W K H A A R T I ? S
2008-02-23 01:05:49 UTC
Part I: Three Months Before
Chapter 1
“Megan Doyle?”
I looked up from my doodle of a bird into the face of an unimaginably pale face with. The boy standing over my desk looked down at my drawing with curiosity in his wide, brown eyes. He had those dark circles that really fare people get under their eyes, and his dirty blonde/light brown hair was wild and messy around his slender, feminine face.
“Yeah?”
He held out his hand. “My name is Jacob Marks. Ms. Thompson put us together as lab partners.”
“What?” It was already February and even though I rarely paid attention in AP physics, I knew everyone in my class. Yet, I had never before seen Jacob Marks.
“I just moved here from Nebraska. Ms. Thompson paired me with you.” His eyes took on that wide, childish look again that made me uneasy, but I could tell that there was something different about him. Maybe he was just socially inept, or maybe it was something more serious, but the way he stood, his face so close to mine, his hair so ruffled, as if he just got out of bed, told me that something was up.
“Hey! Ok, lets get started!” I answered in an overly cheerful voice. “Um…what are we doing?” I whispered. Like I said, I rarely paid attention in Physics.
“I think we’re using magnets or something.” There was a black box sitting on our lab table and in it were five, carefully wrapped, horseshoe magnets. Next to it was a two page “Experiment Packet.”
Uggghhh. When was Rockwall High School going get more creative with stuff like this. I did this lab three times from
ages fourteen to sixteen. Well, I guess in Texas, all of the high school funding went to football instead of innovative lab activities. Oh well. I loved football, especially since my best friend in the world, Robert Andrew Michaels, became starting quarter-back for the Rockwall Yellow Jackets.
“Hey, I’ve done this lab a million times. I’ll just fill in the answers and you can work with the magnets,” I muttered to Jacob as I began writing in my signature, messy cursive on the familiar page. When he didn’t answer, I looked over to see him trying to force two repelling magnets together. Yep, there definitely was something different about this boy.
Different was fine by me though. It seemed that Rockwall was the same as any other bible-belt Southern town. Everyone was the same, friendly person as the next, and no one shared opinion or true emotion except for me and Robbie.
I scratched down the answers quickly enough that I had time to finish all my homework in class. Now I just had to entertain Jacob who, as was customary, would not receive homework until he had been here a week.
“So… Jacob…um…where did you live in Nebraska?”
“Lincoln, I think. Somewhere near a cornfield,” he chuckled with a nervous and obnoxious laugh that sounded more like a goose honking than any person.
Somewhere near a cornfield, you think? The whole freaking state is one gigantic cornfield! How could he not know where he lived for most of his life? I could feel the frustration start inside my stomach. I held very little patience for morons. ‘Stop it Meg’ I thought, ‘be nice’
“That’s cool. Why did you move to Rockwall?”
“My dad’s retarded job. He’s some kind of an account-tant or something.” He spoke with such forced annunciation; it was almost painful to listen to. You could tell he was trying to impress me. Something about this idea endeared him to me. He was trying to make me like him.
I smiled. “That must suck. I bet you had a lot of friends back in Lincoln…or where ever you came from.”
Once again, he started that same laugh at this comment. “I didn’t have any friends. No one liked me,” his once cheerful face changed glum in an instant. “No one ever really likes me.”
I don’t know what prompted me to say these next three words, but it was these word that would change my life forever.
“I like you.”
“Really?” His eyes were wide and genuinely excited.
“Yeah, really.”