then smiles lopsidedly again.

Her son has the same smile.

“Oh, darling, don’t feel like you have to do this or anything. Brady was very old.”

“I know,” and a tinge of irritation enters my tone, because I’ve heard many times now that Brady was old and fat and sick and bound to die in the next few hours anyway, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t care any less. “I just…for your family. For your loss.”

“Thank you.” Seth’s mom smiles sweetly, and then gestures towards the closed garage that is vibrating ever so slightly from the force of the music being played within its walls. A flash of inspiration lightens her features. “Here, why don’t you bring the cookies into Seth?”

“Oh, no—”

“I’m sure he’ll be, er, psyched—is that the word? Yes?—to see you. And he’s like a little kid around sweets—oooh, these look delicious!”

“No, it’s really okay, I don’t—”

“Then he’ll stop making that noise and pissing off the neighbors, for once…” she mutters behind me as she shoulders and herds me towards the door. The only way I could escape from her sheepdog instincts would be to make a break for it, but unfortunately that would be unbearably rude and I can’t just run away, no matter how tempting the idea sounds.

She bangs a meaty fist against the door. “SEEETTTHHH!” She roars, and I quickly decide I wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end of her fury. She is, er, high-spirited and, when angry, probably the equivalent of a white, middle-aged Naomi Campbell. Even now I think I can see her glancing around for a telephone, Blackberry, or some other electronic projectile to hurl at the garage.

The guitar stops with a jangle. My ears ring with this strange thing called quiet, and then the garage door is opening, and then the music is again furiously ricocheting within the enclosed space and out the exit. I am pushed in, clutching the cookies, and Seth’s mom is muttering obscenities as she stalks back to their front door, leaving me alone and helpless.

But Seth’s mom’s retreating figure and the Tupperware container in my arms have no draw on me compared to the sight of Seth himself.

The sunlight that filters through the one dusty window high up on the wooden wall of the garage is oddly white, and the yellow glow from the light bulb barely reaches the corners of the space. It smells like wood, metal, gasoline, sweat and cold. On top of a dilapidated, shockingly ugly couch, Seth is wildly jumping up and down, almost beating his guitar with the force of his movements, his eyes closed and sweat marks under his arms and across his back.

He looks ridiculous.

He looks beautiful.

He’s not a great musician, by any means. He isn’t even a good one. The music is messy, jarring, and lazily orchestrated, and I can hear him hit a few wrong, sour notes but he doesn’t stop. I think that I if I heard what he was playing on a CD, I’d think it so much grinding noise and turn it off immediately to save my ears. It’s just the emotion he puts behind it that makes it…

Then he’s shouting, his brows still fiercely furrowed, and I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this wildness in a human being before and it holds me transfixed even while I’m trembling with anxiety, “What rhymes with mantra?”

I’ve played this game before. My dad and I played it all the time. Hit me, Mimi.

Laughter.

Scatter.

Smatter.

Batter.

Clatter.

Stature.

“It’s a hard one, I know, but I have to use ‘mantra’ or it’s gone, the whole song’s gone—”

“Cleopatra.” I say hoarsely, and then shout it to be heard over the raucous noise.

The music stops again with a horrible screeching. Seth scrambles on the couch, his back to me, his striped boxers showing as he bends gawkily to grab at something that rustles noisily in the sudden lack of background noise. “Perfect, fucking perfect, sorry Mom, but fuck if that isn’t—” His words emerge a little unclearly as he shoves a pen cap in his mouth, then he turns around.

His eyes widen.

I shift uncomfortably, give a lame little wave instinctively, and squeak, “Hey.”

Seth begins to speak, then remembers his mouth is full and spits the pen cap out. It flies into another corner and skitters noisily across the floor. “Uh, hi…” His eyes are slightly narrowed, giving him a suspicious sort of look, and I tug at the skin on my wrist. It’s a nervous habit I have. After particularly nerve-harrowing events, I wake up the next morning with a hickey-like bruise on my inner wrist.

