Chapter One
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“Piper Reid.”
I was walking through the courtyard on a Tuesday afternoon, ready to hop on the bus and go home. It was fall, and my senior year at Victoria Butler had started about two weeks ago, which meant approximately 166 days left at this horrid place. I couldn’t wait to graduate and just get out of there, once and for all. I was sick of highschool and I felt out of place among the other moody acne factories struggling to find their ‘true selves’. I was a deep thinker, and I spent a lot of time wondering about the mysteries of the world. Nobody seemed to understand that about me.
And yet, on this beautifully cool Tuesday in September, I finally found someone who did.
I felt a firm hand on my right shoulder. I whirled around to face my confronter.
It was Emmett again. He was beaming down at me, his green eyes still alive like they were on the first day I met him, two weeks ago. He still sat next to me in English but we never had much time to talk until now.
“Emmett Keys.” I replied in a level tone, taking a step back and looking him up and down. I’m a little tall for my age, yes, but I was still much shorter compared to him.
“Nice to see you on this lovely day, Ms.Reid. How are you?” He sat down on a nearby bench, his hand resting across the back of it as he motioned for me to join him. I looked at him like he was crazy. What was he doing? I had a bus to catch.
“I’m...fine.” I tentatively sat down next to him. The shade from under the branches of the trees made things much cooler, and I sighed gratefully. He smiled that lopsided smile at me.
“Glad to hear it.” He said, leaning forward to rest his head on his hands. I watched him carefully. “What are you doing this afternoon?”
I stared at him for a moment, dumbfounded. Oh my god...he’s not... No. Why would he ask me out, of all people? I wasn’t anywhere near skinny, my brownish hair was hopelessly ensnared in frizzy tangles by noon no matter how much I tried to flatiron it, and my face was so full of freckles and moles and acne that I bet you could make a highly detailed topographic map of all the bumps and lumps on it. I shrugged anyway. “Taking the bus. Going home. Doing my homework. Writing an essay for Mrs.Anderson.”
He laughed. “What else?"
I shrugged again. “Eating a grilled cheese. Maybe reading a little. Sleeping for ten hours.”
His eyebrows furrowed, yet a smile was still on his face. “Well, that sounds awfully boring. Want to know what I’m doing?”
I raised one of my own eyebrows and crossed my arms over my chest. As if that sufficed as a yes, he clapped his hands together. “I’m going people watching.” He made it sound like it was the most interesting thing any one person could possibly do with their afternoon, and I almost burst out laughing. “You’re kidding.”
He shook his head, then unzipped his backpack, pulling something out. I leaned over his shoulder as he flipped open what appeared to be a sketchbook. “I do sketches. Of people. Like, random people I see out on the street. Kind of like that guy from the titanic.”
“Jack Dawson?” I looked up from a sketch of a man with a little girl sitting on his shoulders and across at him.
He laughed, flipping a page. “Yeah, except I don’t draw one-legged prostitutes. I will if I find one though.”
I raised my eyebrows at that. “So, you just go out...and draw these people?” I tilted my head to get a better look of a man in a three quarter turn with a cigarette between his fingers. It had a lot of detail─Emmett had even blended in the smoke coming off the cigarette and left the tip of it white so it looked like it was glowing.
He tilted his head back to look at me upside down, since I was standing on my knees to get a better look and he was leaning forward. “Yeah. And sometimes I take pictures. I like the metaphor of catching a snippet of someone’s life, because they’re never going to remember that moment you just caught, but you’ll have it forever.”
I stared at him again. “Where’d you get that? A quote book?”
He raised his eyebrows, his smile soft and sincere. “Nope. I just like metaphors.”
“Curious.” I said, mocking what he said on the first day I met him. He laughed again, his laugh loud, sharp, and spontaneous. “You remember that?”
I nodded. “Yeah. How could I forget? It’s the first time anyone’s voluntarily talked to me my whole entire three years and two weeks at this place.” I really never realized how easy it was to talk to people until now, since I really hadn’t tried before. And I never realized how much I needed to.
His smile fell. “What? Really?”
I shrugged. “Yeah. It’s no big deal. I’m fine with being a loner.”
“I noticed. I watch you all the time in English.” He raised his eyebrows again, his smile returning.
“Have you drawn me?”
“No, not yet. But I have a feeling we’ll be spending enough time together for me to have plenty of moments to choose from.”
“Why is that?” I could feel my eyebrows furrowing in confusion.
“Because you just missed your bus.” He nodded at the bus lot, just as the last of the long line of golden buses pulled away.
“Shit!” I shot up from my seat, digging my fingers into my hair. “Shit, shit, shit!”
“Hey,” He said as he stood up next to me. “Want to go people watching with me?”
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I wasn’t sure what exactly I was getting myself into when I slid into the passenger seat of Emmett’s old red convertible, I just knew that whatever nutjob thing we were about to do was probably better than whatever demons that were held within one of Mrs.Anderson’s writing prompts. And so I did anyway, and it was stupid, getting into a car with a mere stranger. But, thinking about it, he was the only teenager I knew that I exchanged more than a few words with voluntarily, so maybe that sufficed as a friend in my book. I don’t know.
He was friendly though, and I don’t know if he did this to everyone he met, but he treated me like I was already his friend. Which just made me want to be friends with him even more. Interesting tactic, I must say.
“Where are we going?” I asked once I had buckled my seatbelt and we were pulling out of the parking lot. He smiled sheepishly. “You’ll see.”
I’d never ridden in anyone’s convertible before─except for my aunt’s, but she usually kept the top up because an incident that happened a few years back that involved her getting hit in the head with a flying shoe. But boy, was it nice. Autumn leaves of all colors and shapes fell around us, chestnut brown and golden yellow and maple red, and the breeze pulled at my hair, whisking it back out of my face. It smelled like Fall, and although my favorite season is Spring, I liked it.
Emmett took his eyes off the road and looked over me, fastening his green gaze on mine. “Remarkable, huh?”
“That’s one word to describe it.” I said over the sound of the wind whipping past us, laughing because the moment was so beautiful, and my usual crappy afternoon mood had dissolved.
