Copyright © 2016. All Rights Reserved.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: SOPHOMORE YEAR

D A T E : January 2013

✖ please (don't be offended) ✖

After Christmas break, it took me several days to track down Ryan in the hallways when he wasn't bombarded with his usual posse. It was the middle of study hall when some kids could just wander the halls to their heart's content. It was at such a time that I wandered around the corner and halted at the sight of Ryan reaching up in his locker for a notebook.

"Ryan," I blurted out—and instantly regretted it because he turned around. My mouth had it's own mind that day, and there was no taking back the fact that I'd just called him out. For what was probably the first time in several years. Hell, we were hardly acquaintances at that point, but Ryan was always nice. He was one of the nicer populars.

He dropped back down to his heels and said, "Hey Skye, what's up?"

After a second of hesitation, I approached him across the hall while he rearranged his books, unsure of how to respond. What wasn't up? "I, uh, I've been thinking," I said. God, what a stupidly obvious thing to say. "About when we were friends."

"Heh, yeah, those were the days huh? I remember when I didn't have a care in the world—wouldn't it be nice to go back to elementary school?" he said.

No, not really.

"I guess."

"You seem to have something on your mind," he commented, looking at me then with a soft stare that made me squirm and heat up at the ears. When he realized he was making me uncomfortable, he added, "Just an observation. What is it?"

"Remember that time you kissed me in third grade?" I said quietly, unable to look at him then. I fiddled with my hair until the awkward silence passed.

"Look, Skye, you're nice and all—"

"I'm not asking you out, you dingus," I snapped instantly, recognizing that tone in a second. I wasn't that oblivious. "I'm just wondering."

This time, he blushed, and his startled expression quickly turned into laughter. "Holy shit, sorry about that. Yeah, I remember. I got this because of it." He held up his arm where the scar was. It was plainly obvious, and there were times when people pointed it out in the hallway where I could overhear. He'd always laugh and say how cool it was. How it was okay to have scars, because they were stories.

"I was wondering why you did it," I confessed, and he tilted his head and gave me that look that told me it was obvious, but clearly not enough so for me to understand.

He gave me a crooked smirk and kicked his locker shut. "Because Fynn was my best friend, duh. And you were his best friend. What's friendship without a little competition, am I right?"

He started walking, and I was too startled to follow him until he asked if I was coming or what? "Excuse me, but what does that have anything to do with it?" I asked.

"It's simple: Fynn liked you, so I made a bet that I could kiss you before him. It's what friends did back then. Come to think of it, it was kinda childish."

"You were kids."

"Yeah, but that was your first kiss." He said it so casually, but he wouldn't have brought it up unless he thought it was important. After a moment, he looked at me and asked, "It was your first kiss, right?"

"Yeah—thanks for that by the way." I glared at him, but we both laughed afterwards.

We reached the stairs leading up to the second floor, so I said goodbye and went on my way. I was surprised by how well the conversation went. Before that point, I'd gone over the conversation a dozen times before it even happened, and in none of them did he decide it was okay to bring up that day at the lighthouse. It just proved how little I knew of him.

Later that day, Joni joined Landon and I at the art room after school where we were finishing up painting projects with our now favorite teacher, Mr. Lancaster. He'd play classical music for the after-school kids working on projects, and chat with the regular art students who were upperclassmen. We weren't upperclassmen, so he'd just come by to answer questions and critique our work every now and then.

By that point Joni was already invested in her phone. I painted short strokes of peach across the cheekbones of Landon's portrait, and the gentle slope of his nose. He had a cartoonish nose, one that some might call a "button nose". He always scrunched his nose whenever I pointed it out in class, mainly because we were painting each other. "Let me see that massive forehead of yours again," I'd say, and he'd mutter curses at me the entire time I'd study his face. It made Bluebell giggle like a deranged fox, so I refrained from pissing off Landon after discovering it amused her.

"You never told us how Fynn is," Joni said, casually, still studying the screen of her phone.

