Learning to be Beautiful

Learning to be Beautiful ~19~

After our depressing trip to the cemetery, Gavin decided that we shouldn’t go directly home and detoured to a Starbucks.

The coffee shop was all the way in San Jose.

Most of the hour long drive was spent in a comfortable, companionable silence that was only broken occasionally by the odd, short-lived conversation. Neither of us found the silence awkward; we had known each other much too  long for that.

Sometime between the cemetery and Starbucks, I fell asleep, my forehead pressed against the pane of glass in the window.

There he was: Charles Michael Trevor Clintlock Jr.—better known as Charlie, the star soccer-player of Lowell High.

It was the last class of the day, and Charlie had already changed out of his regular school clothes into the red and white vertically striped uniform of the Lowell Cardinals. His dusty-blond head remained focused intently on the teacher as she lectured on the differences between Eukaryotes and Prokaryotes. In addition to being one of the best athletes of the high-school, Charlie was also one of its top scoring students.

This exceptional combination of both brain and brawn was the bane of most teenage boys at Lowell. With his killer looks, he could steal away the heart of any girl he wished. Girls swooned at the very sight of him, and boys hated him for it.

 Or at least, that was the theory.

In truth, Charles Clintlock Jr. was a complete dunderhead when it came to women and wouldn’t know a flirting female if she walked up to him and slapped him in the face with a  raw slab of meat.

Maybe that’s why I found him so inexplicably alluring.

I had nursed a small attraction to the boy since the seventh grade, and there I was, two years later, ogling at the back of his attractive blond head when I should have been listening to a biology lecture.

“Stop drooling over the soccer-player and pay attention to Mrs. Liffrig,” Gavin hissed into my ear and successfully dragging me, kicking and screaming, out of my silly, early-adolescent day dreams that nearly resembled that teen-sensation: Twilight.

“I’m not drooling over him,” I whispered back, my cheeks flaming a cheery red color as I retrained my focus to the teacher.

“Whatever you say, Ais…” My best friend shook his dark head and resumed doodling on a scrap of notebook paper—obviously, he was a marvelous student.

I managed to keep my attention on the teacher for a few more minutes, but I found my gaze wandering back to the back of Charlie’s blond head every so often.

Groaning, I flicked my eyes to the piece of paper in front of me. In an attempt to stop myself from this madness, I began to doodle random swirling patterns in the upper right hand corner of the lined paper. In this manner, I managed to distract myself from the unfairly attractive human-being two rows ahead of me for a good ten minutes. When I realized that the endeavor was practically hopeless, I resigned myself to my fate, and continued to stare.