I Fell For You At The Cemetery

05.

05

"This is the address to my apartment," said Sarah, giving both Kevin and Joey sheets with handwritten instructions. The two boys accepted it, Kevin with a devastated look on his face while Joey wasn't quite sure what to make of the situation.

"You delinquents have to be there by five sharp," she continued, her tone annoyed. "No excuses."

Kevin spoke up for the first time. "But Ma'am, I don't need tuition. I-"

"Your grades say otherwise, Kevin. You will receive tuition from me for at least two months and that's final. I'm sure your parents wouldn't object."

He tried again. "But the tuition fees-"

"Principal Haley will talk to your parents about that and I'm sure they wouldn't mind it."

Kevin's face fell and his shoulders slagged, defeated. Sarah looked towards Joey and he couldn't help but smile. "No problems or objections here."

Her eyes narrowed and she raised a finger. "No sass from you."

He nodded and followed Kevin out of the empty classroom to their next class. As the door closed behind them, Sarah groaned. "What have I gotten myself into?"

----

As Joey stood outside the apartment door with the sheet in hand, he fidgeted nervously. He wasn't sure how he should feel or act. How do you feel when you visit someone's home for the first time? Especially when that someone happens to be a person you might or might not have feelings for. He cleared his throat and raised his hand. Buck up, he told himself and knocked on the door.

A minute later, the door burst open and almost hit Joey in the face who took a few steps back, to avoid it. A woman with short red hair that nearly reached her shoulders bumped into him and looked up. Her blue eyes studied him carefully.

Joey blinked, confused. Maybe he'd gotten the wrong address.

"Not bad," the woman muttered quietly, as she started to circle him. Joey frowned. "Uh, what?"

She came to a stop in front of him and rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "Could use a little facial hair. But otherwise, you'd make a good boyfriend for Sarah."

"Excuse me?"

"Chel, who the hell are you talking to?"

Sarah appeared in the doorway and she looked from Chelsea to Joey. She was wearing a blue blazer along with a pair of faded jeans. Her brown hair was open and Joey found himself unable to tear his eyes away from her. She looked beautiful, even in these simple clothes. The redhead grinned and turned to Sarah. "You sneaky girl, you already started seeing someone and you didn't even mention-"

Sarah rolled her eyes at her friend's accusation. "He's my student."

Her mouth dropped open before she smirked. "Ooh, a scandal..."

Sarah moved towards her and pushed her. "Get your head out of the gutter and go to work. You," she said, addressing Joey. "Come inside."

Sarah stepped aside and once he was inside, she closed the door on a giggling Chelsea's face. Joey chuckled a little. "So, who was that?"

She sighed. "My roommate, Chelsea."

Joey looked around as he followed Sarah inside. The apartment was simple and domestic. There were two doors that were closed so he guessed that those two were the bedrooms. They entered a room with two sofas - a double and a single one. There was a television set and a table with various magazines on it. The top magazine's cover had a woman in a bikini and when Sarah caught Joey staring at it, she reached forward and grabbed the magazine.

She glared at Joey who after a while, shrugged. "What?"

"You're sick."

"What? I did not-I-it's your fault for having a magazine like that lying in the house," he said, pointing towards her, which earned him an eye-roll.

"All men are the same," she said, as she took the magazine to a room and threw it inside before closing the door again. "And for your information, Chelsea reads those."

"Yeah, sure."

She smacked his arm. "No sarcasm from you either."

He sighed and plastered a fake smile on his face. "Anything else?"

"Yeah. You'd better not waste my time and actually learn something from me."

The doorbell rang and Sarah went to answer it while Joey took a seat on the double sofa. He thought about Sarah's roommate and how she had mistaken him as her boyfriend. Sarah's boyfriend. He wondered how it would feel like to be with her, apart from school and tuition.

Sarah entered the room followed closely by an unenthusiastic Kevin. He plopped down next to Joey and groaned. "Let's get this over with."

Sarah pursed her lips and ignored him as she dug out her English textbook from the pile of magazines on the table. "Alright, let's start with phrases and clauses. You boys know the difference between these two?"

The class continued from five till six-fifteen when both Joey and Kevin asked for a break. She agreed to give them ten minutes and walked out of the room, saying that she had to make a call. Kevin smacked his forehead. "Can you believe this woman? She's nuts."

Joey chuckled a little. "I wouldn't exactly say nuts but yeah, she needs to lighten up."

"No kidding. I feel like my brain is going to explode."

Joey's cell phone started to ring and he fished it out of his pocket. It was Collin. "Look, if you called to annoy me, I'm gonna hang up," Joey warned him.

Collin laughed. "How'd you guess? No, wait. Don't hang up. I called to ask you something."

"What?"

"Chloe's driving me crazy. She wants to know if you'll go out with her again."

Joey squeezed his eyes shut in irritation. Did this girl never give up? "Look, man, you already know my answer."

"Yeah, but that girl is like the overly attached girlfriend or something. She keeps bugging me to persuade you."

"Tell her that there's plenty of other fish in the sea."

"Huh?"

Joey rubbed his forehead. "It means that-how'd you even manage to score more than me in the surprise test anyway, dimwit?"

Collin chuckled from the other end. "I just winged it, dude like you did. But I guess my guesses were more accurate than yours. By the way, how's your class going?"

Like he had warned, Joey did hang up and just then, Kevin nudged him. "I think she's smoking."

"Who?"

Kevin smirked. "Our crazy teacher, that's who. No wonder she's so cranky all the time. Probably misses her pack of cigarettes during the class."

And sure enough, Joey too could smell it and he got up from the couch and turned to one of the rooms whose door was slightly ajar. He walked towards it with slow and measured footsteps, holding his breath.

The smell became even more prominent as he got closer to the door and he risked a peek inside. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the darkness inside and when they did, he saw Sarah get up from a bed and watched her as she moved towards the window. Opening it, she inhaled the cigarette one last time before blowing out the smoke into the air outside. She extinguished the remains and moved into the attached bathroom and Joey walked back to the couch as he heard the water running.

He found it hard to believe that Sarah would actually smoke. It all made perfect sense though. She was grieving and in order to escape her sadness, she choose this path. But didn't she realize that this was hazardous to her health? Wasn't she supposed to be the more mature one since she was older? And more importantly, who exactly had she lost? It must have been someone quite important to her to cause her to react this way. Was her pain really that unbearable that she could only find means of comfort in this?

But then again, maybe Sarah had been smoking even before all this and this was just a habit of hers and not a way of coping up with things.