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And then there were times when I just felt
like I couldn’t tell her, or when I was afraid to confront her
because I dreaded the one question that I knew would be asked. It
hadn’t been my brightest moment, and a part of myself had been lost
that night, and how do you go about telling your best friend, who
also has lost something that very same night, the truth without
sounding overly melodramatic and, well, like I was whining? I just
couldn’t do it. I really hated to lean on other people, especially
when it involved me trying to clean up after one of my own messes.
Maria knew this about me, and had always had a knack at prying out
information I just didn’t want to share until she had the full
story of what I had done, but she hadn’t even asked me why I hadn’t
been at O’Malley’s that night when I had said I would be, and deep
down, I was afraid of the time when she would ask me that
particular question.

The rest of the morning classes passed by in
a haze of misery, one that I tried to battle so that I wouldn’t get
too far behind in my studies. Mom was pissed off enough as it was,
I didn’t need to add even MORE fuel to the fire, but I just
couldn’t drag myself out of the apathy that I found myself in. I
stared blankly at the dry erase board and moved my hand as if I
were copying the notes, but when I looked down at what I had
written all I saw was illegible scribbles and a few idle doodles. I
could partially blame lack of sleep, but I couldn’t help but dwell
on Maria and her angry words from earlier, and my mind just did not
want to focus.

I resolved to talk to her during lunch,
though I had no idea just what I was going to say. I could confront
her about her temperamental outburst; I could drag her off and make
her listen to me, or I could just break down crying on her shoulder
and sob out everything. None of those options sounded very
appealing, and by the time lunch rolled around all I could really
think about was how I wanted to go hide in the bathroom and puke my
guts out.

I scanned the cafeteria when I walked in, and
my eyes went straight to the table where Maria and I usually sat
with several of our other friends. I spotted Ryan Dell and Jessica
Morely there already, but no Maria. I told myself to stop worrying
as I walked across the floor and plastered a huge smile on my face
as I approached. There was worried, and then there was paranoid and
I needed to recognize that I was quickly crossing over that very
fine line. Jessica and Ryan looked up with smiles as I settled into
my seat, and it wasn’t long before Danny Morris and Jeff Smith
joined us. We all chattered about our day, but I didn’t fully relax
until Maria suddenly appeared and sat down next to me.

For a little while things went on like it was
a normal lunch as we discussed teachers, sports, homework, who was
banging whom, but I noticed that Maria had started to zone out.
Jessica and the others hadn’t picked up on it as they were too
wrapped up in their own conversations, so I decided that it was
beyond time to confront Maria about her lack of attention to the
things going on around her.

“Mrs. Nielson is simply horrid.”

“Hmmmmm.”

“She assigned fifty pages of reading, that
monstrous project AND a test, all due next Friday.”

“Ah.”

“And then I saw Jack Well’s with his tongue
half-way down Darby Shaw’s throat.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I also heard that the Board of Trustees
voted to have the school painted with Sparkly Glitter in honor of
Twilight.”

“Wow.”

“ . . . And I was abducted by aliens and
impregnated so that I’m going to have Elvis’ baby, which will most
likely claw its way out of my abdomen and leave me dying in a
large, gory, bloody mess.”

“That’s nice.”

“MARIA!” I snapped, pleased when my friend
jerked in her seat and looked at me. I frowned. For just a moment,
Marie’s eyes had looked strange, milky and flat, almost like they
were dead.

“WHAT?” she snapped back at me.

I blinked. What I thought I had seen must
have been my imagination, because Maria’s eyes were their usual
warm honey brown . . . Or they would have been had they not been
snapping in anger.

“You weren’t listening to a single thing I
was saying,” I complained.

“I was, too, I was just multi-tasking,” Maria
said and rolled her eyes for good measure.

I snorted. “All right, what color did I say
they were going to paint the school?”

“They’re painting the school?”

“I rest my case.”

Maria stuck her tongue out at me before she
started to giggle. I smiled at the sound. I hadn’t realized until
then just how long it had been since I last heard Maria laugh.