He languidly turns towards the movement, and I think I see his mouth twist up just slightly before he turns back to me again. Hiccoughing, I’m a little unnerved to realize that I’ve been holding my breath.

He doesn’t seem at all perturbed that he’s wearing a ratty, too-small white T-shirt with food stains liberally splattered across it, or that his boxers and pants are riding so low that I can see the curve of his hipbone—

I’m definitely not looking there. Shit, that’s my danger spot. That’s the spot that I could stare at and stare at for centuries. I learned that at the same moment I first admitted that boys didn’t have cooties anymore.

Despite the fact that I saved myself—and besides, Robin Roe is way better looking and buffer than Seth, who is all lean and wiry and built like a greyhound where Robin Roe is a…a Great Dane—when I jerk my eyes away I jerk them directly to his face and I stare anyway.

I’ve never actually looked at Seth before. Well, I mean, I have, but I haven’t actually looked at his actual features rather than just settling for blurring them into unremarkable, average ones that fit well on what I have noticed on his face. There are his almond-shaped eyes, and their color, of course. I’d noticed those right away. What I didn’t note before were the winged eyebrows naturally quirked in such a way his expression was almost constantly skeptical. What I didn’t note before was the ski-slope nose framed by his high cheekbones or the long, sensitive mouth, absolutely made for smiling and laughing, above a strong, but rather pointed chin.

He’s not really hot or handsome or any of those. He’s definitely not as gorgeous as his cousin. What he is, though, is attractive. Striking, rather. I think Rain is lucky.

“Sorry.” I whisper nervously, my voice rising to a bit of a squeal at the end. Pushing the cookies towards him, I spit out, rapid-fire, “I brought these for you and your family and I offer my sincerest condolences for your loss and I left flowers on Brady’s grave, sorry they’re only daisies, I hope you don’t mind, and I’ll see you at school, sorry, thank you, g’bye.” I practically flee for the door, bunching my knee-length skirt in my hands and wincing as my suede flats rub painfully against my heel when I execute the turn, congratulating myself on what I deem as a narrow escape.

“Hold on.” Comes softly from behind me. I don’t want to turn around. I don’t want to turn around. I turn around. He’s still got his guitar tucked under one arm, the other holding the cookies, paper stuck in the corner of his mouth. Aside from what looks like a peanut butter stain, black ink is also smeared across his chest, almost in the shape of a leaf. “I’m not kicking you out or anything after you brought me cookies. Wanna hang out a bit?”

The question is thrown so casually that I almost miss the slight nuance that alerts my attention to the fact that he’s trying not to startle me. Abruptly I realize that I am pinching my wrist so hard and gnawing my lip so determinedly that I look like a masochistic rabbit.

“I can’t.” I squeak, a flush spreading from my back to my forehead as I lie. “I…I have something I have to do. But thank you.”

“Okay.” he says matter-of-factly but then continues with straightforward bluntness, the tone softened by the open-mouthed grin spreading across his face. When he does this the paper floats out of his mouth and I almost laugh. “If you don’t want to, whatever, but I’d like to talk to you. I’d like to know you.”

“What? Really? Huh?” Behold the obvious descendent of Scheherazade. “I mean…I don’t know…” I think of Rain. I think of Robin. I think of the Mysterious Note Writer. I think of how awkward it’ll be. I think of how it might be nice to make a new friend. I think of how there’s something so odd and yet natural about the idea of being friends with this guy, this guy who is at least two tiers above my social level but not the four that Robin Roe is. Though the fact that he is related to Robin Roe makes things a bit worse. I think about the way he is James Dean leaning back against the wall, all hooded eyelids and languid limbs, waiting for me to stop thinking about all of this and just be.

“I didn’t make the cookies.” I say weakly. Then I add, answering his questions, “Okay. I’d like that.”

"Okay." And it's almost like he knows how much it took for me to give my answer.

But after all, it can’t hurt to be friends with the guy I’m seriously crushing on, right? I get brownie points with the dudes.

