Jude Anderson Cusses Out God for a Relatively Small Inconvience.
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JUDE SKIPPED A stair with each step up the staircase, and, with each step, something on the side of her hip pulled, but she ignored it. Which, of course, was a really intelligent thing to do. Instead of checking it out, she knocked on the door to Cal's room and peeked her head around the door that was open just a few inches. Inside, Dustin was pulling sheets over Cal's air mattress.
"Got everything?" Jude asked.
Dustin looked up and then held up a pillow that was laying on the floor beside him, "Yep."
"If you need anything, just... holler, I guess," Jude said, tapping on the door twice as she spun on her heel. She slid across the hallway floor in her socks. She was going to continue past the door of her bedroom and make sure Steve had found the guest room alright and everything, but she accidentally hit her hip on an old piece of furniture that was her great-great-grandmother's. Jude wasn't even sure what the wooden thing was, but her dad liked to keep it in the upstairs hallways for sentimental reasons, probably. So, she hit her hip on the furniture because she wasn't paying attention, and Holy Hell. She must have the most gigantic bruise known to mankind because ouch.
With a hand on her hip, she shuffled into her bedroom, and moved to flick on the light, not realizing that it was already on, so she plunged the room into darkness instead.
"Ope," Steve's voice said from inside the room.
Jude flipped the light switch back on, "What are you doing in here?"
He was standing in front of her desk, staring at her corkboard. Her corkboard of all her favorite buildings. The Notre Dame Cathedral for French Gothic, obviously. The crossing of Santa Maria della Crazie in Milan for Renaissance, duh. But Jude knew that she kept a polaroid of her, Daphne, and Nick pinned up right over a floor plan she had drawn her sophomore year that went to the state fine arts show. She also knew that tucked behind those two things, the paper and the polaroid, was another photograph. Tucked strategically so that the photo was completely hidden, but if Jude looked at it specifically, she could see that it was there. Inarguably there.
The photo in question was of Jude's eighth grade Snow Ball. Or, right before it, anyway. Her dad had left that morning for a long weekend business trip of schmoozing authors and treating them out to the most expensive restaurants in Chicago. But, Steve's mom was home and drove them to the school. Steve's parents weren't big picture-takers, but Anthony had called the Harringtons' house phone from his office asking for a photo. So, it was a photo of the two of them, arms thrown over each other's shoulders in front of the Harringtons' front door.
Jude had her hair down for once in her entire middle school career, and she was wearing a dress. It was red and white plaid with a white collar and white cuffs on the short sleeves. The skirt puffed out around her legs, and she felt pretty. Jude always had thought herself to be plain looking, but she felt beautiful. For that night, anyway. Steve was wearing a really ugly tweed suit that his parents probably picked out without his input, but Jude had told him he looked great.