I blanked for a second, pausing in my work, before picking it up again with a simple, "He's fine. We went all over Chicago. We went to the Christkindlmarket."

"I didn't ask about what you did on your trip, Skye," she said, and though it was a friendly reminder, it still made me scowl. "I want to know how the freak Fynn is! I haven't seen him in ages, the nub!"

"I told you he's fine," I retorted. "He still loves tea and plays lacrosse."

"Is he as hot as his Facebook profile picture claims he is?" Landon asked, and Joni snorted and would have shoved him if he hadn't been focusing on making a straight line with paint. "I'm kidding. He's pretty average. His eyes are too far apart for my liking, and he has those crooked teeth English people tend to have."

"Okay, that's a stereotype," I argued, pointing a finger at him. "We don't stereotype here."

"Don't get snarky with me," he snapped.

"I'm not getting snarky. I'm getting real."

"Fair enough. Answer my question." He seemed to be intent on pissing me off, so I just went along with it.

"He didn't turn into a caveman, that's for sure. He's probably gonna end up at an ivy league school or something like that. He's practically touring colleges as we speak because his brother's out at Oxford being ridiculously smart and rich and powerful. I think Fynn and Mrs. Walton were going to look at Stanford," I explained, and realized I was suddenly ranting, so I stopped before I could get too far.

"His brain is hot is what you're saying."

"Brains aren't 'hot', they're squiggly masses of pink gum," Joni told Landon. "You can't even say what's in a brain is hot, because it's still pink gum and blood."

"Are you saying my brain's ugly?" he whined, and went so far as to sniff and sound like he was crying when he said, "Well, your brain's ugly too."

Joni scoffed and rolled her eyes towards me. "Well, the reason I bring it up is because he just posted a video no more than two hours ago and it has your face all over it. Literally, look at the thumbnail." She held her phone out to me, and I was all over it instantly, snatching it from her, and squinting at the miniscule-sized thumbnail where he purposefully photoshopped my face all over it like the clippings of a magazine. He even added white outlines to all of them. It meant he must have spent hours staring at my face to make it.

"What a doofus!" I shrieked. "How long did that take him?"

"Oh yeah, I didn't really think about that... I just thought it looked funny because I forgot about your little head wrap thing. Way to go with that by the way. You look like a real trooper in that pic to the right there." It was the face I made when Fynn told me to stand in front of the painting and I scowled at him. How dare he?

Joni hurried to my side when I declared I was going to watch it with or without her. We stared at the screen for a solid six minutes of shenanigans from Chicago. I wasn't sure if Joni saw it the way I did—there was a warm yellowish-orange hue to the videos, and with the lower contrast, those artsy scenes of the museum were oddly... romantic.

There were plenty of shots of me walking in front of him in the streets, just me in the city, me by the market stands, me running in the hallways, running across the street, slouching with the head wrap, fuzzy cuts of my smile fading in and out. Goofy faces. Silly eyebrows wriggling about. Dramatic poses in front of buildings, on the sidewalk, with a guy wearing lederhosen in the middle of winter. The snow falling in my hair and around my face and in my eyelashes...

I wondered what he was trying to tell me, and if I was meant to pick it up.

"That was too cute, aw, he made you look so good in all those clips," Landon said. I hadn't even noticed him leave his work to come join us in our little Let's Watch Fynn's Video squad.

"What kind of filter did he use on this? It looked... subtly vintage, if you're pickin' up what I'm puttin' down," Joni said. We watched it again, and I felt like crying. Even though I had plenty of videos featuring myself, Fynn's video fit complexly in my heart like I'd been compiling the wrong pieces to the puzzle, and suddenly I was about to pick it up again.

But Joni and Landon moved on from the video because there was work to be done. I gave Joni back her phone, not realizing that I would end up watching Fynn's video over five times that night thinking too much.

