Another excerpt

I think maybe I'll do one more...then, you know, keep attempting to finish it...thanks for the compliments Anne, I really appreciate it. :) As Terry would say, here we go again:


I woke up sputtering. Something had been dumped on my face, as if I had inhaled a sponge full of water. I coughed and shook my head, sitting up to quickly and feeling it in my pounding headache, which became worse as everything came flooding back to me.

I groaned and rubbed my eyes before opening them. I hadn’t been dreaming. My face was soaked, as was most of my upper body. I blinked away the water that had crept in through the corner of my eyes, and saw a figure that slowly swam into view. First a person, then a boy, then I recognized the boy from before, holding a water bottle and looking guilty again.

I coughed again. Well, it had woken me up. “I don’t know whether to thank you, or seriously injure you,” I sputtered, saying the first thing that came to my mind. That was a little more violent than I usually was, but, after the day I had had, I was tired. It was taking most of my strength not to think about it and that little part of your brain that usually filters out the bad stuff to keep you from being seen as a jerk to all the people around you, just wasn’t working at the moment.

The boy jerked back, and, from what his face said, it was half from surprise and half from fear that I would actually lay a finger on him. Sure, I was strong between and dancing and tennis, but the most damage I had ever done with either of those was accidently whack the substitute gym teacher in the nose with a rogue tennis ball.

“I’m sorry,” he ducked his head, hiding behind his hair. “I just wanted to make sure that you were…you know, okay.”

I knitted my eyebrows together. Seriously. I had to be a few inches shorter than him…well, probably. Did he really think that I was going to hurt him for helping me? “I was just kidding, you know,” I assured him.

His head stayed down except for a very fleeting second where he flicked his eyes up at me, saw me still there, still looking at him and quickly glanced back down. “Oh…yeah, right. I knew that,” he said, though I didn’t believe him at all.

“You can look at me,” I told him, feeling like a school teacher giving permission for a kid to go to the bathroom. “If you want.”

Faster than I was running earlier, his head snapped up, knocking his glasses askew in the process. He turned red, fixed his glasses and then stared at the space right above my head. He just nodded. Then was silent.

I looked at the boy, not exactly sure what to make of him. Where had he come from? And hadn’t my grandma said not to trust anyone? I looked at him harder. His face was still pink and I could see him trying to think something up to say. He looked pretty trustworthy to me.

“I can leave if you want,” he suddenly blurted, looking me in the eye for about three seconds and then staring back at his shoes. His face was changing colour faster than I had ever seen anyone’s do before.

“How do you do that with your face?” I asked. Okay, so, maybe not the best question to ask a stranger, but it fascinated me at the time. Besides, he was the only live company besides the squirrel I’d had in what felt like eons.

“What? What’s wrong with my face?” he asked, putting his hands on his cheeks quickly. He looked up at me and actually managed to hold my gaze which I had never known could be so frightening to a person before today.

“Nothing! You’re just…” I giggled a little, in spite of the situation. “You keep turning red, and then pink and then normal and then red again so fast.”

At this, the boy turned even redder than I had ever seen before. I smiled and laughed. It felt good to laugh. Everything had gone so serious all of a sudden…it’s true what they say, about laughter being the best medicine. It helped ease the pain of loss, and of discovery. I couldn’t tell which one was worse.
“So,” I prompted, sitting back off my knees and crossing my legs. “What’s your name?”

He was quiet. He looked at me curiously for a little while. “My name?” he asked, as if he had never heard the words before in his life.
“Um…yeah,” I replied, rubbing the back of my neck a little awkwardly. “You know. My name’s Cincinnati, but all my friends call me Cinni.” He just looked at me.

“Cinni…” he finally whispered.

“Uh, yeah. That’s my name. What is your name?” I said it really slowly, so that maybe he’d finally respond. Okay, so maybe I wasn’t the best person the in the world at reading people because right now, he wasn’t exactly acting like a normal human being.

“My name?” he asked, yet again. “Oh. My name.”

“Yes,” I nodded and pointed at him. “Your name. What is it?” I felt like a caveman. If he was going to act like this all the time, I was going to have to dump him off at a gas station somewhere along the way to Nowhereville which was where I was basically going at the time.

“Salem,” Salem said, putting out his hand. “Salem O’Connell.”

I took his in mine. “Cincinnati Kliene, but you can call me Cinni,” I repeated for his sake.

When he pulled his hand away from mine, he looked at it in wonder. I raised an eyebrow at him. Finally, he moved again, pushing up his glasses. “Like Calvin Klein?”

I looked at him for a few seconds and then chuckled, then totally burst out laughing. I didn’t know exactly what was so funny about his comment, but it totally set me off. He obviously didn’t get why I was laughing so hard either because he just looked at me strange and kind of smiled. “You have a nice laugh,” he told me when I finally managed to stop and catch my breath. “What was so funny, though?”

I decided to ignore his comment about my laugh (which I was inclined to dislike considering it tended to involve quite a bit of unintentional snorting,) and shrugged. “I guess it’s just that most boys have no clue who Calvin Klein is.”

“Oh,” he muttered, sounding kind of dejected. His hair fell in his face, and he looked a little like a kicked puppy or a sullen anime character. “Sorry. My Mom asks for Calvin Klein stuff for Christmas all the time.”

“No! No, don’t think-It’s not bad, it’s just…”I struggled to find word. “Different.”

“Good different or bad different?” he asked, pushing his bangs off his forehead and back into order, swept across to his ear.

I squinted at him. “Good different.”