Growing Pains

Chapter 27 - I had to apologize

L U K E

I had been avoiding Daisy. This was easy because she was avoiding me too. I was sure we could go on avoiding each other for the rest of the school year, at which point we would hopefully go to college in different cities, and never see each other again, thus making actively avoiding each other no longer necessary. I was sure and yet I couldn't avoid her anymore. I had to apologize.

I had apologized the morning after already, when I found her sleeping by the foot of my bed, and after she told me she had come in because she had heard me scream in the middle of the night. I had been having a nightmare, the same nightmare I always had, and after failing to wake me out of it, she had also failed to go back to sleep on the couch because I had grabbed her and refused to let go.

This was new. I had done plenty of strange things during my nightmares over the years, but never anything that included other people. Mostly I walked in my sleep, which often led to me falling down the stairs, or making it down and into the kitchen, which, in turn, often led to me fighting the air with a steak knife, sometimes a butter knife. These and many others had been the reason dad had started locking my bedroom door at night. I had jumped out of the window a few nights after that, but dad had taken care of locking that up from the outside too.

Daisy hadn't accepted my apologies that morning. She said it was just a nightmare, that it happened to the best of us. I was not the best of us, so that made no sense, but I hadn't known what else to say, and so I had hidden in the bathroom for a while, and eventually she had gone home, leaving behind only a thank you note with the words, let's just forget about it.

This proved to be harder than expected when a few days later I noticed I had left a bruise on her wrist. A bruise. I had grabbed her so hard for so long that I had bruised her. I had to apologize. Again.

Lunch break was about to end. I had finished my pizza slice sitting in the back of the school's kitchen, courtesy of Aida, who had let me hide there on the account of me being a good boy. I saw Daisy on the way to my locker, her bright pink shirt hard to miss by the stairs that led to the first floor.

"Hi," I tried. I had practiced this on the way to her, but my voice had broken down somewhere between the h and the i, something I didn't think was possible.

She looked up from her phone and smiled awkwardly, "Hi Luke."

"I've been avoiding you." I hadn't planned to say this.

"So have I," she admitted, putting her phone in the back pocket of her jeans. "But that's not new, is it?"

I smiled, "No, it's not."

"Right, so what's the problem?" she went on, the smile revindicating itself, "Cause I was reading a really good fanfic–"

"I'm sorry," I stopped her. This was nothing like what I had planned. "I wanted to say sorry again. I– I saw the bruise on your wrist. That was me, right? That night–"

"What bruise?" she asked, like a good liar. "Look, you need to get over yourself. I saw you in gym class. You can't even do a push up–"

"I can do a push up."

"Not a very good one."

"That's not the point. I know I hurt you, I didn't mean it, and I think you know that, but I just wanted to say I'm sorry again. I have these nightmares. I've had them since I was a kid actually. I would rather not to have to talk about them, but–"

"Luke," she stopped me again, grabbing me by the shoulders. "You don't have to talk about them. It's fine. We're fine. I promise."

She let go of me to hold out her pinky. The sleeve of her shirt fell down to her elbow when she did it and I could see the yellowing bruise on her wrist. I pointed at it.