Dreaming In Stereo

Part 13 ~ Long Lost Crushes

As soon as Jakob got home, he went straight onto his laptop and skyped Ethan, who luckily enough was online. Chris wasn't however.

"Hey?" Ethan looked a little confused. He and Jakob weren't exactly the best of friends. Not randomly-skyping-each-other-after-school friends.

"Hey Ethan," Jakob said. "So um. I ran into a friend of yours today. At school."

"Oh yeah? Is it Mason? He just moved to Sydney but I don't know which school," Ethan said.

"Uh, no. It's an um... old, childhood friend. Her name is Max? She used to live in Geelong but moved away when she was um, five, I think?" Jakob asked.

"Max..." Ethan repeated. "Max! We used to be best friends in kindergarten! She would play this plastic ukulele and I would sing completely off-tune! Oh my lord, Max? Are you sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. She says she remembers you too."

"I thought for sure I would never see her again," Ethan said. "Oh god. This is insane."

"Yeah, it gets better," Jakob said. "Apparently, she also met Chris at the skate park. Yesterday. First two guys she meets in Sydney just so happens to be in the same band as her long-lost childhood bestie."

"Aw. This is crazy," Ethan grinned. "Hey, could you ask her to give me her email or something? Or like number. I don't know. Oh god... this is insane."

"Yeah, sure, I'll ask her," Jakob, for some reason, felt a little bit annoyed with Ethan. The guy was popular, funny, talented. He was the oldest in his family and so damn charming. He had everything. Including, Jakob sighed as he thought this, a good friendship with Max. His thoughts flew away to a short, full-colour flashback of meeting Max--her thin wrists and her slippery blue eyes like spring rain and her soft laugh. His imagination was vivid and beautiful... simple clothes and melting sunsets and rugs of sand sinking into tinted ocean water... Oh god, Jakob thought, shaking himself off with a cheeky grin. What was going on?

Ethan sighed, logged off Skype and closed the computer. At that moment, his mum entered the room through the open doorway. She was holding a white mug of hot coffee in her left hand and her phone in the other. Ethan spun on the chair.

"Hey mum," Ethan said. "Remember Max?"

"Max...?" She strained her memory. "You gotta help me out here. I have three kids and I honestly don't remember all your little friends. Which one is he again?"

"She, actually," Ethan corrected. "When I was little she was like my best friend. And then she moved away."

"Oh... Max! Yeah! You two were the closest."

I also had the biggest crush on her, Ethan thought, but he didn't tell his mum this. Some secrets were best left untold.

"Yeah, didn't her family move away to France or something?"

"And then Hong Kong," Ethan said. "Well, anyway, she's back in Australia."

"Really? Where?" His mum sat down on Ethan's unmade bed and took a sip of her coffee.

"Sydney," replied Ethan. "Jakob... you remember Jakob? Apparently Max joined the same school as he's in."

"Okay, and how do you know this?" She asked suspiciously.

"Skype," Ethan replied. "Mum! Come on! You can't expect me to be doing my homework all the time!"

"Homework after school, and then Skype," His mum said. "You can--woah!" She screamed into the air and Ethan jumped to his feet. His mum had tripped over the blanket hanging over the corner of the bed and onto the floor and she fell with a heavy thud against the floors. The coffee mug slipped out of her hand, white ceramic shattering against the corner of the bed. Sizzling hot coffee soaked into Ethan's bed and dripped onto the floor, soaking her phone fun. Mrs Karpathy made a mad grab for her phone and tried desperately to switch it on but the screen remained dead. She sighed.

"That's that," Mrs Karpathy groaned.

"Mum! Are you okay?"

"Yeah, Ethan, I'm fine," She replied, standing up and stumbling out of Ethan's room. "Stupid phone."

After his bed and floor had been cleaned up, the shattered pieces tidied and Mrs Karpathy's phone sent to be replaced, Ethan flopped back onto his chair and groaned. He brushed a stray comma of light hair out of his eyes. He opened his laptop and clicked into a folder of pictures buried deep in an innocent-enough folder titled 'Science Screenshots' which was in a similarly-innocent folder called 'school'.

The pictures were of Max when they were both young and stupid and in kindergarten. Pictures of a light-haired, stick-thin young boy with a fake microphone in a too-big tee shirt and jeans. The boy was playing with a blond girl of similar age in a tie-dye tee shirt. She was always standing or running in each of the photos and they were both grinning in these photographs as well. Max had been his secret crush for years when they were smaller--funny and active and beautiful.

He felt a spur of jealousy. The entire kindergarten Ethan had a crazy crush on Max; when she left for France he was devastated, and they'd kept in contact for a few years afterwards but sometime in Hong Kong the emails and phone calls and texts managed to stop without anyone really noticing. And now, finally, she was back in Australia--but not in Geelong. In Sydney. With Jakob. Jakob, Ethan thought to himself bitterly, was the lucky one. The youngest, with an amazing singer for a sister, carefree and cheeky and talented at everything--singing, football, everything.

Ethan quickly shook off these thoughts, however, and told himself it was stupid. He hadn't seen Max in years. They weren't really friends anymore. She'd have changed a lot. And besides, Jakob was his friend. He wasn't going to be mean or jealous because of something so stupid as a crush from eight years ago. A stupid crush. A crazily beautiful crush. Max. 

There. One new chapter published not-so-long after the previous one. I'm really glad I got round to writing this early, I'm such a procrastinator. