Confessions of a Teenage Caffeine Addict

4 // When to Strut

I will never regret you or say that I wish I'd never met you,

because once upon a time, you were everything I needed.

_____________________________________

JAKE

DECEMBER // WEEK 1

I ran out of the coffee shop like I had just met a demon trying to rip my life apart and feed its remains to wolves. My body was out of control, like I'd just finished running Breakfast Club Sprints, Coach Hawthorne's favorite form of torture. They're called Breakfast Club sprints because he got the evil idea that if by the end of it, your breakfast hasn't reappeared, full form, smack in the middle of the ice—you're not working hard enough. Practices with these tend to occur in the afternoon, so as to not confuse our sweat and tears with indigestion.

Coach has never let us stop, not even when A-Mart passed out after he threw up twice. There was that time when Derek was gonna have a Mr. Hawthorne-induced asthma attack, and Coach made us run harder. It's like sports induced asthma, except Mr. Hawthorne was the sole reason. Sometimes I wondered if he walked out on his wife and kid, or if they kicked him out because he was downright awful husband and father. These were the thoughts that plagued my mind as I drove all the way over to the next town to get Jules her damn peppermint coffee and everything else that she wanted.

There was no way in hell that I was going back into Blackie's, not after I had just made out with some chick in a bathroom who had spilled coffee all over me. My night was almost as bad as Osama's when the MI-6's found him, but what made it worse was that she noticed. I pulled into the parking lot of Beaned Up and let out a slow breath. I got Jules's coffee and thanked Wayne Gretzky for guiding me to coffee shop that was open at 4am... without girls who accidentally spill their coffee all over me and just happen to go to my high school.

I thankfully remembered to park my truck in Derek's driveway, which was a few houses down from Jules's. One time, I slept over Jules's house and forgot to park my truck in Derek's driveway. I thought her dad was going to come into her room and strangle me with his brand new tie that his boss gave him. I was thoroughly shocked that Jules's dad had job where people wore ties, or that he even had a job to begin with, because I mean... have you seen her dad? He looked like he could be a professional redneck, and on his off days, he would make the perfect hustler at a pool bar.

I was so grateful that Jules was nothing like her dad, or her mother for that fact. Her mom was a stripper—no, exotic dancer—at Joe's, the local bar down town. Jules's mom took her to the bar with her for her shifts when she was little because her father worked late nights. I guess she picked up a few dance moves along the way... Okay, so Jules had a tendency to dance on tables at parties and take her clothes off, but that didn't mean she would end up like her mother. She'd better not.

I climbed up the tree quite skillfully for holding coffee and a bag of scones in one hand, but then again, I was Jake Roswell, so there wasn't a lot of things I was bad at. Why didn't I just get one scone? Because it was way easier having extras instead of driving to the next town again to get Jules another one. Another outstanding characteristic of my charming girlfriend, was that she was very indecisive, so she tended to change her mind about forty-seven times. I learned my lesson the hard way: one time, I only got Jules one strawberry smoothie... Her response to that was to leave claw marks all over arm because I didn't know she wanted another one for lunch. She was on some health cleanse or something. Her whole cleanse thing was kind of shot to hell that night when she decided to go to A-Mart's party and drink her weight in alcohol. When the guys on the team saw my arm on Monday, they just assumed that Jules liked it rough. There was no way in hell I told them the real truth.