Hi again :D Back with another not-so-one-shot-one-shot. What is this... Like, my fourth one? I apologize for the title. I'm aware it kind of sucks, but it seemed appropriate for the most part.

So I came across this idea when my best friend and I decided that it would be extremely awesome to have a shed where we could put all of our useless crap and hang out. I had been working on the characters for this story a few weeks before I finally decided to sit down and write it.

This one is going to be three or four parts. I'm not too sure yet, since I haven't finished writing it, but I plan on finishing it soon. Updates should be pretty fast.

So here it is. Hope you like it.

The door swung open and hit the wall beside it with much more force then I had intended.

Hayden Barnes looked up immediately from the carton of Chinese take-out in his lap.

"That bad, eh?" His voice showed no surprise. He didn't even look startled at the fact that I had come storming in without any warning.

"The ignorant little… Man, when am I going to learn that guys are assholes?"

"Thanks," Hayden said, shoving another portion of Lo Mein into his mouth. "Appreciate that one."

"Not you, Hayden," I sighed, collapsing onto the lawn chair that was pushed up against the wall. "Just… Ugh."

He reached for the remote control and clicked the mute button. Then Hayden sat up and swung his legs over the side of the lawn chair so his feet touched the paneling below. "What happened, Rae?"

"Right. So we were in his basement playing foosball, right?"

"Nothing wrong with foosball," Hayden mused.

"So I beat him about twelve times in a row, and he comments that 'I may be good at foosball, but I'd never survive in real soccer'."

Hayden nodded and rolled his eyes, as if he knew what was coming. "And outside it goes."

"Now we're in his backyard. He's in the net, and I'm about ten feet away. Then he starts saying all this crap about how I'll never make it into the goal, because I'm a girl and he's a guy, and blah blah blah."

"And you hit the ball right into the net!" Hayden exclaims, throwing his fist into the air.

"Right into his face was more like it. I wasn't even aiming for the net." I scoffed and fell backwards so I was sprawled out on the chair, staring up at the angled ceiling of the shed.

Hayden chuckled and lied back down again. "That's my girl," he murmured. He un-muted the television and the small area was once again filled with the sound of an old sitcom and its laugh-track.

"So how'd your date go?" I asked, sounding more collected when I spoke this time.

"Terrific. That's why I'm sitting in a shed watching reruns and eating Chinese food. Yours is on top of the mini-fridge, if you were wondering. I was just about to put it away if you weren't here in ten minutes."

I laughed and got up, walking five feet to the miniature refrigerator placed right next to the T.V. One cool thing about our shed was that you didn't have to walk more than 10 steps to get to anything. It might've been slightly cramped, but Hayden and I liked it that way. Especially since we were both two people who loved to be lazy.

I opened the little white cartridge and found pork with broccoli; my all time favorite. "So what happened with yours?"

"Got nervous and tripped. Spilled my slushie all over her." Hayden said it nonchalantly, as if he had reflected on the matter and decided to forget it had ever happened.

"And she ditched you just because of that?" I asked incredulously.

My best friend shook his head. "Nah. She took off because I tried to put my arm around her and accidentally wacked her in the head," Hayden told me. Then he paused and pensively furrowed his eyebrows. "Or was it because I started choking on popcorn and the guy in front of us yelled at me because he couldn't hear the movie over my coughing?" He shrugged. "Don't remember. The whole thing was a blur."

I scoffed playfully, mixing the Chinese food around with my chopsticks. "Smooth, Hayden," I commented. "You know… You might have grown six inches over the summer, and you might've learned about the wonder of contact lenses. Hell, you're even over and done with four years of braces. But you're still a nerd at heart." I grinned at him.

Hayden picked up the closest item (which just so happened to be a lantern in the shape of a frog) and hurled it at my head. It hit the wall behind me, missing my face by about three inches. I watched as it fell to the ground with a thump and rolled across the wood.

"So how'd you know I'd be back here?" I asked, returning to my pork and broccoli. "I wasn't supposed to be home till 11 at the earliest."

Hayden turned to me and cocked an eyebrow, almost as if the answer was obvious. "Face it, Raegan. We're both really sucky daters."

I shrugged casually. "I've been thinking, and….Well, I've come to the conclusion that I'm just fine with that."

