February

Approaching St. Valentine's I

He was not in a classroom and there was a girl smiling at him.

He was not in a classroom and there was a girl smiling at him, and he hadn’t a clue who she was. Come to think of it, he doubted that she was even in any of his classes from either the past or the recent quarter.

Zach scrutinized the girl. She looked like the cheerleader-sort, from the top of her curly gold head to the bottom of her be-glittered, flared jeans. She was also appeared to be smiling at him expectantly. Zach considered the situation, formulated a hypothesis, and looked over his shoulder.

There was no one else there.

The girl’s smile widened, and Zach regarded her warily. After growing up with five different cousins, three of them female and two of them younger than him, he knew he had a good reason to be nervous whenever a girl smiled at him like that.

“Hi,” she said, apparently coming to the conclusion that he wasn’t about to do anything. “I’m Leslie. Mind if I eat with you?”

“If you would like to,” replied Zach, eyebrows rising with bemusement. “And…nice to meet you?”

“Yeah, nice to meet you,” she grinned, teeth very white and shiny, and set her tray of food down across from him. Zach tried not to stare. It was an unusually chilly day for early February and she was wearing a tank-top. He recalled Mike’s email and wondered vaguely if this girl also came from Minnesota. “So…do you usually come here?”

When my friends haven’t dragged me off elsewhere, thought Zach. “Usually,” he answered, watching the girl toy with her necklace. It was a gold heart. On a chain. He wondered at the cliché symbolism of it. As someone who had trained himself to be watchful of other’s moods and wills, he found the girl’s body language very distracting. It was incredibly loud for something that had no volume, and also incredibly unsubtle even though he still didn’t know what she was trying to get at, exactly.

“So, you’re Mike’s friend, right?” She asked, with a brief upward glance at him, eyes blue through mascara-darkened lashes. Suddenly Zach realized exactly what she was after or rather, who she was after, and bit his tongue.

“Mmph,” he said, attempting a polite, non-committal response.

“Do you, um, know if he’s going out with anyone right now?”

…And there it was.

Zach cleared his throat nervously. It would be so easy to lie, and Mike, no doubt, would appreciate it. Even so, Zach couldn’t quite convince himself that he had the full justification for it. On the other hand, he also knew exactly what Mike’s current opinion was on the female population of this school, and knew that it definitely would not be appreciated if he told the girl that no, Mike was, in fact, not going out with anyone right now. He settled for the most diplomatic answer.

“I don’t think Michael is …currently available right now,” he said carefully.

The girl’s very white and shiny smile wavered only for an instant, but she carried on very smoothly. “Oh…right. Um. What about his other friend. The tall one?”

What an opportunist, thought Zach with some shock. “Nicolas?” he was getting rather good at this. “He’ll probably just show you a picture of his girlfriend. From France.” He added, just to nail the point home, and then some, because he had decided that he didn’t like the What-About-His-Other-Friend-Leslie.

“Er. Oh okay. Thanks.” She picked at her plate which, Zach noted, contained only plain salad, without dressing, and was only about a quarter full. They sat for a few moments in silence.

Now that Zach knew what she was after, and had a fairly good idea of who he was dealing with, he felt no obligation to attempt to carry on the conversation and decided to let the girl fend for herself.

“Um.” The girl attempted finally, giving up. “I’ll see you around?”

Zach, from the nervous sideways glances and the lacing of the fingers, translated: Let’s never, ever bring this up again, okay?

“Okay,” said Zach. “Nice to meet you.”

She gave him another smile, this time with more awkwardness than anything else, and bolted. Later, while leaving the dining commons, Zach passed her, surrounded by a group of her giggly friends, saw her panicked look when she saw him, and decided to be nice and wander the other way.

It was February, the second month of the year. It was February and the number ‘two’ seemed to do strange and unexplainable things to the hormone levels of his fellow students, both genders alike. Zach, thinking over what had just happened, realized that he should get used to it, because this was only his first year at college with his friends, and this way lays all the Februaries of the future.

...

