Perfectly Flawed (21 page)

“I’m a big comedy fan,” he tells me, pride
filling in his voice. I like comedy… sometimes. “I watch anything
with Will Ferrell or Sacha Baron Cohen.” Now he’s lost me. “What
about you?”

I’m not
that
big of a comedy fan. I
have to be in the mood. “Uh, a little of this, a little of that,
you know.” I’m into everything, really, except zombies. I don’t do
zombies. Except
Fido
. I love that movie. “What about books?”
I ask, swiping my hand through the dusty side of a game
machine.

“I’m not really a big reader.”
Of course
you’re not
. “If a book sounds interesting, I’ll just look for
the movie or wait until the movie comes out.” I have to fight the
urge to facepalm. “You like to read?” he asks me.

“I love it,” I tell him with enthusiasm. “You
should see my book collection.” It takes up a lot of space. “It’s a
great escape,” I tell him, loving how I lose myself within the
pages of a book. How has he not experienced that?

“I guess I just don’t have time for that
stuff,” he mutters with annoyance. How can anyone not have
time
for reading, I
make
time for it. “I used to be
big into comic books as a kid but that’s as literary as it gets.”
That’s
so
not the same for me. Like, not even close.

“Oh, comics.” But I don’t tell him that, I
leave my real thoughts hidden because now I see how little we have
in common. I don’t want this to continue beyond friends if we have
nothing in common.

“Yeah, I’d always get the new
Batman
and
Superman
when they came out.” I force a wide smile on my
face as he continues to speak. “I drove my parents insane. Do you
like comic books?” He stops to look at me, hope in his eyes.

Time for that honesty I love to use. “Not so
much.” I walk toward another game, anything to move this
conversation along.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” he says
behind me. I do know what I’m missing.

We find ourselves in the dreaded awkward
silence—that lull in the conversation that seems to grow larger and
deeper the longer you stay in it. I try and search for some common
interest between us, one that can make this friendship or, whatever
it is, worth it.

“What about music?” I ask. Music is a good
topic; everyone loves music.

“I like music.”
Bingo!

“That’s great,” I exclaim loudly. “Like what?
What do you like to listen to?”

“Well, I guess that I kind of lied,” he
starts.
Crap!
“I mean, I like music, but I only listen to
what’s playing around me.”

Lord, give me strength
.

“Uh, what?” I ask, turning to face him. I
tuck my hair behind my ear as I knit my brows in confusion. He
can’t mean that he only listens to the radio? That would just be
absurd and boring. And they only play the same ten songs over and
over—it’s annoying. No… he has to have
some
music taste
specifically for him.

“Like, whatever’s on the radio, you know?”
Crap, no I don’t know. “Whatever my sister would play in the house,
whatever my parents were listening to.” And I have officially lost
interest in Ryder. “All those songs I sang to you my sister told me
about. She’s the big music person in the family; she got into
Juilliard two years ago.”

Now I’d like to go home. I want to go home
and hope that Ryder just leaves me alone because now I know that
none of this—nothing—will ever work out between us. He doesn’t like
music, reading, decent movies, he doesn’t even ask me what I really
like,
that
alone I have a problem with, but I gave him a
chance.

“Uh…” I start out, trying to think of a way
to convince him to take me home, when I look up at him and see he’s
staring at me. “What?” I ask cautiously, swiping at my cheek in
case there’s something crawling on me that I can’t feel.

He takes a step closer to me, and another,
and another, until he’s so close that I can
feel
his
heartbeat, I can hear it, and there’s something tender and sweet
about that. It’s intimate, the feeling of being this close to
someone. It’s… weird.

“I’m just here with the most beautiful girl
I’ve ever met,” Ryder tells me, his blonde curls falling into his
eyes as he looks down to me. His ocean blue eyes pierce through me
but, sadly, they’re not what I want. They’re not the familiar warm
chocolate gaze that renders me speechless most of the time.

Ryder doesn’t know anything about me, he
doesn’t want to get to know me, he just compliments me, and how can
I argue with that? I can’t argue with that when I just want him to
continue to look at me as if I’m a dessert he wants to devour.
Before I can think clearly, Ryder backs away and takes my hand,
leading me to his car.

