August 2006—the tail end of the summer, the last few precious weeks of vacation. The time when being a kid couldn't pay off more; when all the rules, restrictions, and what may seem to be a lack of freedom, are worth the price of admission.

What did summer vacation look like in East Valley? To everyone, it meant something different, but for Tony Moncello, like most teenagers, summer vacation meant staying up all hours of the night playing Halo 2.

However, far from nightfall, four minutes after one o'clock in the afternoon to be precise, the overhead light was still on, the fan going quickly round and round, the blades whistling at top speed. The sound was only slightly drowned out by the game's home page musical score playing in the background. Tony was asleep on his ugly tan couch, just a few feet away from the entertainment center upon which the TV stood.

The seventeen-year-old boy with short brown hair had about as much muscle mass as a twig, and the height of a tree. Standing at just under five-eleven, his tall and lanky body took up almost the entire couch. His head rested on the top of a hideous pillow that, unfortunately, matched the rest of the furniture.

Ring! Ring! Ring! Tony's silver and blue flip phone, dropped so many times that the front case was discolored and scratched to hell, rang on the dresser.

Ring! Ring! After the fifth alert, which of course for Tony felt as if the phone had been ringing for hours, he finally reached back and tried to grab it. He knocked it off its perch and it banged onto the floor. "Fuck."

He reached around on the floor until he found it, picking it up and bringing it to eye level. Still half asleep, staring at the phone, he saw only the last four digits, 4739. "What? Who the hell is calling me?"

He pushed himself up on the couch and flipped open the phone. "Hello," he said in a raggedy tone, barely awake and sounding nothing like himself.

"Tony?" a girl's voice spoke softly, seemingly confused as if she thought she had dialed the wrong number.

"Yeah. Who's this?" Tony replied, rubbing his eyes and looking around the room, trying to figure out where the hell he had left the remote. The background music on the TV from the Halo home screen had become incredibly obnoxious. Without luck, he was forced to drag himself off the couch and over to the TV, a big tube box, and turned it off via the front power button.

"Payton," the voice on the other end of the phone said nervously.

"Payton?"

"Payton Mack." She used her full name to clarify, though there hadn't been a need to do so.

Tony froze like a deer in headlights, only for a second—but for him, that one-sixtieth of minute, like a dream, felt so much longer. Within that instant of her speaking her name, hearing the oh-so-familiar voice, a memory came to him.

It had been one morning a week or so before school had let out for the summer. The first time he ever truly saw her, though they had gone to school together for years.

Everyone was hanging out in the quad before school, as they did every day. Scattered throughout, clusters of students broke up into their own cliques. Tony had been with his, Payton with hers. Their circles weren't too far from each other's, from both physical and social standpoints. Tony's friends had been talking and bullshitting, but amid it all, his attention was on Payton.

Standing less than twenty feet away, laughing and goofing off with her friends, she didn't notice Tony noticing her.

The Valley had its fair share of sneakerheads among the student body; of course, most of the kids weren't as intense as the few elite collectors. Nike Air Force Ones were the most popular shoes, and almost everyone had at least two pairs, solid white and solid black.

That morning, Payton had been wearing her solid whites while Buffy, her best friend, wore her solid blacks. The two of them shared not only an identical style but similar physique—until feet came into play. Payton placed one of Buffy's shoes on her left foot while keeping her own on the right .

"Damn, girl, your feet are huge."

Payton laughed while trying to walk a straight line; her left foot almost came completely out of the shoe with every step. She paid no attention to what the people around her might have thought. She was so caught up in the moment that once again, she didn't notice Tony noticing her.

"I know who you are—before you said your last name, I mean," Tony said, smiling while anxiously wondering why she was calling him. Though they shared several mutual friends, they had never really interacted—at least, not until the night before.

"Well, you seemed a little puzzled at first. You repeated my name as if you didn't know who I was. Like, I know you know who I am, I just wasn't sure you recognized my voice. We'd never spoken to each other before last night," Paytonwent on to say.

