Story, Continued

So I think I'm seeing the end of the story coming up; looks like it'll be a short story, currently 2,500 some odd words before any serious editing. This last bit has also seemed disturbingly bad to me, but oh well. It's really been a struggle to get the words out; they haven't been anywhere near as easy as they were in the first two portions. Maybe when I'm done it and I come back to it in a month or two to edit it'll look different, or I'll see how to tighten it up somehow. Here's hoping, I suppose. If you haven't read them, or want a quick refresher, the first parts are here and here.

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So who did that leave to help me take those first few steps? My friends, of course. This would lead to a bit of a problem, but more on that later. My best friend at the time was Jack, and we'd spend hours on the phone every night trading thoughts about our respective loves.

The problem that both of us kept running into was that we were in a different social circle from the girls. They had their friends and we had ours; aside from various classes or extra-curricular activities (the innocent kind), we had relatively little contact with them. Jack and I were stuck in the social purgatory of high school: not down in the depths of nerd hell, but certainly not dancing with the popular angels in the clouds. Just another pair of forgettable kids making their way through the school system.

It's funny how those early experiences color you for the rest of your life. I wonder: if a single person had said to us, “Just ask them out,” would things have turned out differently? Would we have been able to take that step, to expose ourselves to public humiliation and derision? Or would we have failed anyway, dragged down by the litany of reasons any insecure teenager can come up with to avoid attempting something difficult? And even had we asked, what would have been the answers? If I saw Audrey tomorrow, would I have the courage to say all the things I wanted to say back then?

As it turned out, a day did come when I had the chance. Time had passed since our first conversations over sines and congruent angles. Audrey had been dating a guy on and off for the past few months, one of those couples that become so synonymous with each other in the school that you just assume they're together, and can't even think of one without the other. I wonder how many of those couples actually stay together, and how many become just another faded memory. In any event, this was one of the months when they were broken up. I was walking down the long path from the chapel to the dining hall when I noticed her sitting on some benches off to the side. I waved, and she called me over. I hadn't actually run into her in a few days, so she gave me a hug as a greeting.

“What's up, Aud?”

“Oh, nothing much. Just doing some thinking.”

“About what?”

“Oh, just stuff. I was actually about to go for a bit of a walk; wanna walk with me?”

“Sure.”

We walked down to the lake. The school campus – and yes, it was a campus; as I said before, it was that kind of school – was on a big lake with a rocky shore. Being the suave teenager I was, I picked a couple up and started skipping them, to impress her with my athletic prowess.

“I never could do that,” she said.

“It's easy,” I said.

I skipped a couple more in silence as she watched.

“Do you ever wonder about your life, Eddie?”

“Wonder what?”

“Like...why things turn out the way they do, and not some other way.”

“Um, I dunno. What do you mean by that?”

“Oh, I don't know. I just feel sometimes like...I dunno. Like it's all slipping away somehow.”

“You mean with Brandon?”

She laughed.

“No, not him. God, no. Fuck him, this has nothing to do with him.”

“So what, then?”