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“Ooh wow, that’s a really pretty flower, Basil!” Aubrey took her eyes off of her homework for a moment and looked over at Basil’s drawing next to her.
“Thanks Aubrey,” Basil smiled shyly. He was drawing a daisy and trying to draw out the finer details of each petal.
Sunny lowered his copy of Capt. Spaceboy And the Unidentified Flying Oranges to take a peek at his drawing; he hummed in approval and buried his nose back into his book.
Sometimes, Aubrey, Sunny, Kel and Basil would go to the school library on the second floor after lunch if they had enough time to go there.
When the group needed some solace from the cafeteria chaos and space away from the stickiness of school lunch tables, they retreated to the library: today was one of those days.
Sunny wanted to read his comic, Basil and Kel just wanted to have a conversation without cafeteria cacophony muffling their voices out, and Aubrey needed to do her homework.
Kel probably needed to do his homework, too, but he found other matters to be more pressing: Aubrey was in prime position for a game of footsies! She was sitting right across from him. How could he not seize this chance and show her what he’s all about?
And all it would take would be just a little nudge, just his orange and white shoes nuzzling against her red and white lace-ups.
“See, Kel, it takes at least three years for an orange tree to start bearing fruit even when a mature-enough tree is transferred,” Basil pointed a teaching finger up as he got engrossed in his explanation, “And if you grow it from a seed it can take up to fifteen years!” He slightly shrieked from how long it would actually take to have a fully-producing orange tree in your backyard, and in proportion to how far-off Kel’s guess of three months was compared to the reality.
Kel was staring at Basil as he spoke, with his hands propping up his chin on the table and everything, but his focus was elsewhere.
“Ow! Kel! Hey!” Aubrey’s face shot up and shot a sharpened glare at Kel.
“Oops, my bad,” His eyes gleamed with silent mischief.
If you paid attention, you could hear a small thud come from under the table: Aubrey kicked him back.
Kel got exactly what he wanted. He beamed.
“Oops, my bad again,” Kel tried to keep a straight face after he kicked her again and failed. He broke out into a grin; he loved bothering her.
Aubrey let out a sigh and put her pencil down. It made Kel feel nervous, but not necessarily intimidated.
“You better not, Kel, I’m being serious,” her eyes locked right onto him.
“Hey Sunny, mind filling me in on what chapter you’re on for Spaceboy?” Basil hopped over to the seat at the head of the table and scooched it over so he could peer over Sunny’s shoulder. His comic acted as a barrier between the little pink tickets saying they were banned from the library for the day because Aubrey and Kel acted up again, and a tent to exclude the outside world from their inside conversations and closeness.
“Kelll,” Aubrey began to growl and braced her palms against the edge of the table. Her engines were revved, and Kel was ready to roll.
Aubrey struck her right foot out, but Kel was ready for it and used his right foot to block the shot from hitting his left foot. Aubrey’s other foot joined the fray, and soon they were both hunching over the desk and kicking away at each other, entangling their feet in aimless kicks that were just as likely to bump their ankles as they were their actual sneakers.
Kel’s grin pinched his cheeks so high that they scrunched his eyes shut with delight. He was laughing and his palms were pressing against the table and his face was beginning to flush vermillion from all his effort.
And so was she: puffy clouds of pink were setting across her face like a hot summer sky. Kel didn’t think anything about her face, did he?
Kel ramped up the ante and threw his feet over hers and began kicking her feet in a rain of kicks. He was using all of his might to concentrate on the buzz in his feet instead of the buzz breaking his brain into two.
“Kel!” Aubrey squeaked. Her hands balled up into fists and smacked the table with an ultimate thud.
“That’s a warning for you two rascals again!” The librarian walked over from her desk to waggle her long, bony finger at them with the danger of a dagger. “If I have to tell you to shush and stay quiet one more time, you’re out!” She pursed her lips and returned to her desk. A brief silence fell over the group and other nearby tables; Aubrey froze in mortification and ducked her head.
The aggravation in her face set out the mouse inside Kel, which squeaked the moment it encountered her hard glare and retreated into his safe space, which was now prancing around on Sunny’s Spaceboy comic and pulling Kel over to sit beside the two boys, with him and Basil sandwiching Sunny in the middle.
“Mind if I see too?” He didn’t really need to ask because he knew that Sunny and Basil wouldn’t mind him anyway, since they were all friends.
“Of course not, Kel,” Warm cerulean eyes met attentive dark brown ones before sinking back into the sea of Sunny’s comic book pages.
Kel silently reabsorbed the plot of Unidentified Flying Oranges invading Spaceboy’s ship, and his eyes were glued to the neon and starry pages.
But his focus was elsewhere.
His eyes kept on flickering back and forth between the comic and Aubrey. He almost looked like he wanted to say something.
Basil noticed, and was about to open his mouth to say something himself, but then felt a certain feeling grip his gut that maybe he shouldn’t. He looked over to Sunny, who was no doubt immersed in the expansive adventures of Spaceboy and all the creatures in his universe.
He was looking at the pages in the comic books, too, but his focus was also elsewhere: his eyes almost shone with the sheen of somewhere far away, somewhere deep in Sunny’s mind and completely inaccessible to Basil, who was trying to swim the depth of Sunny’s eyes to make some sense of what he could possibly be thinking to himself right now.
Aubrey gripped her pencil as if it would run away from her if she held it any looser, and her head was once again bowed down to her homework. Aubrey’s focus was clearly on her homework, and clearly going to burn two holes into it with the intensity her gaze bore.
The mouse in Kel’s chest scurried off of Sunny’s comic book pages once again and settled right onto her homework. The mouse that was timid towards Aubrey’s anger wanted to chew her homework right up and spit it right in the trash. It wasn’t fair that she had homework to do when she should be hanging over his shoulder and reading Capt. Spaceboy And the Unidentified Flying Oranges with everyone else anyway.
Kel crept his hand over to her paper and swiped it right underneath her. He miscalculated; he saw her homework as his competition instead of as his obstacle.
Aubrey looked up at him again, and Kel felt better, but did he do better?
Aubrey pushed her chair back and stood up. Ah. Kel was going to have to run now, wasn’t he?
Kel rose up and pushed his seat back, only to find that the little mouse that ran amok in his heart and head had escaped into the maze of bookshelves.
Kel, too, bolted for the aisles of books, disappearing into the bookshelves and held Aubrey’s homework to his chest. She actually gaped at him for a moment, absolutely amazed that he actually ran away from her like that in the middle of a public school library.
But no. That wasn’t going to stop her - if anything, that only fueled her desire to reach him and stop him even more. She was not about to let Kel and her homework get away from her that easily!
Aubrey tailed right behind him like his shadow. Kel glanced back at her for a moment and wished he didn’t - her face was fierce, and it made him want to jump out of his own skin.
“Hey!” A nearby kid browsing books grunted. Kel bumped into her, blurted out an apology and bounced around the corner. Aubrey shot her a sympathetic glance, and she just rolled her eyes and Aubrey nodded with her in agreement - he was so inconsiderate!
Aubrey sighed. ‘Why is Kel such a jerk?’ She frowned to herself. ‘Why is he always such a jerk to me?’ She saw him dip right, towards the back of the library, but she also saw the distance between them growing: by the slightest sliver, she was beginning to slow down.
‘What did I do to deserve all of this?’ Aubrey clenched her hand to her chest, trying to soothe the storms that brewed inside her heart. ‘Why do bad things keep on happening to me?’ She thought about how she had to hop out of the window in her house’s hallway again to find somewhere nice, quiet and secret to hide because her mom and dad were fighting again. Who was going to think about taking their homework with them when their feet had barely even taken a pair of socks with them?
And here she was, running around by the seat of her pants all over again at the whim of another person too narrow-sighted to consider her, surrounded by an indifferent public that just wanted to keep to itself.
When she turned around to his corner, he saw frustrated sadness sparkle in her eyes. He didn’t mean to make her feel that upset! He gulped and felt guilt pinch at his face. Aubrey was approaching him, but Kel was stubborn; he did not and would not apologize. How could he apologize when he already struggled facing himself in the first place? He looked to his left and right, and found that he had backed himself into an inescapable corner.
“What’s wrong with you, Kel?” Aubrey was cross.
Kel just stared at her and said nothing.
What was wrong with him?
“Why can’t you just be nice to me like Sunny or Basil?” Aubrey clenched her fists at each side of her body; the waver in her voice made Kel’s entire body waver. He looked down at his scuffled sneakers and tried to untie the knot forming in his throat.
She walked closer to him, and it was then she finally processed what was in front of her: Kel was cornered, and his only way out was blocked off by none other than Aubrey herself.
Like light through gray clouds, luck shone through. Ah! Her outlook had shifted: Kel was cornered and had nowhere else to run.
Aubrey got exactly what she wanted. She narrowed her eyes in satisfaction.
“Give me back my homework, Kel,” she held her hand out in front of him.