"That's because I was sleeping, and you woke me up." His attempt at a flirtatious and playfully mad tone came off a little too well.

Payton paused as if she believed he was irritated. "I'm sorry." Again, she stopped, then added, "It's after one in the afternoon."

"It's summer vacation. Who the hell wants to get up early on their summer vacation?" he proclaimed, laughing.

She chuckled. "Early is any time before, like, nine. Anything after noon is just unnecessary." Her voice got a little high-pitched as if she were flirting low-key, testing out the waters.

Payton was sitting in her computer chair, scrolling through Tony's Myspace page. She checked out his musical taste, determined by which song he had playing on his profile—"Never Too Late" by Three Days Grace. He would have noticed it playing in the background if Payton hadn't muted her computer's audio beforehand.

A Three Days Grace tune as his profile song came as a bit of a surprise based on his clique; Payton, nor anyone else, would have pegged Tony as a Three Days Grace fan. But what really piqued her attention was that under his music section, out of the handful of bands and artists listed, Three Days Grace wasn't one of them.

She continued looking at his page, trying not to pass judgment over the type of music he was into solely based on his profile song. Skimming quickly over the "About Me," which was bleak, to say the least, she found her way over to his top eight.

A few minutes passed, lost in meaningless yet consequential confab. Payton then asked what a casual but highly irrelevant question. "What kind of phone do you have?" she muttered.

"Verizon," he answered. "Why, who are you with?"

"Cingular." She exhaled with irritation—not with him, but herself. "Hey, I have to call you right back on my house phone. If my mom finds out that I've used up all the minutes while sitting at home, she's going to get pissed," she explained. "Are you going to pick up?"

Tony, puzzled as to why she would even ask that, answered with a smile while trying not to laugh into the receiver. "Yeah, why wouldn't I pick up?"

Payton paused, not sure what to say. "I don't know, I was just asking." She played it off, setting up a barrier between them, ensuring her walls were in place...just in case.

Not even a minute passed before Tony's phone rang again, but he utilized those seconds all too well. Payton's cell phone number had been saved, and he even went as far as to give her a speed dial number. Fourteen.

He hesitated for a moment, thinking to himself just how insane, fast-paced, and forward of a gesture her call had been, even if only he knew about it. To think even for a mere moment the two of them would share anything more than just a single summer afternoon conversation was at the very least presumptuous.

He stared at his new speed dial number of fourteen. Before he could ponder it any further, his phone rang—an unknown number. He picked it up on the first ring with nothing less than a radiant smile, and Payton's reaction was mirrored on the other side. Undeniable was the chemistry they shared; one of those connections that clicks, like magnets in the same magnetic field.

Their conversation, as do all, started once more with small talk, but took off before long.

"What are you doing today?" Payton asked him.

Tony laughed and replied, "I don't know, I haven't gotten that far. I'm not even dressed yet."

"You're not even dressed yet?" she asked, chuckling, then added lightheartedly, "What have you been doing this whole time?"

"I've been sitting on my couch talking to you," he replied. "Why, what have you been doing?"

"What, you can't multi-task?"

"I can, just not before three p.m. It's way too early for all that. I just woke up—rather just been woken up," he teased, bringing back up the fact that she indeed had woken him up and interrupted his oh-so-precious sleep. He milked it, laying on the dramatics thick and over the top. However, not in a Mean Girls type of way—more coquettish.

Payton received the messages precisely as Tony intended, giving her that air-filled feeling deep in the pit of her stomach. "I said I was sorry, are you going to keep harping on this? It was an accident," she replied.

"I don't know, maybe," Tony laughed. "I'll drop it, I won't bring it up again, promise."

"Really?" Payton asked with what seemed like excitement in her voice.

"Yeah, just don't get mad if I accidentally wake you up one time," Tony said as he dug through his closet, trying to find something to wear.

In her bedroom, Payton lay flat on her back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. "That depends. I mean, if it's late and I'm still sleeping, I wouldn't get mad. If it's not something ridiculous. Honestly, I wouldn't care."

