Puddle Jumping(9)

I lifted my hand to touch him and then closed my fist by my side and looked up with my head tilted slightly. “I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.”

My mind was chanting, ‘Tell me, tell me, tell me.’ Selfishly, I wanted to hear him speak. I wanted to hear his passion over something he loved.

It was, without a doubt, the best sentence to ever come out of my mouth in seventeen years.

He talked. Oh my God, did he talk. And I just stood there like a fool, smiling at him as he rattled off all this information so fast and excitedly, using words I’d never heard someone my age use before.

The bell rang and he was still going. I tried to cut him off, but there really was no stopping him once he’d started. I interjected long enough to get him to hand me his schedule in order to see about walking him to class. People may have walked by, staring at us, but I didn’t pay any attention. I was in his world now, wrapped up in his passion, making my chest feel so damn full I thought I would stop breathing.

When he handed me his schedule, I felt tears rush to my eyes. You know that stinging in your nose right before the tears come? That’s what happened as I realized we were headed to the same class.

AP English. Where our teacher had us all in alphabetical seating when we arrived. I watched Colton from my side of the room as he sat down and went stiff in the chest again, eyes forward and his mouth zipped shut.

About halfway through the period, Mr. Mercer began listing the names of the books we would be reading. I’d barely been paying attention at all because I couldn’t stop staring at the back of Colton’s head and the way his hair curled up at the nape of his neck . . . freckles trailing into his shirt.

I’d been so lost in my fantasy of actually touching them and wondering how it would feel to get my fingers wrapped around one wayward curl that I wasn’t at full attention to hear Colton suddenly speak out to tell our teacher he had already read a few of them.

It was like an out of body experience watching his head raise a little higher as the words, low and steady just rushed from his lips.

Mr. Mercer had given him one of those looks and whispered that Colton needed to please raise his hand in the future before interrupting class with an outburst.

Poor Colton’s fists curled in his lap and he kept his head down for the rest of the class, but as soon as the bell rang, I pushed my way to the front and tapped Mr. Mercer on the shoulder, giving him my very best authoritative voice as I told him flat out that Colton’s mom had asked me sit with him during our class and he would move to the back row with me tomorrow. Mercer had given me a look like he didn’t believe me, but I didn’t back down.

An agreement was reached and I made sure to wait for Colton as we left class, knowing after seeing his schedule he was going back to the Resources room for another period.

He smiled a tiny bit when we reached the room, but turned abruptly and found his seat at the back of the class again. Like the creepy stalker-girl I am, I watched him settle in and then moved out of sight so he didn’t know I was still there.

It was when I moved out of his view that I caught sight of the poster behind his head. It was of two pair of sneaker clad feet, one male and one female, frozen mid-air before landing in a deep puddle of water. Looking from their feet upward to their legs and higher, the shot revealed fingers knotted together as the boy and girl held hands. It was raining. It was black and white. And the only words on the poster were, FRIENDSHIP: A true friend is one soul in two bodies – Aristotle.

So cheesy, but all of that stuff in school is. Yet, this particular poster didn’t seem that bad to me.

It made me wonder if it were true.





After school, I completely ditched Harper and waited for Colton outside his last class. If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t let on. Instead, he fell in by my side as if we’d been walking through the halls of our school together for years.

“Want a ride home?” I asked, my palms all sweaty again.

His head shook slowly from side to side. “At three-thirty-five I’m supposed to be standing outside for my mother.”

I smiled as big as I could. “Then I’ll wait with you.”

A nod. That was all I got, but it didn’t matter. It was something.

I’ll be honest, I was more nervous about facing Sheila Neely again than I was to first approach her son. While we waited for her to drive the long loop set aside for car riders, mostly freshman, I thought of things I could talk to him about. Like, why the hell he was suddenly at school?

Instead, I chickened out. “Are you busy after school tomorrow?”

His answer was abrupt. “Yes.”

Look, being a girl in high school is hard enough. But add having to do the ‘dude’ duty of asking someone to hang out was making my head want to implode. And we didn’t want that.

About that time, his mom pulled slowly up before crawling to a stop. She rolled the passenger’s side window down and then kind of pulled her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose as she squinted to see if I was really standing next to her son.

“Lilly Evans.” The way she said my name made my nose scrunch. I said hello and she laughed, her head thrown back and reddish hair bouncing. “I didn’t think you’d make it to sixteen . . . much less your senior year.”

Touché, Mrs. Neely. One point for you.

Colton was getting into the passenger seat, blocking my view of her, so I moved around to her window. She’d smiled wide and pushed her glasses into her hair to address me. I was leaning in and trying to speak loud enough for both of them to hear.