In the end I’m only sitting on the edge of the tatty couch for a grand three minutes, just beginning to get into a stilted conversation about how Seth got started playing, when his mom opens the door to the garage from the house and says apologetically that it was time dinnertime. When she invites me to stay, rather obviously out of sheer politeness, I decline.

Still, the feeling of accomplishment I get for being brave and moving out of my comfort zone stays with me, and I smile, bemused, as I file away the fact that Seth is a gesticulator when he gets excited (in this case it was beginning to talk about his band that sparked it) into my mind’s cabinet. And I dubiously finger the number scrawled on the piece of paper Seth had unceremoniously flicked into my hand as I was leaving.

“You don’t think he thought I was, I dunno, trying to, you know?” I ask Jess later that night, frowning as I contemplate my ceiling, phone in my hand.

“Naw.” She says immediately. Then she pauses. “Well…I don’t know. I don’t know him, so it’s hard to tell what he’d be thinking. Like, somebody could think that you were, you know, but someone else could just as easily think that you were there for what you were there for.” She paused again. “Wait, you weren’t…?”

“No, no.” I hurriedly reassure her. “I did tell you about Robin Roe, right? And I promise I’m a monogamist.” Unsurprisingly, I blush just saying his name. “God, he is so…”

“I know.” We share giggles. “But you know…musicians are hot…” She says slyly.

I shriek, mock-outraged, into the phone. “Jess!” The conversation disintegrates into laughter again. “And you’re only saying that because, as you very well know, Kevin labors under the delusion that he is a bass god.”

“Aaw, don’t disparage the poor boy’s dreams.”

Sniggering, I retort, “As long as you’ll stop making those comments. Besides, Seth’s got a girlfriend.”

“Hippie chick, right?”

“Something like that. She has a hippie name. I don’t know if she’s an actual hippie. She doesn’t wear hemp, floor-length peasant skirts, or smell permanently of incense.”

“Meow!”

“I didn’t mean to be mean! Sorry. You know I love what hippie friends we do have. Liv can on occasion pass for one and she and you are my soul sisters.”

“Aaw!”

“Aaw!” I mimic, giggles roiling in my throat again. “I looove you.”

“Love ya too. But tell me more about Robin. You haven’t had a proper crush in months—even a year—and I want to talk about it.”

I smile, and start shyly, “He’s got a lovely voice. And that one time he took me to the nurse’s office he held my hand for a bit and—okay, now that I think about it I’m kind of embarrassed because I was probably all sweaty and gross…” Moaning, I fall back on my bed again. “Dude, why can’t I be cool for once? And the shitty thing is…it’s not even like I have a chance with him.” I add softly. It’s not fishing for compliments, it really isn’t. Because it’s true.

Jess, darling that she is, attempts to cheer me up. “That’s not necessarily true. He was totally flirting with you when he came to Kevin’s house the other day. Kevin got all protective and shit so you know that even he could tell that something was going on.”

That brings a bit of a smile to my face again. “Yeah…I guess…”

“So your campaign is not entirely without hope.”

“Hey, who said there was going to be a campaign? There will be no campaign of any sort. This crush I have is going to remain secret and private and…and…and un-campaigned.”

“So you’re not going to go for it?”

“Of course I’m not going to go for it! It’s never going to work out, so I’m just going to enjoy this in peace, while I can! And don’t you dare go messing it up.”

“Hey, I thought we just established that there was hope alive.”

“Yeah, well—”

Jess spends the rest of the call trying to convince me to get me some man. I spend the rest of the call trying fruitlessly to change the subject to no avail. Jess. Never. Lets. Go. And I love that about her, and I admire that, for example, she’s been in love with Kevin for years and years, but sometimes I just want to shoot her. Not really. Because if I really wanted to stop talking about it she’d shut up right away.

But secretly I kind of want to talk about Robin Roe. I want to talk about him as much as I can before my friends get tired of hearing how hot his body is and how soft his hair looks and how nice he is to me and how Seth said he came to visit me when I was sick in the nurse’s office and how sometimes I think he looks at me like he thinks I’m cool.

