Over the Wall: A Collection of Short Stories (NaNoWriMo 2014)

Day 5: Food Fight

Note: Most of the ideas came from the Dare Machine on the NaNoWriMo Young Writers site. I bet you guys can't guess what ideas I got from it. Especially since some of them don't even stick out that much. Comment and say what you think I used :)

As soon as he tapped her on the shoulder, he regretted it. Why? Because that meant when he tapped her on the shoulder she would turn around. She looked nice today though, which possibly made it worse. Her long hair was in a braid that rested over her shoulder and a pretty green sweater. He realized that the sweater matched her eyes. Why must the stupid sweater match her eyes? He couldn’t deal with it. But he had to because she was turned around and looking at him with those eyes and those cheekbones and that sweater and just the slight flush on her cheeks and her eyebrows raised...

Oh shit she was waiting for him to say something.

He had to say something. His brain has stopped working. Work brain work! Her friends were looking at him with eyebrows raised as well. He just had to say something, anything. God fifteen years of trying to talk to girls and he still didn’t have it down. Speak man speak!

“Are you okay?”

“What.” Was all he could get out.

“Are you okay...”

“Uh, oh, yeah.”

“You sure? You’ve been standing there saying nothing for a little while.” She laughed a little. He snapped awake realizing the embarrassment factor of the situation.

“Oh! Yeah! I’m sorry! I just... I was...”

“You came over here for a reason?”

“I did? Oh, yes, I came here for a reason... I can’t remember what it is.”

“Okay...” She said.

“So bye.” He said, walking away as quickly as possible back to his friends.

They were sitting in a circle across the room playing Monopoly, which he hated playing. The game just went on and on until they got bored or ran out of time. He and his friends never finished a game of Monopoly. Ever.

He was just sitting down with them when he saw Jason walking over to her. He was such an asshole. But he did know how to talk to her. He had her laughing and her friends laughing too. He was probably saying something about how her name was Jennifer and his name was Jason and the alliteration must mean that they were meant to be together. It was almost clever but disgusting all the same. His name didn’t alliterate with hers. If that even made sense.

Then, the universe decided to take pity on him. The leaders of the after school program, all freshmen had been sent there to “mingle” after the main orientation was done, turned on the chicken dance song. And they picked out Jason to help them lead it. Karma was a wonderful thing when it was on your side.

So Jason was pulled away from Jen, he never called her Jen, or anything really, to her face but in his mind she was Jen, like her friends called her, and up to the front of the room to do the chicken dance in front of everyone. This was sure to be a story that would be told until even after graduation. It was awesome. He sat back on his hands ignoring his friends and just laughed and laughed. In fact, he laughed until it was no longer necessary to laugh and laughed until people started looking at him weird. It was pretty awkward. Then again, pretty awkward was how he would describe his life.

Then, as if karma was just trying to lull him into a false sense of security, Lily ran up and sat by him. He groaned inwardly. He had known Lily for only a day but he already knew she was the weird girl of the grade. If he wanted to be with Jen he needed to stay away from people like that. Plus, Lily creeped him out. She was oddly obsessed with mermaids. Like, with the kind of passion little girls love pink or the passion teenaged girls had for that Zac Efron guy. It was just weird.