“Really, Maria,” Jessica said. “You need to
start paying more attention. It’s almost like half the time you’re
not here anymore, you know?”

The table got quiet as everyone first stared
at Jessica, small, petite with short brown hair and exotic green
eyes, then turned and looked at Maria, who stared at Jessica like
she had never seen her before. My heart sank as I saw Maria visibly
change again, this time from my grinning, giggling friend to a very
angry stranger in a matter of seconds.

“So?” she snapped. “I have a lot on my mind.
I guess I’m not allowed to try and figure things out like the rest
of you, oh no, heaven forbid. Instead I just have to sit here and
pay attention to everyone except myself.”

“Maria,” Danny started, only to sink back a
little when she turned her glare onto him.

“You know what,” she said as she grabbed up
her books, “Forget it. I don’t have time for this.”

We all watched in silence as Maria stalked
off, shocked by her sudden temper and uncharacteristic “Grand Exit;
Stage Left” maneuver. Once she was out of sight, we all turned and
stared at each other.

“What the hell?” Danny asked. He sighed and
ran his hands through his short black hair, which gave him an even
more artfully tousled look than before. Danny was our designated
“GQ” boy, a nickname we gave him because he always dressed nicely
in slacks with some type of collared shirt in the warmer months,
turtle necks, sweaters and blazers once the weather turned
colder.

“What did I say?” Jessica asked, her voice
small and worried as she gazed off in the direction Maria had
vanished. Poor Jessica, she was the most sensitive of our group of
friends, and I could see her trying to fight back tears and put on
a brave front despite the fact that her lower lip trembled
slightly. Danny reached over and took her hand and squeezed it as
she took in a deep breath. She sighed and the tears retreated as
her lip steadied, though she was still visibly rattled.

“Wow, Jane, I thought you were the only one
with a major temper. Perhaps all the years ya’ll have been friends
has finally caught up to her,” Jeff said. We had nicknamed him “The
Professor”, and his absent-minded habit of pushing his wire frame
glasses on the bridge of his nose while deep in thought had
cemented the moniker despite the fact that he had switched to
contacts last year.

“My temper is not that bad!” I said and blew
out an irritated huff. “Have you ever seem me storm off all
dramatic like that?” I asked as I gazed down at my own lunch. I
made a face when I realized that I had completely lost my appetite.
A scratch and tug alerted me to the fact that I was worrying at a
hangnail on my thumb, and forced my fingers to relax.

“No, you just break the nose of whoever it is
that’s pissed you off,” Ryan said, and I managing to dredge up a
small smile. Ryan was the other sensitive person in our group, the
romantic, if you will. Ryan was the only other person outside of
Maria that I had spent most of my life with. We had met in day care
and bonded over a mutual love of all things fuzzy and fluffy.

His stared at me for a moment, then asked,
“Are you all right?”

“I’m all right,” I said, but I could tell
that he didn’t fully believe me. “Jessica, are you ok?”

Jessica gave me a weak smile, sniffled a
little, and then nodded. “You just don’t think that Maria would
lose her temper at us, you know? It just startled me, that’s
all.”

I nodded, but my attention had already turned
away from the lunch table and back to the absent member of our
group. I debated with myself as I tried to decide if I should go
and confront Maria, send her a text and see if she’d answer, or
just let it alone the way I had so much else. One look at Jessica’s
upset face decided me, and I swiftly excused myself as I got to my
feet, gathered up my stuff, and headed out the door. As I exited, I
glanced back briefly and jumped a bit when I met Akira’s sharp eyes
from across the room, but I didn’t hold his gaze for long as the
door swung shut behind me.

Chapter Three

I couldn’t decide if it was a good thing or a
bad thing that I wasn’t able to locate Maria before my next class.
I had to abandon my search when the warning bell rang and decided
that I would hunt her down in the parking lot after school. I knew
it probably went against what her doctor’s would all suggest; after
all, she had had a “traumatic experience that had resulted in
partial amnesia”, but seriously, enough was enough. There was
something majorly wrong with my friend, and I fully intended to
find out what it was.