My room is a shade of this hideous branch of periwinkle that I picked when I was ten, and I haven’t bothered to change it since. Too much work. Besides, I figure that I only have two more years in it before I’m out and off to college. My sister is welcome to it. The walls are full of old drawings and posters messily slapped on with tape, calendar pictures, photos, quotes, stickers, framed odds-and-ends, and one wall-hanging. My twin-size bed is covered with a light yellow quilt, my dresser is white, my walnut bookshelf is stuffed, my Moroccan carpet is bright and colorful against the cream floor carpeting. I suppose you could say that my room demonstrates character. I just think it looks like an uncoordinated mess.

I shudder to contemplate bringing any prospective boyfriend into this hovel.

Because when I look at my room I think it looks like it belongs to the messiest little girl in the universe. I say little girl because aside from the make-up scattered on my desk and the contents of my closet/dresser, you wouldn’t think that this room belonged to a sixteen year old. Every so often I’ll get really unsatisfied about this and start cleaning my room, and when everything’s been shuffled around and organized and picked off the floor the room looks a bit more mature, but the effort it takes to clean is phenomenal. I’m just a naturally messy person who is naturally embarrassed to reveal the results to anybody outside the family.

People say that rooms reflect the personality of their inhabitant. Maybe. I know I’m immature—because who dreams of the roses and stars and dances and kisses this far along in the game?—and the ragged stuffed animal lying on my flowered (flowered!) pillowcase sort of accents that. But sometimes I don’t think I’m so much of a little girl. Sometimes I feel so grown-up when I recognize my own ignorance in something or other. Yet that again is a bit of a childish thought, isn’t it? I don’t know. I get confused. Muddled-up. I’m not a philosopher; I don’t read enough good literature. I’m not eloquent enough to articulate my thoughts.

And that makes me sad.

So, feeling grown-up, wistful when it comes to my own immaturity. Coming-of-age stories, doncha know? I used to read them all the time. ‘Another touching coming-of-age story from blah-blah, critically acclaimed author of bleh-bleh.’ And the characters felt so assured and secure by the conclusion. I wanted that so badly, and here at sixteen I’m still muddling along like Alice through Wonderland.

There’s another kind of sad I feel sometimes when I see something beautiful. Maybe not sad—just some sort of aching deep within that’s either the biggest joy anybody in the world has ever felt or the most tragic melancholy that’s ever existed. And that makes me think, sometimes…Hey. I’m getting there. I’m getting there.

“Why Rob?” Kevin says casually when he arrives in the library. Aside from me, he is the first in our group to get here.

“Shh!” I hiss immediately, slapping his arm, swiveling my eyeballs around to make sure that neither Robin Roe nor any of his friends are around. “God, do you want everybody to hear you?”

“Aw, Mimi, you’re so cute.”

“Shut up, fucker!”

The coffee Kevin snorts up when he starts guffawing with laughter burns his nose hairs and he squeals with pain. It makes me laugh. “Shut up, bitch!” He wheezes, clutching his nose, but smiles at me so I know he’s kidding. Then his eyes travel up and down my form. It’s a little awkward, but he’s not checking me out or anything. It’s perfunctory and critical, much like a doctor assessing the health state of his patient. “You dressed up for him and everything.”

Dude, I am not a little unnerved that Kevin noticed this. “Uh. Yeah. I am a little unnerved you noticed this.” I inform him.

With an annoyed look my way, Kevin takes a sip from his thermos. “Shut up.” He’s very sensitive about his masculinity. Jess, Liv and I never miss an opportunity to jibe him about this. “But seriously, for him?”

“Well, yeah.” I say simply, looking at myself. I dressed cute today, in a boxy, floral-print cotton top with gray skinny jeans cuffed into capris and yellow flip flops. Maybe out of some misbegotten notion that Robin Roe…who knows. I don’t even dare whisper the thought to myself. Then I look up sharply. “What do you mean? Do you not like him or something?”

“I’m just saying.”

“What?”

His lips curl in a rueful grimace. “Mee,” He says carefully, “Rob’s a great guy. He really is. I don’t know a single person who doesn’t like him. I just—everybody likes him, you know?”

