(Book One) Do you ever feel as if your life has yet to begin? I've been alive for almost seventeen years now and absolutely nothing has ever happened to me. Not until I met a girl who kick-started my life. She introduced me to love, sex, scandal, ex...
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I would love to say after our meet-cute, we instantly became the best of friends. I become popular, start dating the captain of a sports team, join the pom-pom brigade, get elected prom queen, and then live happily ever after. But let's be real. In real life, it never happens that way. If you think it does you haven't been to high school or you've binged watched a lot of teen dramas on Netflix.
The building of our friendship was slow and unnoticeable. We only saw each other for half an hour a day for three days a week. And let's face it, in a classroom where talking isn't allowed, there were days we didn't say a single word to each other. We'd greet each other with a smile, sit down and listen to Mr. Smith's lecture.
Or at least I intently listened to the lectures. Aurora on the other hand never paid any attention. She always held her backpack in her lap. She would periodically look up and pretend to listen, but anyone born in this generation knows it's a charade. She is using her backpack as a cover to hide the cellphone she is texting within her lap. It was a technique everyone used, I couldn't understand how the teachers never caught on.
At first, it was distracting and annoying. I was trying hard to focus and learn, and there she was not even trying. The thing was though, she didn't need to. She was one of those students. Mr. Smith would call on her ask her to solve a problem on the whiteboard. She would calmly get up answer the question, always correctly, then sit back down and continue texting. Aurora got A's on all her quizzes. And in a strange turn of events. During lab projects, I was looking at her paper and leaning on her to help finish the lab projects.
She didn't mind and offered up her work freely. Because of her, my grades were on an upswing. We always finished first and always got an A. Finishing our labs early, gave us time to talk to each other.
The best thing about Aurora is she didn't pull her cellphone out when she's talking to you. This is rare to find in a teen. Especially, since you could hear the vibration of her phone whenever she got a text message. And someone was always messaging her; yet, she didn't so much as twitch. She gave her full attention and leaned into the conversations as if your words were gospel. And she smiled in interest, asked the right follow-up questions, and always knew exactly what to say.
Of course, she also talked about herself...a lot. Which is fine by me, to be honest, there wasn't a lot to say about myself. I was content to listen. She spoke about handsome boys in far off countries on their yachts and in their mansions, snowboarding trips, backpack trips across Europe and adventures too daring for me to ever consider trying. It all seemed like made-up fairy tales. Not real and unobtainable, or at least for me.
And then there was her love of science and technology. This was the one thing I could relate with her and what we talked about the most. It wasn't so much the pure science. I wasn't capable of keeping up with her once she started talking technical, but rather science's impact on the future. Her views of the future were optimistic and hopeful. She even shyly mentioned her dream to cure cancer. It's not what you'd expect to hear from a girl like her.