February, recalled Nick, was a time when the female half of the population seemed to get very friendly, in an alarming sort of way. The last two years he had simply avoided the awkwardness by having a girlfriend which, he admitted, was convenient on St. Valentine’s day but, on the whole, proved to be much more than he could handle. He’d wanted the friend part more than the girlfriend part, and unlike her, had had no intentions of settling down and marrying any time within the next two years (que effrayant!). That had ended the progressively more one-sided relationship and Nicolas Lucille thought that he had had quite enough of girls for the time being, thank you very much. Therefore, when the girl with nut-coloured hair who sat across from him during chemistry labs smiled slightly too much and attempted to carry conversations with random (and badly pronounced) French vocabularies mixed in, Nick, recalling that the fourteenth of February was now less than fourteen days away, became somewhat nervous.

But it was either going to the chemistry labs or getting repeatedly marked down for missing and making up more than three late labs, and Nick was a good student which meant that, if nothing else, that he was a dutiful one. So he went to the labs, and was unfailingly polite to everyone, and did his best to avoid being cornered into any conversations that might inevitably lead up to the dreaded date of February the fourteenth. And so when the girl smiled at him over the vapours of strange boiling substances and crystalline gleams of fifty millilitre burettes and asked him if he was busy that weekend he smiled back, painstakingly polite as always, said ‘yes’, and thanked the heavens that he had friends. Male friends. Who have a life and do things on weekends.

He was thankful enough even to feel a mild tolerance at first, when Mike passed by the park and decided that climbing That Tree Over There would be a good idea—a tolerance that quickly diminished when Mike continued to climb up past what Nick was sure to be the safety level of the weight-supporting abilities of the tree limbs…and kept on going. Up.

“Mike, you’re going to break your neck!”

Rustling shadows and scorn, not unmixed with exasperated amusement. “No I’m not.”

“Yes you are!” He tried to peer upwards into the bewildering sway of leaves and millions of tiny suns dancing among the boughs. It was a sunny day and the sun was currently not helping him.

“No I’m not.” Another foot. Nick made an alarmed noise. “Nick, I’m not going to break my neck!”

The branches bending a little more under the unusual pressure, forming perfect bows, graceful even under the strain. Nick would’ve admired them a lot more had he not know and were not worried about the cause of the strain. He actually felt the prickling along the back of his neck, from sheer nerves. “By the time you break it it’ll be too late! Descendres!”

“Non, mère!”

“Um, Mike, that’s high enough now,” suggested Gary nervously, squinting upward.

“Agreed.” Zach took a stand. “Do come down, Mike, and stop abusing that poor tree.”

He stared down at them for a moment, perched precariously on a tree limp, narrow face unreadable, and huffed. “You guys suck.”

“So does gravity,” replied Zach, affably, “And the life of that tree, as of this moment.”

“Since when are you such a tree-lover?” Mike made a face, but he eventually descended the crucial few feet that was causing Nick’s innards to try to take evasive action and sat on a lower branch, dangling his legs and regarding the rest of them with the aggravated look of six-year old who’d just been told that no, he was not allowed to play with matches. “I wasn’t even doing anything!”

“Well…refrais ça et tu es consigné! No…TV, for a week.” Annouced Nick, jokingly. Jokingly, because he knew—and he knew that Mike knew it too—that he hated confrontations and therefore would never be able to carry out his threats, such as grounding his friend, which he wouldn’t know how to do anyway since back at home it was always mother who dealt with his sister when she misbehaved.

Mike stuck out his tongue at him and Nick, always happy with nonverbal arguments, responded likewise.

“They’re so mature,” sighed Gary.

“Teenagers,” agreed Zach sagely, just as Mike started to pick off leaves randomly to flick them at Nick.

Across the street, among the various shops, the increasingly alarming shades of pink continued to appear.

[All romantic details are provided by my various floormates, for this and possibly any of the future posts that may involve romantic details. Muchas gracias, even if they don't read this. Or have any idea that I'm indirectly using the information that they're supplying.]

[edit: 13:00]
Lucy, you're loosing your touch...Kate beat you to the beta-ing. o_O

And right, Kate, I'll ...keep trying. Though the guys that I'm currently living around seem to hug more than what's normal for the general male population, (I'm serious, Molly was complaining about this guy who kept hugging him) but I'm guessing it's another Miller hall thing (I'll just observe the guys at work instead).

[edit: 22:04]
Got it, Lucy. And...I'm really not sure if I should congratulate you on finding my writing mistakes. Something about that doesn't seem quite right, you know? =p