So you think that I have a lot of competition and don’t stand a chance, is that it? I’m really kind of hurt. I really am. That’s not a cool thing for Kevin to hint at.

“Hey. Hey! I see what you’re thinking and it’s not that.” He snaps his fingers in my face so that I’m forced to look at the sincerity in his incredibly blue eyes. “It’s just that—I don’t know him beyond the basic stuff. And I don’t—guh, this is going to sound retarded, but I don’t want you to…to hurt yourself or whatever.”

All rancorous feelings evaporate, and I make sure to give Kevin an extra big smile, gushy with affection. So he’s an unthinking, insensitive nincompoop sometimes. But more often than not he’s like this, and I could just hug him and never let go. “Would you consider being my adopted brother?” I ask half-jokingly and half-serious.

He makes a face at me. “Uh, duh.”

I laugh again, my head flinging itself back and I could wince at how loud and unrestrained my laughter always is, but for now I just look at Kevin again and say, “I’m not a little girl that you need to protect. So I really, really like Robin Roe. It’s not like anything’s going to come of it, right?”

I’d stick in a ‘famous last words’ after that but after all, nothing was going to happen anyway.

(Famous last words.) (I’ll tempt Fate just in case she decides to listen.)

A few hours later I looked under my desk in English while my teacher talked about how we needed to see things from a different perspective—and this made me want to throttle her, because we were seventeen years old, we were Generation Y, we were us, we more than anybody else were impelled to look at things from a different perspective and all our schooling so far had provided that we actually thought, instead of just doing—and saw another one.

The thrill was still there, mingled with an almost-dread. I felt somehow disloyal, crushing on Robin Roe but looking forward to these notes at the same time. And a hopeful, sly little thought crept into my mind: what if…just maybe, just in my imagination but it would be wonderful…

The neatly folded paper rested on my desk as my eyes glazed over. I could see it. And the note would be longer than usual, full of professions of impatience and love, telling me to meet the author in some secluded spot because he was tired of waiting…

There I’d be, dressed in a really flattering, feminine outfit, wearing matching underwear—just because wearing a cute set of matching underwear would give me a confidence boost, not because I thought he’d try to get up under there in the first five minutes of finally meeting—anxiously wringing my hands together as I took those slow steps to the meeting place. And then—and then! There he’d be, but he wouldn’t be turned around so I’d only see his back, but still, when I saw the broad expanse of his shoulders and his dark hair softly rippling in the wind a little ping of hope would sound in me.

And he’d turn around, and I’d lose myself in his dark eyes.

“I hope you’re not disappointed.” He’d say.

“Never.” I’d breathe. And then—

THIS SUCKS.

Okay. I’ve been reading far too many crappy romance novels lately. God. That was possibly the worst, most unimaginative daydream I’ve come up with yet. I cringe, I flush, I bubble with frustration. The shame of it puts me in a bad mood and I rip open the note with unforgiving hands of destruction.

Given the choice between your blush and your smile, I think I’d pick your heart.

“OH, COME ON!” I wail. “Hallmark comes up with better shit than that!”

I get my first detention ever for my language. I think it’s actually divine intervention for being an ungrateful whore.

Guilt sets in pretty soon, propelled, of course, by my punishment, but also because I shouldn’t even think thoughts as mean and unkind as that. I ought to be so, so happy to receive anything like this no matter how wretchedly corny it is, no matter how much it sounds like a variation of some obscure pick-up line in the boonies.

And that’s exactly what I’m talking about. I’m a bitch. I need to stop this.

I think back on the other notes I’ve received, and this one seems weird compared to those. I know it’s the same person because it’s the same handwriting and whatnot. But the others were somehow…more honest. But perhaps, I grant, he’s just running out of ideas. It must be difficult to come up with line after line after line. On the bright side there wasn’t anything about fragile roses.

I’m grateful. I am. I am so, so buoyed up by the idea that someone likes me that I want to find my secret admirer (woah, that’s weird to say) and just tell him how his notes make me feel.

