How You Get the Girl

I Take a Chance

On Tuesday afternoon I was back at Ben's house. It was getting to the point where I was over at his house almost as much as I was at my own. Between working on our project, our math tutoring sessions, and my new friendships with Kenzie, I spent a lot of time there. The kitchen construction project at my house meant we could never meet at my house. My parents had a strict, no boys on the second-floor rule, so I could not have Ben over. The only place we could have worked on our game was in my bedroom and my parents would have flipped out.

Ben had turned out to be a really good math tutor. He was very patient about explaining things and I had actually gotten a B on my most recent test. My mom had still not found me a new permanent math tutor and I was not pushing her to do it as hard as I could have. I liked having the excuse to spend more time with Ben. I could not believe he had been nice enough to help me out. But I needed to remind myself it did not mean anything. He was just a really nice guy.

Kenzie and I were sitting in her bedroom. Ben and I were meeting at their house in an hour to work on the game but he had had a math team practice after school. I had given Kenzie a ride home since it seemed silly for me to go home for such a short time and Kenzie hated waiting around after school for Ben. It also gave us a chance to hang out without him.

Kenzie and I had discovered a mutual love of Harry Potter and Tolkien a few weeks ago when I had spotted a Platform 9 ¾ pillow on one of the chairs in her room. We were both Fantasy fiction fangirls.

I was a little worried that Kenzie and Ben's parents might get sick of me spending so much time at his house but his mom always seemed genuinely glad to have me there. She smiled at me, asked me how school was going and talked to me about my art. I had started to show her pictures from my sketchbook and photos of my paintings that I had on my phone. Even his dad was nice, but I did not see much of him. He was not home a lot. I finally asked Kenzie why their mom seemed so okay with having me there all the time.

"Are you kidding? My mom loves us having friends over. She was worried when we moved here last year that she had ruined our lives moving us in the middle of high school. She was especially worried about Ben because he's so quiet and they were moving him as a junior but it's worked out just fine for him. If anything, his social life's better here than it was at our last school," Kenzie said.

"I'm glad she's not sick of me," I told her. Then I heard Ben talking to his mom downstairs. "Sounds like Ben's home. I should go work on our project. See you later Kenzie," I told her, relieved to escape.

"See you later," she said.

I left Kenzie's room and met Ben walking down the hall. "Are you ready to get to work?" I asked him.

"Sure," he said.

We went into his room, got our computers and we got to work. Unfortunately, I had trouble with the game engine that day so Ben ended up sitting next to me on the loveseat trying figure out what was going wrong. Normally I could get things right once Ben had explained them to me but today, nothing I did worked. Finally, Ben hunted down what the glitch was. It was in the code, not in what I was doing. Which was a relief. I liked to think I had the basics down at this point. If I could not drag and drop things I was a total idiot. While Ben straightened things out, I pulled up my animation program. I might as well work on the part I was actually good at.

I tried to concentrate on the spaceship I was animating. I was excited about my design but I had picked a challenging one. If it had just been a simple wedge or sphere, having it rotate would be easy. Having added tentacle-like protrusions and a grayscale color pallet made it much more challenging. Way to get ambitious Harper, I thought to myself. You'd be done already if you had just done a knock off of every other video game on the planet. Were you, maybe trying to impress someone? And it did not help that Ben was sitting so close to me. His arm kept brushing against mine and I could smell a faint hint of body wash or cologne again. Whatever it was, it smelled spicy and was very distracting. I closed my eyes. Get a grip on it girl, I told myself. Sniffing your friend is just weird.