I recognized that Kole started to message me more frequently since Fynn's video, and I wouldn't call it a coincidence because he mentioned it in the first few messages before the influx. He said it was cool and didn't expand upon it, and I ignored it the following day when he commented on the number of views it had. I also ignored it the day after that when he said Fynn mentioned my name in a vlog of his when he was in California—the video was one of the video diaries where Fynn and I "talked" to one another, so I ignored that message as well.

He was obsessively trying to cover the fact that he was obsessed, and I wasn't sure what he was trying to accomplish by keeping tabs on Fynn's videos. It took a week, but he actually called me out on it. Literally called me. "Don't you find it weird that the Chicago video was only of you?"

"Don't read into it, Kole," I muttered into the speaker, trying but failing at putting pants on while on the phone. I gave up and plopped down on the floor where Puck lounged. He slapped his paw on my lap, and I pet him while Kole sighed through the other line.

"I'm just—but don't you think it's weird?"

"No."

"C'mon, Skye. I'm being serious. It's like he's, I dunno, obsessed with you or something." I found it ironic that he mentioned the same word I'd used to describe his views over Fynn's video, but I knew I shouldn't say it. I felt guilty for thinking it. I shouldn't have thought of him as obsessive.

"It's one video, and we haven't seen each other in years. We used to be best friends—it's expected that we cinematographers want to have videos of each other," I said, scratching at Puck's side until he started kicking his leg obnoxiously.

"You guys aren't cinematographers. You're YouTubers."

"It's whatever, same diff, you get the gist." Puck scratched my leg by accident and I hissed and avoided shouting by ignoring the sting and continuing talking. "I'm posting my Chicago video tomorrow, and I won't have you saying anything ridiculous about Fynn and I. That's just plain rude to assume things."

"I'm sorry, it's just that—"

"It's just what? It's just nothing. What are you up to?" My sudden change in tone must have threw him off guard, because he was quiet for a while. When he did talk, though, it was a begrudged mumble.

"I was just playing COD."

I steered the conversation towards him, and we talked about desultory things again, like we always did on Facebook. We talked about the teachers we both had, the English project coming up, the usual. He sounded at ease again by the end of our chat, and by the time we hung up, I realized it was the opposite for me.

I felt as if he'd plunged a knife through my chest, wagging around feelings Fynn had for me as if it was some forbidden thing, like alcohol for teenagers and sex before marriage. Like disobeying your parents, or getting fired from a job. Wearing short shorts to school, staying up until two in the morning on a school night. Fynn posting a video about me.

"Unbelievable," I muttered, flopping backwards. My face landed next to Puck's, and I smelt his nasty dog breath but didn't recoil. I nuzzled towards his big fluff of chest fur and stayed there for a while, listening to him huff and puff and pant even though it was probably forty degrees in my room because it was winter and I had my window open.

Later that day I ranted to Mom about Kole's indecencies when it came to boundaries with Fynn; it came in spurts while I drove. I drove. Driver's ed was a real pain in the tuchus, but driving with Mom in the passenger's seat was easy—Lucas, not so much. He had a habit of pretending he was in the driver's seat.

"I just—I don't understand why anyone has to... be infatuated with anyone," I whined, the drive smoothly transitioning to the countryside. The roads here were less busy.

"You can't assume people are infatuated with you," Mom told me, and I swore she was rolling her eyes.

"I know. That's what people call self-absorbed, pompous, whatever. But how else would you describe Fynn posting a video all about me, and then Kole complaining about it to me?"

"What did he say exactly?"

I sighed, realizing that my temper was getting short. I didn't want to describe it beyond what I'd already told her, so I said this: "Ugh, I don't know. Something about the video being only of me, and that he thought it was weird and—and—he even used the word 'obsessed'."

She was quiet for a while, and I didn't push her because I knew she was thinking. After I asked her which way to turn, she answered and finally said, "Well, I know it sucks letting people think what they want even if you don't agree with it, but you can't change people, Skye. You know that. And since you told Kole that you and Fynn aren't dating, and he keeps bringing it up, then what would you do?"

Ugh, she's asking me questions, I moaned inside, trying desperately to think of the road ahead and the metaphorical one Mom brought up.

