On ‘mirroball’ the sixth track off of Taylor Swift’s surprise eighth studio album, folklore, she compares herself to a reflective disco ball; she sees herself as reflecting all the personalities around her, she entertains others, and she shatters like glass when her heart is broken. [Source: Genius Lyrics]

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(Not so) FFAEK: Emily once cried listening to this song at a dark night staring at her ceiling. Then she felt stupid about it.

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Chapter Three: Mirrorball

Leanna Miller dropped me off at the intersection. From there, she drove left, and I had to walk right to go home. I should have gotten a driver's license last summer, but I was too lazy. It was my fault that I waited for mom to have time for me, when she went off to teach summer classes.

I would learn driving this summer from Leanna's dad since I was done waiting for my mom. My other parent, who should be my dad, was missing in action for seventeen years of my life (that was my whole life if you were wondering), and the only proof of his existence was biology. I was definitely born because of the union of a sperm and an egg. That sperm had to come from some dude. The other proof was a yellowed out Polaroid I found in our storage accidentally when I was looking for an old scarf that mom had thrown out.

He looked handsome enough in it; square jawed, big eyes, with dark hair and a smile that looked heartbreakingly devious. He had his arms wrapped around my mother, who was staring up at him adoringly. The detail was that both of them were touching her ballooned stomach, which I was inhabiting during that time, I guessed.

We never talked about him. We never brought up the fact that he existed. All I knew was that I grew up in the same house we were living in now. My mom always had the same job. We were a pair, the two of us, living by ourselves, only relying on ourselves. My grandmother died when I was fifteen. That was the only time I got to know my mother actually had a mother. We drove to Wisconsin to see her off towards her journey to nirvana, and we didn't talk about it either.

I looked at the pavement as I walked. Our neighborhood was small, a few rows of houses side by side, small but picturesque and organized.

I loved this little walk. I would never tell this to anyone. I liked me-time, alone-time more than I cared to admit. Anyone would think I ought to get lonely, being the only child living with a job-holder mother who had irregular hours. But that wasn't the case with me.

I thrived when I was alone. I loved the exact moment I got to get out of Leanna's car and say goodbye to human interaction for the day. It took so much energy to make conversation, to make eye contact, to keep it going once I made it.

Being alone meant I could read as many books as I wanted, watch the same movies, listen to the same songs again and again while daydreaming about the distant future. In it, I was a happy girl living the happily ever after that I knew was sure to come.

Despite being introverted and less interesting than all my classmates, I had a group of friends. In middle school, my best friend was TJ, who moved out of the state right when high school started.

My other friend Leanna and I had bonded over Six of Crows, the book series, randomly one day in sophomore year. At the start, we were always two peas in a pod, agreeing with whatever the other said. Even though she was the prettiest and somewhat the coolest girl of the school, she didn't have any close friends. I filled up that role pretty nicely.

Then somehow I ended up being friends with random girls in random classes. A conversation about a book, or a song, or how boring the teacher was, or how the homeworks was the bane of our existence—conversations like this brought me closer to people who seemed to enjoy my company. Or rather people who didn't hate it— Erika, Uyen, Malti, Azra, and of course Leanna. I sometimes observed all of us when they were busy laughing over each other's jokes and having fun and wondered to myself how I had made friends at all.

I still talked to TJ. Distance had done us good and made us more into friends who could tell each other all our secrets because we didn't live in the same town anymore.  We were always texting.

I unlocked the front door of our house and walked in. The living room was right in front, opening to the kitchen. I climbed the stairs to my living room and flopped on my bed as I eyed my bookshelves that held every romance I had ever read.

The colorful spines with the titles in bold fonts calmed me. These were what made home feel like home— the silence of my room, the soft sunlight streaming through my windows, the titles of romance books, and the Taylor Swift albums proudly displayed on the shelves.

*****

I had gone over the conversation between Nathan Callahan and me at least five thousand times. I knew this was bordering on obsessive, but I also knew the conversation was random, and it made no sense to me that he had observed me enough to know I read romances.

I did carry fictions with me to school. If I wasn't feeling particularly sociable, I would belt it out and start reading while other people were having conversations around me. Leanna would roll her eyes at me and tell me to join, but my friends were used to this. I had a limited social battery, and I needed to save up on energy when I could.

Nathan sat down beside me while I was mulling over all that. I took him in, in my peripheral vision; the silver chain hidden underneath the black shirt, the messy black hair falling haphazardly over his forehead. Bed hair, I assumed.

I sometimes wondered if he had loads of black shirts or if he wore the same one every other day. He was a teenage guy. You could never trust them on account of hygiene.

Thankfully, he didn't smell sweaty or gross. From my seat, I could smell the clean smell of his aftershave.

Wong didn't miss a second of the class, as he appeared and started talking about isotopes, natural and artificial, radioactivity, half-life and whatever. I stole glances at my seatmate, wondering if yesterday's conversation was an anomaly, an event that only occurred once in several years. That it would never happen again.

But Nathan Callahan had something else in mind, and he decided to share. I wished he wouldn't.

“Why do you keep checking me out?”

His choice of words and its bluntness made my heart jump up in nervousness. I didn't like to confront, and I didn't like to be confronted either. And case in point, I wasn't even checking him out.

But my body disagreed. I blushed like I was guilty. The crime was Nathan Callahan.

“I wasn't checking you out.”

I pushed the words out as silently as possible. Whispering wasn't my forte. I had a loud, booming voice and I hated myself for it.

“You were.” Nathan said, looking forward, his lips barely moving, “I thought you had a crush on Landon, not me.”

I knew at that moment that talking to him would be an extreme sport, and it would undeniably be fatal to me.

