Crashing Into Blue

Chapter 23

When I get home from the bluffs, windswept and fluttering much to my chagrin, I make my way upstairs to my room, and when I open the door I am greeted by the sight of Indigo lying on my bed, riffling through my diary. As I shut the door behind me, her head pops out from behind the book.

"You haven't written anything in here since we were eleven," she says to me, almost accusingly.

I nod along with her, making my way to the laundry hamper to throw my socks into.

"Yeah, that's when I finally figured out that you had been reading it."

"Damn, I always thought I was subtle."

I walk towards her bed, and I lie down on top of her comforter. I automatically feel my muscles relax as I sink into the down.

"You wrote comments in the margins," I say as she drops my diary and turns to face me.

"Well, I didn't think you would read back on past entries."

She throws the diary back at me, and I hug it tightly against my chest. Indigo sits up on my bed and does a quick scan of my tousled bun, flushed skin, and grass stained hands, and she smiles slowly, a Cheshire cat sort of grin, really.

"Were you at the bluffs with someone?"

Seriously, sometimes that twin connection really freaks me out. Is there a way to turn it off?

I avoid looking at her, and I decide to make eye contact with our popcorn ceiling.

"Maybe," I say.

I hear her lean forward. "So, that's a yes; the real question is with who."

I think back to Samson beside me on the grass, his fingertips light and sure. "Samson," I say quickly without looking at Indigo.

There's silence from the peanut gallery, and then: "Hold on a second; did you say Samson or did I momentarily lapse into insanity?"

When I don't comfort her with reassuring words confirming my insanity, she races from my bed back to her own, and slams right into me, making my funny bone twinge. She shakes my shoulders vigorously.

"Are you kidding? Are you starting to have feelings for your fake boyfriend, the guy who's been there all along? How cliché can you get!"

I grab her arms so she stops shaking me.

"Rattling my brain isn't going to help me!"

"It might, maybe we have to rearrange some of the neuronal connections up there."

I sit up so that we're face to face. I'm still holding onto her arms, and she's still holding on to my shoulders. I can feel all the questions bubbling up in her mind, she's practically vibrating from holding it all in. So I put her out of her misery.

At the end of my tale, her eyes are wide. She bites at her bottom lip while she thinks. It goes from white back to pink.

"I just... can't believe it," she says to me slowly.

I laugh gruffly. "Neither can I, if I'm being honest. I mean it's probably nothing, I'm just getting caught up in the situation and Samson is better at faking it than I thought he would be. I mean, it's Samson."

She snorts. "Right? Like seriously. He's the guy who stole the pad out of your sleeve when we were fourteen and asked you point blank if your Aunt Flo finally graced you with her first visit. And may I add this was in front of an entire movie theatre. A full one, at that."

I cringe at the thought. We were watching some superhero franchise movie that Samson was totally into at the time (Indigo and I were there more to gawk at the male eye candy) but as I left to go to the washroom before the movie started, thinking I sneaked the pad into my sleeve with complete stealth and not too much of a crinkly sound, Samson grabbed my padded wrist, and yanked out my bright orange pad packet. Even later on when the movie theatre lights turned off, I was still mortified.

"You're probably just in guy overload," Indigo says to me, but I feel like she may just be thinking out loud and I'm in the vicinity of her thoughts. "Maybe playing Patrick and acting like a couple with Samson is confusing you. You don't know which way to shoot your antennae."

I raise an eyebrow at her. "You know what I mean," she says to me. "You've been receiving a lot of content from both of these guys and you don't know which way to go. You're experiencing static."

"Static?" I ask her.

"Static, interference, whatever you want to call it. Everything is coming in hazy from all directions."

I feel myself agreeing with what Indigo is saying. I mean, I've been thrown a lot of left fielders from these guys lately, and I feel like I've been left spinning around aimlessly. My mind is jumping from Patrick to Samson and back again. When did I become the center of guy drama? I think to myself. This is more Indigo's field of expertise; she's had her fair share of admirers and dates and casual hookups over the years, and all I've ever had was Patrick and Samson, the latter I've never even had an inkling of a romantic feeling for before this summer. What has changed?

Indigo hops off my bed and makes her way to our dressers.

"I think I know what will help you," she says while looking for something in one of our drawers.

"What? A lobotomy, perhaps?" I ask her sarcastically.

"A change, yes, but not an anatomical one, more of a scenic one," she says vaguely.

"What does that even mean?" I ask her as she holds up my palm tree bikini bottoms and the matching halter bikini top.

"It means that tomorrow is a no-boys allowed beach day."