The view as I walk reluctantly down the hallways to the detention room slows. There are actually not a small number of people left at the school, as quite a few take an extra period, but school after-hours is much quieter than it is during the rest of the day. Nobody takes notice as a revelation yanks the light bulb above my head.

I can find him. I can figure out who the mysterious note-writer is, and it wouldn’t be too difficult. All I’d have to do was watch the classroom during the beginning of the day until my English class. At least I could narrow down the suspect list, right?

Something sinks inside me at the thought, and I resume my death-march to detention. Do I want to know?

But there—I reach Room 806. I have to think about that later. For now it is all I can do not to collapse into jell-o as it becomes crystal clear that I have finally entered the realm of Bad.

Ish.

Badder than before. Worse than before. Hadn’t I learned in fourth grade that ‘badder’ isn’t a word? Same as ‘funner’. I wonder what constitutes a word—something that can be understood? Because then ‘badder’ is a word, as is ‘funner’, because one knows what one means. Oh God, I’ve started babbling in my head now, the one place that I can supposedly control myself.

A deep breath for courage, and I push open the door with a militaristic shove and tiptoe, not so militaristically, in.

Amusement is only part of my jeopardy wheel of emotions when I realize that not for naught did I go to the bother of dressing up nicely today. The rest of the wheel is taken up by fluttery feelings that swish through my stomach and up to my throat, and by the hot, trickling feeling of a vibrant flush spreading across my entire face so that I resemble an albino in the Bahamas.

“Mimi?”

“Hi,” I say, again attacking my wrist skin with newfound vigor. “H-what up-doing?” Aah! Stupid! Dunce! Mentally retarded social leper!

“In detention, same as you.” He waves me over and I dumbly stagger in his direction. “Are you a regular visitor to this particular room?”

If I tell him it’s my first time in detention will he think I’m a loser? But come to think of it, he doesn’t seem the type to be in detention, either. Our school is pretty lenient on things like this; detentions are given out maybe to one student per every two days. They like the three-strikes-you’ve-got-Saturday-School method better.

I hedge a bit, laughing nervously, then give up and admit the truth. “No, it’s my first time, actually.”

He smiles warmly. “I’d give you a tour but this is only my second, I think.”

I wonder if he is thinking ‘This girl pantsed me’ like I’m thinking ‘I pantsed this boy’. Frankly the humiliation of that moment is never far from my mind, but Robin Roe seems to have completely struck it from his memory. How very noble. If it were me I’d bring it up whenever I could just to tease the person into tongue-tied trauma.

But then, my verbosity is zero around him anyway so if he did bring it up again I’d probably be in negatives.

“Heh.” I giggle weakly, half-hysterical. My head feels like it’s about to explode with nervous energy. “What are you in for?”

He bends conspiratorially towards me. I hold my breath as his face approaches mine, partly because I think my heart just skipped a few beats and more because I don’t know how bad my breath smells right now. I can’t hold eye contact; for some reason I’ve never been able to when people get really close to me like this. Instead I gaze at a spot somewhere behind his left ear, flicking my gaze back and forth between that spot and his eyes every half a second, attempting to suppress the wide, silly grin battling to surface. “To be honest,” he murmurs, “I’m not really sure.”

Able to breathe again when he leans back, I respond to his echo of my own question with, “I interrupted class and used a dirty word. Er, what do you mean, you’re not sure?” This is getting a bit easier. Sort of. I still can’t for the life of me think of anything to say and I just hope that Robin Roe will take care of that for me.

“Well, that’s sort of a lie—I was letting this girl copy off my homework in Physics and we got caught.”

My mouth opens in a rounded ‘o’. “That’s not very fair for the first offense,” I say lamely, even though I think that they must have gone about it in a fairly stupid way if they were actually found out by one of the oblivious members of the science department.

“Hey, no biggie.” A warm feeling bubbles in my stomach at the appreciative smile he gives me for defending him. “I get to hang out with you, don’t I?” And more than a agreeable warm feeling, my face immediately flames even hotter and redder, if at all possible, and a high-pitched cackle emerges from my throat, which throws Robin Roe off a bit because his well-formed toosh leaps off the table for a brief moment.

