three
IT started with a bouquet of flowers.
Dead flowers, shoved into Clementine's locker.
Her face blank as she bent down to retrieve the crinkled bouquet, Clementine pushed away the snarky giggles of observers around you.
It was just another day.
It came with a card, the bouquet. Scraggly handwriting and smeared ink.
For your mother. Psycho.
Clementine carefully and methodically folded up the note and tucked it into her pocket. As she slammed her locker door shut, she aimed the flowers into a nearby trashcan.
A boy caught the bouquet instead.
He blinked at her for a second, as though seeing her for the first time, although Gabriel had walked the same school walls with her for the past three years.
"Sorry," Clementine murmured, shoving past him. Expecting no response from a boy who she had never spoken with before.
He surprised her. And himself, it seemed, with the flutter of his lashes as he said, "It's okay." He tossed the bouquet into the trash with ease and stepped aside as she squeezed past him.
A moment that lasted a split second with little regard from either of them.
Then they were both gone, swallowed up by the crowd carrying them both in opposite directions.
That was the first time.
The second time was in calculous, when Mr. West reassigned the seating chart. Suddenly, Clementine was sitting behind Gabriel.
Not that she noticed.
One week went by with no acknowledgement. It was a mutual agreement, the silence between them. At least, that was what Clementine liked to believe. And it was comfortable, the silence. She liked it that way.
Until Monday of a new week, when he twisted in his seat to face her.
Clementine looked up and met soft, coffee eyes.
"Do you have a pencil?" he whispered.
Wordlessly, she reached into her strawberry-themed pencil pouch and tossed him a black mechanical pencil.
"Thanks."
She looked back down at her notes.
Then, at the end of class. "Here," he said, passing her the pencil.
"Keep it," she said. Then she stood up, backpack over one shoulder, and left.
And so that was the second time.
There was a third time, too. And a fourth, and fifth, sixth, seventh...
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