“I’m taking you home before I do something
that I’ll regret,” he tells me before he closes the door for
me.

“That’s a good thing,” I mutter to myself
when he’s walking around the car.

“We need to do this again,” he says when he
pulls into my empty driveway, my aunt already at work.

For once, I agreed with him.

We did.

He wasn’t as bad as I originally pegged him
to be.

After his football practices, we hung out. We
studied together, we saw a few movies, we went to the local
restaurants trying to pathetically pass themselves off as diners;
we were growing into genuine friends.
Who coulda thunk it?
I
never saw the moment arrive when I would call Ryder Harrison my
friend
. It was odd and weird—
very
weird. He even sat
with me at lunch, no matter how annoyed and openly mocking Harley
got or how wide and toothy Kennie’s smile grew; he didn’t seem to
go anywhere other than wherever I was.

It was like that for a good two weeks.

Then it all went to hell courtesy of my best
friend.

Zephyr wasn’t too happy about it—none of it.
He avoided the topic, aggressively, when Jamie brought it up,
sometimes even throwing a hissy fit perfect for a toddler on a
sugar high.

“You’ve been awful cozy with Ryder Harrison
lately,” Jamie began conspicuously one day on the way to school,
trying her best to gather the latest gossip directly from the main
source: Me. I guess that her usual sources are dry in new
information; Ryder and I have been keeping things quiet. Well, at
least I have. “What’s going on there?”

“Nothing much,” I answer truthfully. What can
I say other than
we’re friends unless you know something more
than me, and you shouldn’t know more than me
. But I missed my
chance to let that slip from my lips.

“That’s a lie if I ever heard one, little
missy,” she started, trying to be coy and innocent but completely
failing. She peeked into the rearview mirror and tried to fix her
hair. How we haven’t been hit by a car because of her
distractedness, I’ll never know. “There
is
something going
on,” Jamie presses, flipping the mirror down in front of her to
check her makeup as we sit at a traffic light. At least she stopped
this time.

She pulls into the school parking lot, taking
her usual parking space near the front of the school, prime
territory for all the students with cars.

“God, why are you pressing it, Jamie?” Zephyr
bursts abruptly from the back seat. My body lurches from the shock
of his loud, angry voice. He doesn’t get angry that easily.

Not batting an eye, because she’s used to her
little brother, Jamie asks him, “Who lit the fuse on your tampon
this morning?” I would’ve laughed had I not been wondering the same
thing.

“Forget it,” he mumbles as he slides from the
car before she even fully stops to park. He slams the door shut,
rocking the car, and stomps to school, not even waiting for me to
catch up—like normal—to ask him what’s wrong. I’m not used to my
friend being so angry without talking to me. That means I’m the
problem… but I haven’t done anything.

For the rest of the day, he avoided me. He
even skipped AP Euro. As if I wouldn’t notice the empty seat next
to me. At the end of class, after I spent the entire fifty-five
minutes thinking that he’d just pop into the room with a late pass
from the nurse’s office or something, I decided that I wouldn’t
worry too much about it, he wasn’t my problem.

Even though he felt like my problem.

Scratch that, he’s my best friend—the boy has
always been my problem.

***

At the start of October, aside from the
gorgeous sight of the changing leaves and wonderful scents of
autumn filling the air, the Homecoming signs started popping up all
over the building. They were plastered to the walls, covering the
walls, strung along lockers, some even in the bathrooms; it was a
bit ridiculous what they were doing for advertising, although the
professionals should really take notes from high school students.
If I saw this amount of advertising for movies, maybe I’d see a few
out of annoyance. Most of the Homecoming posters were hand painted
by the girls of the cheerleading squad and student council—no boys
were trusted simply for the reason of their stereotypical awful
handwriting. Some of them fit the stereotype perfectly. Some
posters were done professionally to promote and better incorporate
this year’s theme: A Night Beneath the Stars. Oddly, and
pathetically, enough, that was the theme last year, if I remember
the old posters from last year correctly.

