Intoxicated

Chapter Two

I have only one class with Blake Larsen, trigonometry. It was there that I noticed him on the first day of school, seated in the last seat of the third row, the one nearest the window, chewing the eraser off his pencil and looking as if he'd rather be anywhere else in the world but there. One glimpse of the way his dark hair flopped over his forehead, almost obscuring his dark, brooding eyes, and I was glad I got to see him exactly where he was.

Cara and I had chosen seats in the second-to-last row of the room, in what we'd once determined was every teacher's blind spot, the area where students were least often called upon when not volunteering.

"He's mine," I'd said, nodding in Blake's direction as I moved my desk and chair a bit closer to Cara's.

"Who is he?"

"Haven't the slightest idea, but he's mine."

"Why, Evan Maxwell, has a prince finally crash landed through the thicket to awaken Sleeping Beauty? What has this guy got that the hundreds you've ignored were missing?"

"Me," I'd said. Only, as it turned out, I was the one who had to go crashing through the thicket, and the prince was one sound sleeper.

He was new in town, he came from Springfield, he was a junior, and he drove a black Honda Civic. That was all I had been able to find out about him. Most people hadn't even noticed him, and he seemed to be doing his best to keep it that way.

Oh, and he ruined a lot of perfectly good pencils by chewing off their erasers subconsciously. Not a major piece of information, perhaps, but still the kind of snippet I'd been living on for months. He was destroying his latest as Cara and I approached trigonometry class that Monday after New Year's. Suddenly, Cara laid a hand on my arm and drew me back to where we couldn't be seen from inside the classroom.

"He's working on our assignment for today," she hissed. "He must be having trouble with it."

"How do you know?" 

"He's got his book open to the page with that damn triangle, he's deep in thought, and the assignment's due in ten minutes. Go offer to help him."

"Are you crazy?"

"I will be if you don't take advantage of this golden opportunity. I mean it, Evan, get in there and talk to him."

It was not a totally ridiculous idea. After all, I told myself, I am good at math. I pictured us close together as we analyzed a formula or two. Stomach quaking, I slipped into the seat behind his. Mrs. Dunst, our teacher, glanced up from her desk, then went back to grading papers. Trigonometry was our first class of the day, and the bell had not yet rung.

"Having trouble?" I asked, voice rasping through constricted throat. I was doing it! I was talking to Blake Larsen. Three months of effort had brought me to this!

He spun around, brown eyes regarding me with mild interest.

"No," he said.

My mouth fell open. My eyes darted to Cara, already seated two rows away. She clapped one hand across her smirk and quickly lowered her head over her own book. I turned back toward Blake, my cheeks ablaze.

"Oh," I said. "Sorry, I thought maybe you were." There was a long and very pregnant pause. "Sorry," I mumbled at last, and somehow managed to slither away to my regular seat beside Cara.

"Sorry," she whispered. 

"A big fat no," I groaned.

That afternoon I was scheduled to work in Mr. Avery's office. Three days a week, instead of going to study hall with Cara, I answer his phone, run errands, and so on, while his secretary goes to lunch. Still mulling over my humiliation in trig, I dropped my books on Mrs. Witherspoon's desk and was just getting settled in her chair when Mr. Avery emerged from the crowd passing in the hallway.