My humiliation is so totally complete.

“I, uh…” I cover my mouth, mortified. “I’m sorry. I have a weird laugh. Which anybody who knows me finds out immediately. It’s really bad.”

“No, it’s fine. It’s funny.” And his smile is so sweet. “Believe me, I sound like a horse on crack when I get into it.” He pulls out the chair below him with his foot, his voice low and pleasant as he asks me to sit.

Despite how calm his voice is, despite how composed he is, my nerves are like an end of the world movie, all mangled wires, frozen people, exploding people, floods and earthquakes totally shaking my internal system. It’s anxiety more than anything else, because…I want to impress him. I want him to walk away from the detention center thinking: I like her.

When the teacher comes in a few minutes later, we and the two other people in the room fall silent at his glare, and the blossoming repartee Robin Roe and I had going is abruptly finished. Instead he takes out math and starts working on the problems methodically and calmly, apparently not a person who mumbles and swears and growls under their breath when frustrated. He is apparently not a person who ever gets frustrated.

But what is nice about this is that I’m free to sneak as many glances at him as I want to. Unfortunately, by the end of the hour all I’ve remembered to take in is how long his body is and how the natural waviness of his dark hair is really handsome, because the one time his forearm brushed against my shoulder when he reached around to get something out of his backpack, I was frozen in place for a good twenty minutes, so concentrated on not letting any more ridiculous giggles come out of my mouth that I almost peed my pants.

And…I think that I once caught him looking at me, his eyes half-lidded and languorous, his full mouth curved into a small smile.

“So,” are his first words to me after an hour of silence, and he picks up my backpack and pushes in my chair. Which leaves me feeling a bit helpless, but at least he doesn’t help me put on my backpack. That would have left me feeling a bit like a second grader in addition to feeling like a wet noodle. “I’m sorry. I should have put in better effort to entertain you; you probably won’t wish to revisit this experience again, and I shall have to endure any subsequent punishments of this sort by myself.”

I’d like to talk to you. I’d like to get to know you.

I don’t know where that came from, but ignoring my thoughts, I laugh, careful to make it slightly more demure this time. “I’m sure you can come up with some way to entertain yourself.” I’m flirting! I’m flirting!

And he could so easily make a dirty joke out of that. So, so easily. My mind swims with them as soon as the words are out of my mouth. But no, he just laughs too, and follows me out the door and into the sunlight. We blink at the sudden brightness, and while we’re waiting for the spots in our vision to recede we turn to each other. “Maybe I’ll see you around.” He suggests. His voice is like chocolate, like decades-old bourbon whiskey, like golden syrup. I can see him living in a different age when people ran around in cloaks and boots, embracing each other on Juliet balconies and waving around swords like lunatics.

Already backing away, because I can sense with some weird otherworldly sense that Liv is illegally here to pick me up, I call softly, “Yeah. I’ll see you later.”

“Bye.” Eyes big and solemn, his frame black and solid in front of the sun, he looks like some sort of guardian prince. It’s a bizarre, absurd thought but it’s kind of true. I think he popped out of the womb offering to help his mother tidy up the mess, telling her to rest, charming the nurses with a smile and asking them if they could please towel him off and how was their day going today?

Once I can dart to the safety of a locker bay I snort into my palm at the images and then reprimand myself for being such a weirdass person, before sufficiently calming myself down enough to trot to the parking lot where Liv is blasting rap music from her mom’s shiny minivan and mock-dancing with a gangster pout on her lips. Briefly the sunlight glancing off the ‘Proud Parent of an Honors Student’ bumper sticker blinds me.

I hop in the front seat and join in while we speed off.

“So it was a good day.” A piece of tree digs into my shoulder. Reaching under my back, I find it and fling it away. There’s a yelp. I know that yelp. That yelp belongs to the dumbest, meanest dog in the neighborhood, an underweight Chihuahua with anger issues. I am so hugely satisfied right now.

