Charlie Who?

The boy with the bright cobalt eyes stared back at me; however I did not suppress and turn away. My friends around me were giggling and cussing about who-knows-what, but somehow I couldn’t stay in the conversation for long before I turned my gaze back to the strange boy across the cafeteria. “Look, I think Charlotte is in love!” Diane giggled, tearing my stare away from the boy. I hid my hot-red cheeks with a clump of my fiery red hair and retorted, “Oh, no. He… just seems real weird,” Surprisingly, my friends didn’t detect my lie and all turned their heads toward the boy in question.

“Mmm!” Thalia banged the table (her way of telling us she has something to say), “I have him for math! He is freaking weird- always sitting in the back of the classroom and such,” she said opening the cap of her milk and pouring it over the leftover food on her tray. I turned my head back to him and asked, “Well, what’s his name?” Thalia drank the remaing milk and replied, “Charles something or other,” I turned back around to see him and found nothing but a an empty tray of food.

“Where’d he go?” I asked dumping my plastic tray into the garbage can placed carelessly in the middle of the “cafetorium”. I followed my friends to the ramp leading up to the stage. That’s why the label outside the doors read ‘Cafetorium’; cafeteria/auditorium. I always thought it was completely ridiculous that we had a stage in a cafeteria with the floors marked as a basketball court with the hoops dangling above the lunch tables. And it was also ridiculous that our “cafetorium” is smaller than the adjacent elementary school.

We sat on the edge of the stage and waited for the bell to dismiss us. I had long forgotten about Charles and left to History right after the ringing of the much familiar bell. I walked alongside Gabrielle and searched for my homework.

“So how are things going with Marco?” I asked breaking the cold silence.
Gabrielle and Marco was touchy subject. They met on the day of the Fall Festival, which so happens to be the day that Gabrielle lost her virginity to Miguel. But as soon as Marco was introduced to her, Miguel suddenly became a lost thought; a dispersed memory. My group of friends were annoyed by her behavior and even joined in on talking trash about her with Adrian, the cousin of our friend Alex and an acquaintance of Marco.

“Things are… good,” she hesitated looking the other direction.
I didn’t press on fact that she just lied to me, instead I nodded and turned into the hall with all the history teachers. I handed my report upon arrival and sat in my assigned seat. I disregarded the dark figure in the seat adjacent to mine and proceeded to right down the day’s agenda.

A skinny finger poked my shoulder and I turned around in response. I was stunned to see the boy that I was staring at during lunch.
“Do you have a pencil I can borrow?” he asked in a scratchy voice that sounded like he desperately needed a glass of water.

“Uhm, sure,” I reached in my bag a retrieved a sparkly pencil that read, ‘Girls Rule, Boys Drool’. I apologized for the offensive pencil and quickly turned back around. The whole period I made an unbreakable wall behind me, telling myself not to look back at the boy. However, my “impenetrable wall” did not suffice for I was paired with the person behind me for a debate.

“So…” I started

“I’ll take some notes,” His voice was much clearer this time and I got a good look at his features.

His pitch-black hair was cropped short; he had a slender face with a pointed noise. I noticed the silvery scar above his left eyebrow and his concave dimples. He was rather handsome. My evaluation however, was cut short when he waved a hand in my face.

“What?” I snapped

“I said if we are going to debate on the thoughts of federalists or anti-federalists?”
I noted the line that creases above his scar and the way he looked back at me with curiosity twinkling in his sapphire eyes.

“We should do both, Mr. Baine has a habit of making us debate either the affirmative or negative,” I said passing him my notebook that was filled with tons of Cornell notes.
“This is a lot,” he said flipping through the pages, and reading some of the notes I had written.

“Thank you?”

The whole part of this assignment was just… uncomfortable. It was an uncanny feeling, like no other. I wanted to get up and stay where I felt… safe. It was extremely odd. My breath caught in my throat every time he looked directly into my eyes and I could roughly see his dark aura that seemed to present itself near us .We were about ready to discuss the outline of our debate when the bell rang.

“Oh, thank God!” I got up as quickly as I could and mustered up a farewell to the boy. I left the room quickly and darted to the foreign language hall. Never in my life had I felt so relieved and happy to enter Mr. Krauss’s German 1A class. Right then and there, I realized that something wasn’t quite right with Charles Fletcher.

And that thought scared me to death.