"Best friends forever" is such bullshit because I had a best friend, but he sure as hell isn't forever. Then why is the universe making him my project partner now? And why is he so hot and beautiful... just why?
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Every summer, our town club hosts a carnival for the whole town. There's a ball party for the grown-ups and a get-together for the kids with games and everything. The summer before second grade, Noa's parents took me to this carnival with them—my parents were never interested in these things.
At this party, Noa suddenly disappears. So I went looking for her, and Noa being Noa, had already found trouble. I saw her standing there between pools of dark amber and glass shreds. Her dress was ruined; her hands had a few cuts, and the glass was stuck. She was crying, and when she saw me, she said in her crying voice, "I was just looking at the pretty dress."
We first removed the remaining glass shards from her hand and made a temporary bandage for her cuts. Then, we cleared out the glass shards and the liquid from the floor. The liquid was expensive scotch worth $900. We were seven; we didn't know the worth, but we knew it was something important. After cleaning any evidence of the scotch, we went to her parents and told them that Noa got hurt. Not the whole story, just that she got hurt; that got us out of trouble. The point is, that I have always been someone who gets out of trouble, and Noa is someone who can get into trouble. But not today; I am the one who got us into trouble.
We were asked to leave the library, and on top of that, we got detention for misbehaving. We are both silently walking towards the outdoors of our school. We still haven't finished our reports—hell, we haven't even started yet. At this pace, I don't think we will be able to finish it by the end of senior year. I look towards her to say something and see her hiding her laughter.
"Are you laughing!?" Noa quickly composes herself. "No," I raise my eyebrow in suspicion. She finally breaks and laughs.
"It was a little funny." We find an empty bench outside.
"No, it was humiliating to be kicked out of a library." We sit down beside each other.
"We were asked to leave." Noa starts to laugh again.
"Stop laughing; it was your fault, you know if you would have listened—"
"How is this my fault? You were the one who shouted." Noa can change her emotion from one to the other like a pro, so right now she went from laughing to yelling at me like this!
"Yes, because of you, you never understand others; it's just about you." I can see the anger in her face at what I said, which was wrong of me to say.
"I knew that this was a bad idea." She waves her hands towards us. "But now it is what it is, and we have to live with it." Her chin tilts upwards stubbornly.
"So, I say we make a truce."
"Truce?" I ask slowly, testing the word on my tongue.
"We can meet each other in the middle, like me using one of your ways and you use one of my ways. Like a pact to behave civilly toward each other. It will make things easier." Her cherry-red hair spills from her shoulder as she tilts her head, and it shines in the sunlight, giving her hair an angelic effect. Now that I have noticed, I don't see her cap, which she usually wears to hide her. Her hair falls on her face in soft waves. She looks beautiful. I have never—
"Mason?"
"Yeah?" I break out of my stupor.
"So, what do you say, deal?" Do I have a choice? She extends her hand towards me.
"Yeah," I sigh. "Deal." We shake hands like business colleagues.
But as my hand touches hers, my heart starts to pump out and beats like I have run 10k.
