Shadows of Yesterday

Chapter 10: Nickel for Your Thoughts?

Monday: objectively the worst day of the week. Whoever invented it must have had something seriously wrong with them. Monday was the day that I was convinced the universe had programmed to make everything go wrong. It was the day of burnt toast, cold coffee, failed tests, and bad weather. 

And on this particular Monday, the coffee was out, the bread had gone stale, and Liam Brown was dead to me.

Thanks to Mom having my cell phone, she had discovered that he'd been trying to get ahold of me all weekend. Apparently, it had been going off with so many messages that she had to shut it down just so she could sleep. And she was determined that whatever had happened, I should stop "being a child" and just talk to him.

Thanks, Mom.

Ignoring both her advice and the boy it was about, I had breezed by Liam when I arrived at school and staunchly disregarded his overly friendly hello.  When he had tried to confront me in AP Spanish about ignoring him all weekend and ask me how I was doing, I buried my face in my textbook, choosing to actually attempt the classwork for once rather than answering him. I'd brushed past him at the end of class, too, with my earbuds in both ears like I still had music to drown him out with.

Memories of our conversation on Friday night kept replaying in my head. The more I thought about how weak I had been, the more I wanted to become a permanent part of the school's wall art. The tears. The melodrama. The stupid trembling. And if I felt this strongly about how I'd acted, he must think I was the most childish person on Earth. 

So I avoided him.

I even managed to evade him at lunchtime, despite our overlapping friend group. He sat on one end of the table, so I made sure to sit on the end farthest away from him. When he tried to move over, Grayson arrived just in time and sat in the only seat still available: the one right across from me. Him and Mat talked so much and so loudly that it was impossible for Liam to ask me about what he wanted to. It was perfect. For once, it seemed like Fate was on my side.

Until Chemistry, that was.

For once, Liam was not only on time to class but five minutes early. He was the only one in the classroom when I arrived. All of his supplies were arranged neatly in front of him on the desk, and he was sitting with his hands clasped on top of his notebook and his face turned to watch the door. He hadn't even bothered to turn on the lights. I felt like I was walking into some sort of intervention.

"So," he said immediately upon seeing me. "You've been avoiding me."

I sat down in my seat without responding and avoided looking at his overly serious face by digging through my backpack.

"You're still avoiding me, it seems. Why?"

Inside, I grumbled back at him, "because I embarrassed myself in front of you, and now I feel like you think I'm weak." Outside, I just pulled out my notebook and pencil and continued giving him the silent treatment. It was safer that way.

He sighed. "If this is about the other night, you don't have to worry. I'm not going to judge you or think of you differently or anything."

My body tensed. "It's not about anything, and I don't care how you think of me," I lied.

"Right. Because people ignore each other for no reason all the time," he responded, leaning back in his chair. He crossed his arms and looked at me dubiously.

I grumbled back that they did when the person they were ignoring was an incessant pest, then avoided looking at him by meticulously writing down the date as neatly as possible on a fresh sheet of notebook paper. It would undoubtedly be the only thing that was written on that paper for the entire class, but he didn't need to know that.