Limonene |H. S.|

8. a little company

Excuse the grammaticals, I have yet again fallen ill with conjunctivitis (something quite common with me), my eyes hurt and using glasses makes it worse so sorry for the errors on this chapter and a few more to come:(
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I've never been an overly emotional person, it's not something one would use to describe me. I'm not cold, I'm not some machine that doesn't feel things, it just takes me a minute to process them, and by the time I do, there's rarely enough of that emotion left to provoke something visceral in me, like crying.

My ex boyfriend, Nate, would call this me being uninterested. Apparently, whatever I was feeling was never enough for him. He didn't understand that it was simply who I was, how I was made to be. There wasn't a lot of talk about feelings, it was just something I had to figure out by myself, and this was the way I handled them.

Lennon understood it, for the most part. She understood that there didn't have to be tears running down my face in order for me to be sad, and she didn't need me to confess some undying loyalty for her to be my friend. She just... got it, so well, this might be why I was so miserable about the way she was acting.

Things hadn't gotten better, she'd barely talked to Justin and I since a week ago when she snapped at us both. I didn't have to apologize for anything, this much I knew, so I hadn't. I'd taken her short replies and eyerolls, and I'd said nothing, because I truly had no idea what was wrong. Three days ago I swallowed my pride and asked her what's wrong, only to receive some stupid meme in reply. I didn't try after that, I refuse to.

Justin had come over to my house last night, with what he called hot gossip, which in reality was just him telling me about how he'd seen Lennon and Tara Lee at the mall, eating a pretzel. Again, I said nothing at all, not wanting to come off as territorial or like a jealous friend. However, it's hard not to feel any kind of anger at Tara when she's being... well, Tara.

"You know, you're not supposed to tackle people that are on your own team." I snap in annoyance at Tara as the school nurse passes a gauze damp with alcohol along the scrape under my forearm.

"I thought you were someone else, how many times am I gonna have to say sorry?" Her exasperated sigh makes me roll my eyes, frustrated at her very existence, more so now that she had practically rammed me into the ground on the football field.

"Does it hurt?" Wendy, the school nurse, asks.

"Yes. Incredibly."

"Oh my god, Emily, it's a scrape." Tara shakes her head at me, eyeing me like I was a nuisance.

"I think some lidocaine would work alright." I tell Wendy, making sure the bleeding has stopped. Why am I always bleeding?

Once back on the field, coach let me sit next to him on a shaded bench while we watched the rest of the class sweat their lunch out, Lennon included. Who, like a traitor, gave Tara a high five whenever she did something right.

We needed to have a serious talk.

"How's your dad been doing, Harper?" Coach asks, yawning.

"He's alright, been working a lot." It is kinda true, he's on that sobriety streak he takes on once every month, which means more of his time has been put into his actual job. And weirdly enough, he even goes jogging every morning.

"Sounds like him." Coach and my dad were friends since they were kids, so much so that I remember seeing him in every family gathering.

After the awkward small talk, class was over and we all walked to the lockers to change back into our regular clothes. I dramatically moaned once I caught sight of Justin by his locker, holding out my bandaged hand.