You Are My Addiction

I haven't talked to Mitch in five days and I've been going insane. It's my own fault though; if I hadn't kissed him then none of this would have happened. I wouldn't feel that uneasiness in my stomach whenever I thought about talking to him and, like I was doing now, I wouldn't keep dodging him in the hallways when it looked like he was walking over to talk to me. I didn't mean to avoid him, it was just something that happened in the spur of the moment when I was so close to being around him again.

I'm not gay. I kept telling myself that as I walked down the hallway away from him. I couldn't be. What would that mean? How would the rest of my life go if I was gay? I shook the thoughts away; I'm not gay so it was foolish to wonder about the 'what ifs'.

I found Ashley waiting for me around the corner at my locker, her blonde hair straightened and resting just above her waist. She wasn't paying attention and jumped when I tapped her on the shoulder. "What the hell, Grant!" She shouted; panicked. I let out a loud laugh and threw my hands in the air like one would do if a cop told them to freeze.

"I had to! You made it too easy!" She let out a small laugh and smacked me on the shoulder in a way that I think was supposed to hurt, but didn't really. I grabbed my shoulder anyways, pretending that it did. "Hey! Where's the love?"

"It vanished when you decided my heart was better off out of my chest." I shoved my books from last period in my locker and walked down the hall with her towards the exit. I promised Ashley I would go to the mall with her today the day after I told her I would no way in hell go to the mall with her again after the last time, but here I was, walking over to my car so that I could drive us right to it.

"Can we not spend too much time in there today, Ash? I'm not really feeling my best at the moment." We both got in my car and sat there without going anywhere.

"Are you ever going to tell me what happened with you and Mitch?" She asked, concerned. "You two were inseparable last week and now you haven't said a word to each other." I shrugged like it was no big deal. She had been asking me the same question over and over since lunch on Monday when instead of eating with Mitch, I avoided the cafeteria altogether and left with her to grab Menchies down the road, excluding Mitch from the outing. He had tried to talk to me while I was putting my text books in my locker but I told him I didn't feel like talking and walked away. He probably thought I was a terrible person, but I just couldn't bare to be around him right now.

"Seriously, it's not a big deal. We just decided that maybe it's time to move on." I started the car and began to drive out of the parking lot. I was scared that if we continued this conversation I was going to lose my focus and smash into another car. I could feel her staring at me and it took everything in me not to yell at her to stop.

"So... you two like, broke up?" She sounded confused. Her words made me cringe. Breaking up would imply that we were together and we were not together.

"I guess, yeah. We aren't friends anymore if that's what you mean, anyway." I said the words so casually. Like Mitch and I not being friends anymore was bound to happen someday and I wasn't at all shocked or hurt that someday was today.

"But why?" I could tell she was annoyed with me right now but I wasn't about to go into detail about what happened with Mitch and I. Nobody needed to know about what happened except for Mitch and myself and I hoped Mitch wouldn't say anything to anyone. I would deny it if he did.

"Can we drop it? Please." The words came out harsher than I meant them to and Ashley sat back into her seat, letting the conversation go for now. At least she stopped asking me about it.

The mall was packed with people, which was surprising for a Wednesday. I could feel the heat radiating off of everyone and the smell of body odor making me want to gag as I walked through the crowds of people with Ashley right beside me. I could tell she wasn't enjoying the smell too much either because her lips were pulled in to a tight line. I had a feeling she was also making that face because she was still upset about the way I spoke to her. I apologized to her once I had parked and she seemed fine, but sometimes people weren't fine even when they said otherwise.

I let her drag me into Sephora as a way of saying sorry and immediately regretted my decision when she walked over to the eye shadow palettes and started to swatch every colour onto the tops of my hands. She was doing this to bug me and I knew it, but I let her do it anyway because that's what friends do.

"I don't know which Palette to get." She said, seriously contemplating between two palettes that looked exactly the same to me.

"This one." I suggested, pointing to the palette that at least had a better shade of purple in it.

"But the other one has the brown I want for when I do my smokey eyes." I sighed, not knowing how to help her with something I knew nothing about.