The duckling continues hopping up and down my torso. He has a bit of trouble navigating the small lumps of my breasts, which I find gratifying as normally unless someone is looking they could miss them, the same way people forget that Greenland is an actual solid noun that is in our hemisphere as well, rather than an abstract, made-up place full of cold stuff.

His feathers are like silk, and his eyes half-close when I run my finger gently over the top of his head. He’s learned how to balance despite his missing leg, but moving a lot tires him out. I don’t know whether I should be glad or not that he’s getting attached to me. He needs to know how to survive without humans. Or rather, without my feeding him and playing with him every other day.

I saw him digging a bug out of the ground and nibbling on some grass the other day, though, so I think I’ll stop bringing food from now on as he’s clearly capable of foraging for himself. “A good day.” I repeat sleepily. “Oh, he is so nice to me.” I curl up suddenly, hugging myself as if it will keep the feelings in more efficiently.

The duck falls off my belly and rather than attempting to struggle up again, settles for hopping around to my cheek. He pips gently while I murmur to myself. “Robin Roe. Do you think I could try calling him what everybody else does? Let’s try that. Rob. Oooh, that’s weird. He’s been Robin Roe in my head for so long. Maybe I’ll do it by steps. Robin. That’s a bit better. I’ll work my way to the other one.” I’m getting kind of tired. The pond is growing into that dark green and gold look it gets when the sun is lower in the sky. I should be home soon; I told my mom that I was at Liv’s house but I stopped here while walking home and I’d been here for the past thirty minutes or so.

I close my eyes just to block the sun out. My vision behind my eyelids is red. Then there aren’t colors anymore and when I wake up and open my eyes everything is the blue of nine-thirty in the evening.

When I wake up the bastard duck has eaten half my hair.

He properly saw her for the first time in a long time as if in a dream. A dream where a dead dog presided over the occasion, and she looked awkward, and he felt so indescribably awkward placed in the situation that he was that he could have joined the damn canine in the afterland. And the rain was almost lilac against the hard gray of the cement and her shampoo smelled like mandarin oranges. It was a strange combination of nightmares and fantasies, monsters and castles.

When he glimpsed that brief flash of her lily-white bum—it wasn’t as big a deal as she’d obviously thought it to be, in retrospect, because it had been for half a second and she’d only revealed the same fraction beneath her towel—he’d almost let out an undignified yelp, but he doesn’t want to dwell on that because it’s a bit embarrassing how suddenly he’d waxed over pre-adolescent. He wants to think about how her glasses obstructed half her face and how she’d looked like a drowning rat in the rainstorm. How later her hair had been greasy and lank against her sweaty face. How the pale of the note almost blended in with the sick-pale of her skin and he’d been worried. How she’d smelt a little revolting but he hadn’t really cared.

Or no, he doesn’t want to think about that. Yes, he does. No. No, yes, he doesn’t know and he’s never been rendered so incapable of verbosity before but there it is.

He doesn’t know what he sees in her, really. She’s shy and he barely even knows her and she seems to have a bit of a stuttering problem and she isn’t as gorgeous as other women he knows, not at all. But there’s a bit of a fire burning in her eyes, sometimes. A bit of spunk. A bit of fetching solemnity, too. In many ways she is not the type of woman that the love struck write sonnets about and that Byron loved, but in some other ways she is. Sometimes he looks at her and sees poetry.

In simplest terms, what he does think is that she is heartbreakingly pretty. And he feels like such a fucking fruit for thinking something like that but there that is and he can’t take it back anymore.

A/N: iDone! iDone! iDone! Ahem. I hope you liked this chapter; it probably wasn’t all that funny, but there are some bits in here that I really like. I’m thinking that this story as a whole won’t be too long—it’ll probably reach maybe 20 chapters, maximum.

I think this chapter is gonna bring up a bunch of speculations. Just maybe. XD Aaanyway, I do hope you liked it, and I do want you to tell me your thoughts, opinions, feelings, etc. about this story or about whatever because I love you guys to bits.

Please review!