REM // Van McCann

24. Why'd You Ask?

I've known her for months now and saw her as a friend for most of it, and then one day, it just clicked that I enjoyed her company. Seeing her once a week wasn't enough; I wanted to be with her all the time but I held back. What if she doesn't like me back? Our friendship was too important to lose.

I'm quite boastful when in love, loving to court and be courted. I've had past girlfriends tell me I can be overbearing at times which caused me to be self-conscious in how I express myself. I'm much better than I was before but still come on quite strong.

Clara is the opposite of me—quiet and shy. If she knew how I truly felt, she'll run for the hills. Despite being a sensitive, fragile person, she often holds back so it's difficult to tell how she feels about me. Luckily, I knew how to elicit a response from her and I can lay on the flirting.

It was Monday, the day of her interview. I wasn't sure what time her interview was so I texted her in the morning wishing her good luck.

Good luck on your interview. x

Despite us having each other's number, we don't call or text each other often. There was really no need to as we always had things figured out. Our driving lessons were always on Saturday around 3 PM.

On Mondays, I have calculus in the morning and computer programming in the afternoon. Despite only having two lectures today, I still have a full day's worth of reading and assignments to do. After my calculus lecture, I went to the library to work on my homework for computer programming. Even though we only had five problems, each question was a bitch to solve. I was trying to write the code for a random password generator and got to work, defining lowercase and uppercase characters along with numbers and special characters.

import random

LOWERCASE_CHARS = tuple(map(chr, xrange(ord('a'), ord('z')+1)))
UPPERCASE_CHARS = tuple(map(chr, xrange(ord('A'), ord('Z')+1)))
DIGITS = tuple(map(str, range(0, 10)))
SPECIALS = ('!', '@', '#', '$', '%', '^', '&', '*')

SEQUENCE = (LOWERCASE_CHARS,
                           UPPERCASE_CHARS,
                           DIGITS,
                           SPECIALS,
                            )

It was noon so I decided to stop before I got too into it or else I'll miss lunch and have to go to lecture hungry. Clara hadn't replied to my text which was unusual. She's usually more responsive but perhaps she was nervous and avoiding distractions. I stared at the screen wondering if I should send another text but decided against it as I didn't want to be too pushy. She'll reply when she wants to. I couldn't focus on what my professor was saying because my mind always wandered back to Clara. To make up for it, I read the textbook and tried to make sense of my notes.

It wasn't until dinner that I knew something was wrong. The interview should be done by now and it shouldn't be too much of a hassle to text me how it went. A simple "it went well" would've sufficed but there was nothing from her. Perhaps she was still upset at me for asking joke interview questions.

I had fallen asleep on the couch and my phone was vibrating with an incoming call. I sat up, looking for my phone which was on the floor and was quick to answer it as I knew the person was almost going to voicemail.

"Hello?" I asked.

"It's me—Clara. Sorry for missing your text message. My phone died and I had to go to my interview. We didn't have time to get a new phone until later." She was out of breath trying to explain the whole situation but I honestly didn't mind. I was happy she wasn't upset at me.

"Don't worry about it. I just wanted to wish you good luck. How'd it go?"

"It went well until they asked me a question that caught me off guard. I panicked and answered without thinking and looking back, I realized my answer wasn't the best." You could tell by her tone that she was upset about it and despite everything else going well, she was beating herself up for it.