I didn’t go to the dance last year. I don’t
do dances to begin with. Something about them just seems
pretentious and overdone. If I want to, say,
bust a move
,
I’ll happily do it in the safety of my bedroom with the blinds
drawn and the perfect music. Just for further information, I never
have the need.

Kennie had been on a cloud since the
temperature started to drop. She knew that Homecoming was around
the corner and she couldn’t wait to dress shop. And by
dress
shop
, I mean
kidnap Harley and me and take us to the mall to
watch her try on every single dress in the store until she chooses
a blue one, because she
always
chooses a blue one
.

“I can’t wait,” Kennie announces in her
high-pitched squeal, the one she uses when she’s
very
excited. She slides into the seat across from me, a large smile on
her face. It’s now common knowledge that the seat next to me is
reserved for Ryder. How that
became
common knowledge, I’ll
never know or understand. He started spending lunch with me the day
after the afternoon we spent at the arcade. Once he realized that I
liked apples, he started bringing me one daily.

Kennie looks expectantly from Harley to me,
waiting for one of us to do something, say something.
She wants
us to ask.

“For what?” Harley finally, sarcastically,
asks in monotone when she realizes what Kennie’s waiting for. She
angrily tears apart her sandwich, letting the pieces fall onto the
Ziploc bag she packed it in. “Alexia Cavanaugh to wear another
plastic crown while she quotes Lindsay Lohan’s speech from the end
of
Mean Girls
? Again?” With a roll of her brown eyes, she
looks to me, silently pleading. “Not that I’d know anything about
that.” From what I’ve heard, that’s pretty accurate.

What can I do?
I want to ask her.
Instead, I shrug. What does she expect? She’s dealing with Kennie
Strait, here.

“Homecoming is
awesome
, Harley,”
Kennie begins, as expected, with a faraway look on her face as
memories flood through her mind. I bet that she’s remembering all
the dances of her past. All the good times she’s had, all the times
she’s been nominated for Princess only to receive first runner up,
all of her past dates—usually Duke. As quickly as I saw it, it’s
gone. “Just because you’re too bitter to appreciate it—”

“What
is
there to appreciate?” Harley
snaps angrily. “The paper streamers, the half-assed decorations,
and the way everyone seems to be nice to everyone they’ve hated
before this one little moment?” Her hand runs through her hair, the
way she does when she’s stressed or annoyed, pulling her brown hair
back only for it to flop back into her face, covering her eyes. “At
least this year we have an awesome color and hall.” She’s referring
to the Class Color tradition, the juniors wear black, the easiest
to do, and the hall that’s decorated and designated The Junior Hall
during this one week is the first hall that you see when you walk
into the building, but the second one that you’re most likely to
walk down for any reason. “We still have a crappy theme, like every
year.”

“I will admit,” Kennie begins, her hands
straightening the gray t-shirt she’s wearing. “That our class
themes haven’t been that great in the past.” The themes chosen for
every class usually have nothing to do with the theme of the dance;
they are only meant for the Spirit Week leading up to the big game.
Freshman year, the overall theme was Disney movies, my class was
stuck with
Toy Story
, sophomore year we had movie genres—a
big step up, huh?—and my class was stuck with action movies. This
year, we have seasons as our school theme and the junior class has
winter, which means that all the girls that want to dress up and
show some leg or whatever have to cover up if they want to properly
represent winter. The upside: I don’t have to endure the sight of
the girls of my class walking around like prostitutes or something.
Oh, and our hall will be a winter wonderland. That will be awesome!
“But Homecoming is still fun,” Kennie presses, hoping to sway
Harley.

“Says the peppy, perky cheerleader,” I add,
watching their heads snap in my direction, as if they forget that I
was there—sitting across from them as they had their little debate
about nothing important.

“And the rugged, manly football player,” I
hear behind me. Harley and Kennie snicker like schoolgirls while
Ryder throws a leg over the bench, taking his usual seat next to
me, his jean-clad thigh touching mine. He does that on purpose, I
know. He wants to be closer to me than I want him to be. “Did I
mention how handsome this football player is?” He angles his face
to accentuate his features. I laugh at his idiocy.