“No,” he flatly stated, hugging her homework to his chest.
His eyes swerved to either side of her to see if he can slide right by her, but it was futile.
She finally won their little game of cat and mouse. She propped her foot up on a nearby stepping stool and began to study him for her assignment.
“Give me back my homework, Kel,” Aubrey repeated.
“No,” He tells her again, pursing his lips.
How long was he going to keep up this charade? She begins to tap her foot and wait, waiting for someone to move and for something to happen.
“Uhh...” and that was all he said. He said nothing. And Aubrey wanted something - an answer. And she wanted it now. She stepped closer to him; her shadow covered him and they were almost nose to nose.
Kel squirmed around in the corner and looked away, looking any other way except in front of him.
Where’d all his spunk go? Who was this new Kel in front of her, that looked ready to sputter at the drop of a hat? She decided that she liked this new Kel, who was shy and suddenly knew how to have manners around her. Oh, how the tides have turned! Aubrey swelled with pride at the fact that Kel was the one around her thumb this time.
“What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” She tilted her head a little and smiled as if she was asking him about the weather.
“A-Aubrey, you’re so close...” He was wiggling his toes so the blood in his body would go back there.
“Can you please step back a bit?” He was looking at a book wedged on a shelf to his left titled Backyard to Terabithia.
“Not if you’re rude like this! You have to look me in the eye and say please!”
“No!” His voice cracked.
“And why not!?” Aubrey was close enough to study the way he tucked a piece of his hair behind his ears so he could keep at least some of it back, and were those speckles of orange in his eyes?
He wouldn’t look at her.
He refused to look at her.
Finally finding his friends among the aisles of endless books, Basil pants and places his hands on his knees for support. They turn to him.
“Hey guys, be careful, the libr-“ Basil was cut off by none other than the death knoll herself: the librarian. She reigned her pink ticket fury upon Aubrey and Kel in no time. Her voice crackled throughout the whole room and Sunny placed the comic over his head and hid under it as if he was hiding from the rain.
“That’s IT! Out!” Both of them winced in recoil, and ducked their heads down in shame. The quiet, laughing eyes of their classmates followed them the entire way out. Aubrey wanted to disappear into the folds of the bookshelves forever.
Basil waved and smiled sadly at the two of them. Kel looked back at him and smiled sadly; he didn’t wave back.
Sighing with sympathy, Basil returned to what was now just his and Sunny’s table and rubbed Sunny’s back in consolation: he hated yelling, and he especially hated adults yelling.
“Thanks,” Sunny murmured to him. He didn’t look at him, but Basil knew he was giving him his undivided attention with all of his being. Even when his thoughts were far away, remembering his dad at the dinner table when unspoken tensions boiled over, Sunny was right by Basil’s side and wanted to promise the world to him.
Everything was so quiet now. It was the library, so of course it was supposed to be quiet! But this wasn’t the natural quiet of a library; something had been disturbed, and something else had been destroyed. The library was not quiet: it was disquieted.
A part of that disquiet seeped through the library’s doors as Kel and Aubrey left the library behind them. To avoid the eyes in the library following them outside the door, they clung to the wall nearest to them to be just out of the line of sight for the doors’ glass windows.
Nobody but them were in the hallway. Instead of feeling spacious, however, the hallway felt stifled. The hallway was stifled with their unsaid words, their bottled up frustrations and their inexpressible feelings that were too much to untangle and wrap around their heads.
They always saw it coming, but never saw it as it was coming. Why did they always dig each others’ graves, why did they always fight?
Aubrey looked at the clock across the hall: 2 minutes before lunch ends, class begins and the sight of people whizzing around the hallway fills up their focus instead.
It was 2 minutes before class began, and not only was Aubrey’s homework not complete, but it was practically crumpled from Kel’s rough touch.
Mutely, Kel handed Aubrey’s homework over to her.
She couldn’t see his eyes.
He handed her a stray pencil at the bottom of his backpack and pulled out his copy of the homework she needed to get done: everything was corrected, with all the right and wrong answers marked, since he already had that class in the morning.
He held it to her so she could read off of it and tilted his head towards the wall so she could write the right answers against it.
“Thanks....” Aubrey let go of the gust of wind she was holding for the moment Kel opened his mouth, deflated.
Kel still didn’t meet her eyes. But Aubrey wanted him to look her in the eyes, Aubrey wanted an answer from him.
Why was he being so nice all of a sudden? Why was he even mean in the first place? It scrambled her brain all up, and she needed more concentration to figure that out than her homework would ever need.
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***Baked by Starfood***