My eyes traveled up to the old crinkled snapshot of Hayden and I that had been thumb-tacked to the wall above the window. It had been taken roughly five years ago by his mother. The two of us were standing in front of the shed the first day we got it. The areas around our mouths, not to mention our teeth as we grinned broadly, were stained from our self-congratulatory popsicles; his was blue and mine was red. The picture was pretty funny, since both of us looked like social rejects and all. But that wasn't my favorite part of the picture. My favorite part was the fact that our hands were connected between us. "Rather be here with you in this stupid shed, anyway," I murmured.

To anyone else, the shed might've seemed like just that. A shed. But it wasn't; not to us, anyway. It was our shed. It had been our hang out and place of refuge for the past five years.

See, when Hayden and I were around eleven years old, we came up with the ingenious idea of buying one for ourselves. We would fill it with all kinds of stuff and spend all of our time there. Thrilled with the idea, we made pages and pages of crayon-drawn plans, showing what our new hang out would look like.

The first thing we did was get my dad to take us to a home improvement and gardening store. We looked through sheds for a good two hours until we found the perfect one by both of our standards. It was ten by twelve feet with two glass pane windows and a small skylight. The shed had gray siding on the outside, wood on the inside, and came complete with a paneled floor. The price tag read 1,350.

It was quite a lot of money for two eleven-year-olds to get on their own. But our determination was greater than the extremely large sum of money. If we could save enough money to buy it, our parents would allow us to get it. That was the deal, and Hayden and I weren't giving up.

For one full year, we set aside money from our birthdays, Christmas, weekly chores, and a million lemonade stands. By the time the summer before our 7th grade year rolled around, the two of us had pooled enough money to buy our shed. We even had fifty dollars left over to buy each of us our own reclining lawn chair to put inside.

Since he had more room at his house than I did, the shed was put up in the corner of Hayden's backyard, pushed up against the fence. The lock came with two keys; one for him and one for me.

Over the years, more and more things collected in the shed. We bought a beanbag chair, and a small table to play cards on, and a whiteboard, and hooks for our coats in the winter, and shelves on the walls to fill with picture frames and other junk.

Hayden's dad was eventually able to hook up electricity in there. It took a lot of wiring and a few days of work, but he eventually got it; Being a former builder and carpenter, Mr. Barnes was great with that kind of stuff.

Along with the electricity came a small television set, a miniature refrigerator, basic lighting, a tiny stereo, and a strand of colored Christmas lights strung along the ceiling.

We had personalized the walls with photos and posters of our favorite bands, and both put blankets of our choice on the lawn chairs so we could sleep there if we wanted. The shed sort of felt like a home for the two of us. If there was nothing to do, we went to the shed. If one of us got into a fight with our parents, we went to the shed. If we got home late and we didn't want to get in trouble for waking our entire households, we went to the shed.

Although mine and Hayden's friendship centered around the shed, it didn't start with it. Our friendship started in third grade when I first moved to town.

My mother began talking to Hayden's mother when they met at a local book-club for women that gathered once a week. They became friendly with each other and ever-so-conveniently realized that both had a child in the same grade. Since I was new to town and Hayden had no friends (although he refuses to admit it), our parents thought it would be a good idea if we started spending time together.

It turned out that Hayden and I made an incredibly good pair. He was the nerd who would rather read comic books and play chess than pick up a football, and I was the tough girl who punched just as hard as any of the guys. One time Timmy Zimmerman stole Hayden's glasses on the playground, and I didn't hesitate to throw a punch in his direction. Timmy went home with a bloody nose that day. Hayden and I had dubbed ourselves best friends ever since.

"So you done with dating for a while, then?" Hayden asked, breaking me out of my daze.

"Huh?" I muttered, looking to the side so I could see him. I shook my head free of the daydream. "Oh… Yeah. Yeah, definitely."

"Me, too," Hayden agreed. "I'm so sick of it."

So that's the first part. Sorry it's kind of short. I wanted to put more, but I'm not done editing it yet.

I hope everyone sort of gets where this story is going, yet at the same time it's not so obvious. That didn't really make sense. oh well.

Thanks so much for reading, and feedback and reviews would be very much appreciated :)