"Then get that one." She held the two palettes in front of her face, squinting at every single colour as she looked at them.

"No, I think you were right. I like the purple in this one." I rolled my eyes playfully and she gave me a shove, all of the tension between us vanishing. Who knew all it would take to fix an argument was a really great purple eye shadow? It was probably the shimmer that got her.

We walked up to the register and watched as the cashier scanned the palette and wrapped it up in white tissue paper and a red bow before placing it in a bag. I wasn't a big green activist, but that seemed like a lot of packaging for such a little palette. I looked over at the screen as the price appeared and my jaw dropped. "Sixty bucks for a tiny tin of powder?" I said, incredulous. Was she nuts?

"Shut up, Grant. It actually lasts me a long time and it's worth the money since I'll use it a lot." I shook my head at her, deciding that there was noway I was going to win this argument. Girls will find a way to justify anything they buy. Anything. I've been to the mall with Ashley enough times now to know that trying to make a point about the cost of something she really wanted was useless.

"Is that all you needed?" I asked, trying not to sound too impatient. Like I said before, I really wanted this to be a quick trip. The mall was a terrible place for me to be right now with my mood so all over the place. There were too many people capable of pissing me off for little things like not running down the escalator when nobody else was on it and slowing up the line behind them.

"I guess we can go now. I'm sorry I dragged you here after you told me you weren't in the mood for it." Her apology was sincere and it made me feel bad for snapping at her earlier.

"We could try and find something else to do or I don't know, maybe Elias could come over and we could watch movies?" Elias was Ashley's seven year old brother and as cute as he was, he could also be the devil. Not around Lily though. We all suspected he had a crush on her, but he spent a lot of time denying it when we brought it up, claiming that girls had cooties and he only played with Lily because her cooties weren't as bad as the other girls' his age. In other words, he had a crush on her. It was cute and hilarious when Elias' face turned beat red after a comment Ashley and I made about his feelings.

"Elias has baseball today with his school, but you know what we can do?" Her face lit up with her new idea. I felt like a light bulb should have appeared over her head at that moment; it would have been perfect.

"What?" I asked, curious.

"The tracks!" She jumped up with excitement. "We haven't gone to the tracks in a few months." The tracks were what they sounded like; a set of train tracks. They were abandoned though which was what made them so thrilling. We usually went there at midnight with a bunch of people and made a fire, throwing in a couple of ghost stories to add to the thrill.

So that's where we went. It was evening now, the sun still peaking out but the sky was darkening. The trees cast just enough of a shadow where the tracks were that it looked darker than it was. I felt my chest tighten and ignored it. Mitch and I came here all the time when we had nothing else to do. Ashley hadn't been here for a couple of months, but Mitch and I were here just last week.

We walked along the tracks for a little while and I could feel her arm brush mine accidentally every now and then. This was normal for us; our arms touched accidentally all the time and we never thought much of it. I looked over at her. She was beautiful, I hadn't been lying when I said that. Her blue sweater brought out the blue in her eyes as did the black winged eyeliner she wore every day. She had faint freckles on her cheeks beneath her make up, but if you didn't know her and hadn't seen her without any of it on, you would have never known that. I looked down at our hands so close together and thought about taking hers. Maybe this could be something more. Maybe she liked me. I was so close, all I had to do was-

I couldn't. Not Ashley. She was too close to me and I couldn't afford to lose another friend over my own stupidity. Even if Ashley had reciprocated, how long would things go on until we broke up and never talked to each other again? She was beautiful and intelligent and obsessed with things I didn't understand, but I didn't like her like that and I couldn't fool myself into thinking I did. I needed to find somebody else, another girl from school I should have noticed but haven't yet. There was a part of me capable of loving that girl and I knew it, I just needed to discover her.

"This place is still creepy, even during the day." Ashley said shivering, not from the cold but from the eeriness of the place.

"I do still get that weird feeling." I agreed. "Maybe there's an ax murderer waiting for us behind one of these trees."

"You are such an ass, Grant!" She hit me on the shoulder and I laughed. I was happy to have her in my life and I felt stupid that a second ago I was willing to risk our friendship for something so ridiculous. She was right though; I was an ass.