Lighting a Match in the Rain

Chapter Five

"Girl, I don't know how to flirt!" Macey shouted dramatically, slamming my car's passenger door closed. "Am I just going to have to stare at him until he marries me?" Fear etched across her eyes. "Ella, that might take a while."

I remained in the driver's seat, letting the car idle and waste the gas or battery or whatever the car was running on at that moment. Cars were one of the few things I knew nothing about. "Macey, you are going to have to make a move if you want something to happen. Boys your age are chickens."

An ugly groaned whine escaped her lips, making me question her humanity. "Ugh, Ella, why is life so hard!"

I rolled my eyes and shifted my car into reverse, keeping my foot on the break. There were much bigger problems in this world than her boy nervousness. "Go. Skedaddle. And tell mom where I'm going." As I started backing out of the driveway, she finally listened and raced inside. I could only hope she wouldn't go in and dramatize to our mother that I was going to a boy's house. And what would mom end up telling my dad when he got home? I'd be six feet under. Either that or they'd both be congratulating me on getting myself out there. With them being so laid back, the latter option was most likely, but I still didn't want to take the chance. A small part of me hoped that this would be the time that they would step up and create some ground rules. Because there have been absolutely none before.

It took me fifteen minutes to drive to Julian's house and when I pulled into the gravel driveway, I was surprised. I wasn't really sure what I had expected but his house was very minimalistic and modern. The one-story building had white siding and navy-blue shudders, a simple, small porch, and a porch swing. Parking my car behind what I assumed was Julian's black car, I grabbed my backpack and walked up the porch steps. The door swung open before I could even get close enough to raise my hand to knock, revealing my friend's smiling face.

He was wearing basketball shorts and a T-shirt which was different from the usual washed-out jeans that I usually saw him wearing at school. A cell phone was held to his ear, and he just waved me in before turning back in the house. My feet moved quickly to follow him in, and I closed the door behind us. "Alright, thanks, bye," he said, ending the phone call. Inside his house was just like the outside: simplistic and neat. "My mom is picking up extra hours at work this evening, so I went ahead and ordered a pizza. Hope you like pepperoni."

"Who doesn't like pepperoni?" I replied, following him into a small gathering room with an open floor and a sage-green loveseat.

He grabbed his forest-green backpack from beside the loveseat and plopped down in the middle of the floor, so I followed his actions. We both grabbed notebooks and pens, me of course grabbing multiple different colored ones because writing things down is more fun when it's organized in pretty colors. "Okay, so I've been thinking," he started immediately flipping to a page that was already scattered with information. He had an early start with all his ideas sprawled out on a page. But I couldn't say anything because thought he had one, I had multiple pages of ideas already jotted down in blues, pinks, and purples. "We can get a list of every student's name from the principal and go find the students that we don't recognize to talk to them."

Staring at him blankly, I finally furrowed my eyebrows. "How do you plan on convincing Principle Laken to even give you the list?" I'm sure there's some important protocol for not giving random people a list containing every student's name.

"You," Julian answered simply, crossing his legs, and setting his notebook in his lap before leaning back on his arms. "You are close with him, or at least on good terms. And as class president, I'm sure you can pull some strings."

I rolled my eyes but felt pride that he called me the class president. "I'm not the president."

"Yet," he corrected. "Everyone knows it's going to be you. Reputations, remember?"