"So, like if I called you and woke you up at, I don't know, four-thirty. You wouldn't be mad?" he said. Payton could hear his dry sense of humor bleeding through.

"I would be so mad!" she said bluntly, her face lighting up. "You better not do it!"

Playing off her witty tone, reading the moment for what it was, Tony blurted out, "At first I was kidding, but now... I just have this unbearable urge to call and wake you up." He fumbled with each word, barely able to speak to them due to his subtle—and unnecessary—chuckles.

"I'll just turn my cell off," Payton said quickly.

"That's fine, I'll just call your house phone. You can't turn that off," Tony replied, escalating a simple joke to an entirely new level—implying he would wake up not only Payton but everyone else in her house.

Of course, he was kidding; he would never actually call and wake her up at four-thirty in the morning, nor do something as heartless as wake up her family in the process. However, Payton couldn't have known that—not at first anyway.

"No, don't," she pleaded. "My mom would be furious! Not only would I be in so much trouble, but she would hate you forever and ban you from ever stepping foot in the house if you woke her up."

She sounded slightly nervous, so Tony quickly reassured her. "I'm joking, I would never call your house and wake your mom up. I would feel terrible if I did that. Your mom did nothing to me. Of course, waking you up is a different story."

There was a moment of silence, a brief intermission from the witty back and forth banter. Tony decided to break the quiet with a huge leap, asking a question, disguised as something more meaningless. "Why do you care if your mom hates me? She doesn't even know who I am," he said.

Payton chose her next words carefully. "What, do you want my mom to hate you? I'm not saying I thought you were into me, but I didn't think you resented me. I mean, you don't have to provoke my mother, just to avoid talking to me."

Clever and droll, Payton's response left him lost for words. After a moment, she began to wonder if her response had come across as malicious instead of trifling.

Tony panicked and quickly closed his flip phone shut without a second thought, then after taking a deep breath and allowing a few seconds to go by, the weight of his actions began festering in his head. Quickly he tried to call her back, prepared with the old reliable explanation: "I dropped my phone, and the battery popped out and we got disconnected."Something that happened all too often, which made it believable. As for the rest of the story—he had been getting dressed, preparing to come and meet her to hang out.

His call back got a busy signal, indicating that she had already been on the phone with someone else. Of course, his thought process was that she must be on the phone with Buffy or one of her other friends saying how much of an asshole he was, that calling him, trying to reach out, was the biggest mistake of her life.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the phone, Payton has been hitting the redial then end buttons on repeat, calling him over and over, trying to get through. Getting the same busy signal, Payton stared blankly at the phone, playing over and over again in her head exactly what had been said. Wondering if she had gone too far, too soon.

Finally, after what felt like forever, her phone rang. Still lost in thought, she let it sound off again, then snapped out of it, allowing one more ring to cycle through before answering to avoid appearing desperate.

"Hello?" she said nonchalantly, pretending that she didn't just have a minor freak-out moment.

"Sorry, I was getting dressed and dropped my phone, the battery popped out. Took me a minute to get it to turn back on," Tony said, trying to be smooth.

"So, I'm ready to go, where did you want me to meet you?" he asked nervously, still uneasy over the whole phone debacle.

Likewise, Payton meandered through the conversation, trying her very best to not come across as melodramatic.

"I guess meet me by the school, the one by Buffy's house?" Payton asked more than told, leaving it open-ended to see if he was going to invite her over to his house.

But Tony didn't seem to pick up on her hopes. "Yeah, that sounds good!" he said, trying to end the conversation on a high note before he said anything to screw it up again.

"Alright, I'm about to leave. I'll call you when I'm close."

"Okay, I'll see you then."

Tony regretted the signing-off words as soon as they came out of his mouth. The tone in which he said them felt so awkward and unnatural, as if his teen angst had been in full force.

Payton didn't pick up on his silent discomfort. She replied, "See you then," without a second thought.