My resolve lasted through fifth period into
sixth, where it was promptly derailed and shoved into the caboose
of my brain by Mr. Miller’s announcement that we were going to be
paired up for a project that we’d be working on for the remainder
of the semester that was going to count 75% of our over all grade.
I wasn’t the only one who stared at him in horror, EVERYONE hated
any type of project, group or otherwise, but group more so because
it almost always meant that one person would be doing all the work
while the other person just made token gestures. Several of my
classmates even groaned.

“Now, now,” Mr. Miller said after he had
given everyone his own version of The Glare, that one look of death
that any teacher develops in order to get a bunch of rowdy students
to settle down. “I’ve had great reviews of this particular project
from students in the past, and I think you will find it rather
fascinating once pairs are assigned and you hear what the project
is about.”

“I don’t remember hearing about this from any
of the seniors,” Billy Jones groused from the back of the room, and
his buddies quickly grumbled their own agreements.

“That’s because the last group of juniors who
did this particular project graduated two years ago. I try not to
do this on back-to-back years, as I like to challenge each junior
class with something a little different. Now, let me assign
partners . . .” another round of loud groans interrupted him.

“You mean we don’t get to choose for
ourselves?” Sherri Murphy asked. She shot Akira a flirty look
underneath her eyelashes, but the effort was wasted on him because
he had turned to rummage through his bag. She pouted and returned
her attention to the front.

“Nope, I have learned that it’s far better to
assign you partners instead of letting you pair up on your own.
Consider it a lesson in learning how to compromise, something that
will come in handy in college. Alexander?”

“Yes, sir?” I said. I mentally cursed, not
for the first time, about the fact that my last name started with
an “A” and usually meant that I was always first to be called on
whenever a teacher got it into their head to be alphabetical.

“You’re going to partner up with
Yamaguchi.”

I turned and sent a startled look in Akira’s
direction, and there was yet another round of disappointed groans
that erupted from the “Akira Fanclub” section of the room, with the
loudest complaint coming from Sherri. They were mostly
good-natured, and were soon extinguished by another one of Mr.
Miller’s Glares. When he called out the next two names, Banes and
Wyler, I realized that he was pairing people early in the alphabet
with those that came later, which was rather clever, only it put me
with someone I was highly uncomfortable to be around.

Oh well, no hope for it, and with that lovely
bracing thought I stood and moved over to where Akira was seated
next to one of the big windows. His usual tablemate had left to
find his own partner, and he grinned at me as he pulled back the
chair next to him with a flourish. A wave of his hand indicated
that I was to sit down while all I really wanted to do was stand
there awkwardly . . . or flee the classroom.

I gingerly sat my stuff down, slid into the
chair, and tried to make sure it was as far from Akira as it could
get without being too rude. The hair on my arms began to stir from
being this close to him, and the over all feeling of “not all that
he seems to be” was almost overwhelming. There was a heavy pressure
on the back of my head, a strange combination of weight and
electrical type energy that practically screamed something was
wrong. I wondered just how I was going to make it through being his
partner and spending time in his company without freaking out and
either embarrassing myself, embarrassing him, or both. Probably
both. My leg muscles twitched and signaled their readiness to run.
Oh yeah, most definitely both. I started to dig at the skin around
my thumbnails in an effort to bleed off some of the nervous energy
that had steadily built up a slow burn in my gut.

“No need to act like I’m going to eat you
alive, Alexander,” Akira’s amused voice cut across my building
panic attack the way butter slides across a hot skillet. Melty,
sizzling, steamy, and it made me nearly jump out of my skin.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,
Akira,” I snapped in embarrassment as my hands clenched underneath
the table in an effort to still the constant scratching.

“When Mr. Miller read out my name as your
partner, you turned and stared at me like I was about to leap out
of my chair and drag you to the ground. Once you sat down you began
fidgeting in so many ways I’m starting to feel tired from watching.
Could you please stop bouncing your leg, at least, it’s making the
floor vibrate,” he said.