I wanted to laugh at his joke. But I couldn't, class and all that, so I did my best to reply, ““Me crushing on you? Don't make me get detention from Wong because I laughed too loudly during class, Callahan.”

“Then what? You like my fit or something?”

I smiled. Two could play this game. This was easy for me, “I was wondering if you had a crush on me instead.”

I was not someone to have a crush on, and I knew it very well. I didn't have the type of beauty that would strike you if you took one look at my face.

For starters, I had inherited my father's square face and his non-existent cheekbone, instead of having an oval face and high cheekbones like my mother. I wasn't fond of the bone structure of my face, or my acne, or my dirt colored eyes. My hair was mid-length, boring brown. I didn't even have a personality colorful enough to make up for the lack of aesthetic visuals.

I knew that there was no way anyone would ever be crushing on me. The joke was more at my expense than Nathan’s. I was sacrificing myself to make a dent in his pride. I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Nathan snorted at my comment. Wong sent him a warning look.

“Dream on, Kingsley,” he muttered some minutes later.

“That would be a nightmare, jerk,” I replied, smiling.

“Sure.”

“I mean, you know I read romance. That means you have been paying attention to me,” I played the only card in my hands.

He had even a wilder card in his collection. I didn't see that one coming.

“You were hyperventilating in class.”

My eyes widened and I turned towards him. He had a smirk overtaking the left side of his face, the corners of his lips lifting for the sole reason to mock me and my reading choices.

I was regretting my reading choices.

“Something about a dozen little deaths,” he whispered with a sneaky smile.

I knew exactly what he was referring to. It was a romance I was reading last week. The book had just gotten good, and it had reached that one encompassing make-love scene. I couldn't stop reading just because I was in class.

“You were reading about some guy giving a girl-” Nathan said.

“Stop,” I hissed.

“There were mentions of lube-” I was going to kill this guy. I didn't care about the rumors. Even if he was a mafia boss, he would face a brutal death in my hands. I would deal with the consequences later.

“Why'd you read it?” I said under my breath, still looking forward, pretending I was paying attention to class.

“You were reading it with such a straight face, like you were reading something serious that altered brain chemistry,” he said, “While at the same time breathing hard. So I thought, I'd take a look.”

I had no idea he had done something like that because I was so absorbed in the scene, forgetting where I was and who was around me.

“It's rude,” I informed him, “You invaded my privacy.”

“It wasn't a bad scene,” Nathan replied, “But it was just unrealistic.”

I rolled my eyes, “Of course.”

“A guy giving a girl a dozen orgasms and not taking one for himself, really? I can't believe that.”

Nathan said casually as he kept his eyes on Wong. But it had the utmost effect on me. I was no stranger to various multitudes of words regarding what happened under the sheets. I'd never say them out loud.

To hear that O-word coming out of Nathan's mouth, like it was no big deal, did some weird shit to my brain. Maybe it short-circuited. Perhaps it stopped working completely. I had to clear my throat and then drink water from my water bottle, and then sit there for minutes before I replied.

“That is not unrealistic because he loved her selflessly.”

Nathan burst out laughing.

“Callahan. Kingsley.” Wong shouted from the front of the class, “Detention, both of you.”

I knew it was coming. I was wondering how it took him so long.

I remembered I had a debating club meeting after class. Then I regretted ever talking to Nathan. Because of him, I would miss the only chance I had to set my eyes on Landon.

Nathan and I stayed silent for the rest of the class, not taking any chances on our beloved chemistry teacher. After class, he called us to the front and sent us straight to detention. I texted Leanna about it before Mrs. Spring in detention snatched my phone out of my hands.

Of course, talking to Nathan Callahan would lead me straight to detention. There was something so prophetic about it.

The devil sat right beside me. We couldn't even move under the watchful eyes of Mrs. Spring. It was suffocating, sitting in silence. I started daydreaming about choking Nathan to death for subjecting me to this. If only he hadn't laughed at me like that, I would be in the clubroom right now, staring at the blue eyes of Landon McArther.

Sitting there and half glancing at his face, I sent all my frustrations into a curse.  I cursed him that he would fall in love badly with a girl. When he would give multiple o-word to his girlfriend and forget about himself, he would think of me. That would serve him right.

When detention ended, and I collected my phone, I saw Leanna had texted back, saying she had gone home because her dad had called. That me, her and Simon were to do a team bonding meeting sometime this week.

I glanced at the person to blame for it once again, only to find him smiling down at me.

“I can't believe I had detention for talking porn with you,” he said. We were almost at the front gate. From where I stood, the parking spot seemed empty except for one Kia Soul that looked like it had seen better days.

“You are disgusting,” I muttered under my breath.

Nathan rolled his eyes, “You were the one who was reading it, sweetheart.”

I glanced back at him, “Don’t you ever nickname me. I hate those.”

He laughed, “Does your Mr. Right know you’re so wild in there?”

He tapped his index finger on my forehead.

I steered away from him, “That doesn't matter. He will when he will.”

Nathan shook his head. He looked around at the deserted school front and parking lot and said, “Do you need a ride, Kingsley?”

I thought for a moment, “Is that how you kidnap people and throw their bodies in a ditch?”

Nathan waved me off and said with a serious expression, “The ditch is full by now. I need a new place. I might start with you.”

I blinked at him. He watched me for a few moments and started laughing.

“Are you trying to be charming or something?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.

He leaned towards me, “Is it working?”

*****

A/N: We all love a little character aesthetics :

Emily Kingsley

“It takes courage to fall in love.”

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Nathan Callahan

“Don’t be naive. Nobody cares.”
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