"Um... I don't know? Tell him to knock it off."

"Don't do that, Skye..."

"What? That's what I'd do."

"It isn't courteous of him to pester you about your relationship with Fynn—whatever it is. I'm not pushing! Don't look at me like that, eyes on the road," Mom snapped, jabbing her finger towards the windshield when I glared at her. "Would you... want to date Kole?"

I didn't even have to think about it. "Ew, no." But perhaps that was just an automatic response to a mother asking her daughter about her love life.

"Why not?"

I had to come up with an answer, and my brain forced me to think at an abnormally fast rate. The first thing to pop up, and the loudest that screamed to me, was this: "Because I just don't like the concept of dating. I think it's weird and irrelevant."

"And that's perfectly fine," Mom said, and I was annoyed because I knew she was just trying to make me feel like a normal child. "You're in school and boyfriends are just a distraction. Though, I wouldn't object, necessarily, to you dating in high school..."

"Mom."

"You don't have to if you don't want to!"

"Maybe I won't! Out of spite," I argued, and I saw her look at me with a bland, unamused expression on her face. I would have stuck my tongue out at her, but I was too busy turning on the blinker and taking a left turn.

We wound up driving past Kole's neighborhood, but neither of us brought it up. We turned around and started on our way home. I was nervous around intersections so we skipped the downtown and drove along the bluff for a ways. Every now and then Lake Michigan would get choppy and even from this far up, we could see the white-tipped waves rolling into shore. Some of the shorelines, specifically by the lighthouse, were lined with massive, concrete boulders that looked like pebbles from afar.

For the remainder of the drive, I kept thinking about Mom and her questions, and what I think she wants but I could never be sure.

So when we get out of the car, and my brain had sufficiently worn itself out from over-processing things, I wait for Mom to walk over to my side. She probably found me staring at the ground or something, looking dejected, because she said, "You did good today—what's the matter? Nervous about your test?"

"No, not particularly," I said. "I'm just... Do you ever feel like you aren't... normal?"

It wasn't exactly a question a Mom should have to worry about for their child. Should it go like this: the mom encourages their kid to be anything and everything they ever want to be, whether or not it's normal? What made me different?

"Honey," Mom started, and she barely even needed to bend down to go to my eye level now. "Who said anything about being normal? Is this about the boyfriend thing? I was just teasing, Skye."

"But, I mean—Joni basically has a boyfriend, Clara's had things with guys, and Fynn's been around a bit, and I know Landon wants a boyfriend but I... I don't know," I said. "I just... don't feel normal."

So when it comes to romance, to a nonexistent love life, there are a few small things to consider when unexpectedly finding yourself infatuated with me. Please, do not be surprised if we don't talk for a few days. It isn't that I don't like you or don't want to talk. I can barely say I talk to Joni on a regular basis—my best friend—let alone you. Please, do not be offended if I don't appreciate your impromptu snuggle sessions. It isn't that I don't want your arms around me, it's that I don't care for them at all hours of the day. And please, please, do not feel hurt if I don't accept your affection in the form of kisses, touches, the urge for more. It means I don't like it.

When Mom asked me if I was interested in dating Kole, the real answer was this: I knew he wouldn't understand me. He wouldn't understand why I wouldn't want to hold hands, kiss, feel and be close to him. I felt anxious at the thought of being the cause of his unhappiness, and the upset over not understanding me. Would he blame himself? Most likely.

But Fynn—Did it truly mean I was impartial to the romance? If I thought about it long enough, my head would explode, and often times I gave myself headaches over it. I wasn't particularly against our brief, but clearly couple-like experience. Color me neutral, for I am full of grey values on the palette of romance.

Kissing Fynn that day in Chicago triggered in me a thought I hadn't considered before: it wasn't some magnificent thing like fireworks, like a great sunset, Earth's majesties—it was a bodily function, just like nudging a person to get their attention, or high-fiving, bumping shoulders. What made a kiss great was situational.