Pulse

“Get up!” Daniel shouted, jumping on Ivy’s bed. How he got into her house was a mystery to her. “Get up, get up get up!” Daniel stood up on her bed and did a little flourish with his arms.

Ivy groaned and rolled onto her stomach. “Five more minutes…” she mumbled. It sounded like mush.

“No! There’s no time to waste! Life’s blood’s beating! The angels are singing. Your mom is awake…” Daniel sat down, cross-legged, on Ivy’s bed. He picked up a random pencil from her floor and started to poke her with the eraser end.

“Stoppiiiiiiiit!” Ivy elongated the word for several seconds, flailing her arms about, whacking Daniel in the face in the process.

“Ouch. Not until you get up.” He was as stubborn as she was. He started to bounce up and down beside her. “Up! Up! Up!” he said in time with his bouncing.

“No” Ivy moaned into her pillow.

“If you don’t get up right now, I’ll be forced to… read your diary!” He quickly stooped and picked up a worn spiral off of the floor.

“I don’t have a diary.” Ivy sighed, surprisingly lucid for someone in the awkward state between dreams and reality. She closed her eyes and tried to dream.

“Then what’s this?” Daniel wondered aloud. He opened it, quickly reading her messy scrawl.

“You said you’d never hurt me, now I’m lying on my back…” He read aloud.

Ivy screamed and shot out of her bed, ripping the spiral from his hands. He had succeeded in finding her songbook. Out of all of the random spirals he could have picked up…

Ivy clutched the spiral to her chest, glaring at Daniel with wild eyes. He held up both hands defensively, his eyes widened with shock.

Ivy suddenly realized how that probably looked to him. He had no clue it was that private, after all, and he only wanted her out of bed. Reluctantly, she stuck her arm out towards him, the notebook in her palm.

He took it carefully, not wanting to make Ivy go crazy again. He looked at her carefully. Her eyes were teary, and she looked like she half-expected him to beat her for what was written on the yellowed pages. Daniel turned the book over in his hands, musing. Ivy grimaced.

Suddenly, he placed it on the desk. Ivy looked at him, not believing what her eyes were telling her. He held his arms out to her comfortingly, not wanting to harm her in any way, seeing the fragile emotional state she was apparently in.

Ivy was very confused. She had just offered her most prized possession to Daniel, and he refused it? And then he wanted a hug? She awkwardly hugged him around the middle, much like a child might do to Mickey Mouse at Disneyland. A few tears fell from the corners of her eyes, and she hated herself for that. Why was she crying?

Angrily, she brushed the back of her hand against her cheeks, wiping away all of the moisture. She sighed, incredibly frustrated by her own weakness as well as by the fact that her emotions weren’t seeming to check with her conscious mind before making themselves known.

Daniel pulled himself away from Ivy and smiled. Then he looked down at her and his smile turned to a look of puzzlement. “Are you actually crying?” He said, looking at the one tear she had missed on her left cheek.

Ivy quickly brushed away the offending tear and laughed a hard, short laugh. “Yeah.”

“But why?” He sat down on her bed, pulling her down to sit beside him. “What did I do wrong?”

She was appalled. He thought he had done something wrong. He was blaming himself for something that he had no control over. Ivy sighed. “Nothing.” She said, looking fondly at Daniel. “You never do anything wrong.”