Bright Eyes

16. No One But Us

Damien sat on his seat, restless, barely listening to his classmate piecing together a puzzle of another classmate's face on the board, the latter standing next to the former in his own awkward silence. He and Lyn would be called soon, he knew. And he knew he would have to present first—Bautista comes before Taraschi. But he wasn't ready, didn't even prepare the printed output he was supposed to pass that day.

    He couldn't think of anything else but Cheryl. He spent yesterday sending her messages, apologizing, explaining why he did what he did. And when that didn't work, after hours passed without a reply, he tried calling her—once, twice, twenty times.

    And when he sat himself down to come up with an actual speech about Lyn, thoughts of Cheryl kept him distracted—How is she? Is she still mad at me? Does she want to break things off?—that he couldn't manage to type down anything good enough for his presentation. So he went to sleep at eight o'clock that evening, without a word on his Word document, thinking that he could wake up at three in the morning and type it all in and print it all out. But when the beeping of his phone alarm broke the nocturne silence, without a thought, he snoozed his alarm, and slept some more.

    "Bautista, Damien."

    Damien tore his gaze away from the front of the room, where no one now stood, and looked to the left, at Mrs. Chase.

    "It's your turn now," she went on to say.

    He rose from his seat, took one fleeting glance at Cheryl who refused to look at him, and walked over to the front.

    Mrs. Chase looked through her papers, flipping one page, one printed output after another. "Mister Bautista, where is your printed output?"

    "The printer in my dorm room didn't work yesterday and this morning," said Damien, with ease. "I tried, I really tried, Mrs. Chase, but the printer wouldn't cooperate with me. I'll give you the printed output next meeting."

    "With corresponding deductions to your score," said Mrs. Chase. "A five-point deduction per day of delay."

    "I'll leave it on your desk tomorrow," said Damien.

    Mrs. Chase gave off a quiet sigh, nodded, then said, "Start."

    "Adelina Taraschi," began Damien. "Lyn, as her family and friends call her. We all know her as one of the new kids in school, but you probably didn't know that I've known her for years. We go a long way back. We grew up together. She's a childhood friend. She's like a sister to me. We were neighbors. My family and I moved from California to Oregon when my dad and his business partners decided to put up a branch of their hotel and restaurant business in Portland. I was five when we moved next door to Lyn and her family. Then our parents became friends. We went to the same school, hung out in each other's houses on weekends and in the summer. Even back then, she was the quiet type. She likes to read, if you haven't noticed. She used to bring all these books to school—Harry Potter, Narnia, Matilda, and those other Ronald Doll books—"

    "Roald Dahl," corrected Lyn, her voice barely above a whisper. She kept her eyes on her desk, her finger drawing unseen images on the wooden surface.

    "—and read them over recess and lunch. She was this nerd, and I know she didn't like the label back when we were in middle school—"

    I don't care anymore, remarked Lyn, without a sound.

    "—and that it pissed her off because all our other classmates made fun of her for it. They also thought she was weird, too quiet, a loner. Then we went our separate ways when we went to high school. My mom, my sister, and I moved to somewhere else in the city."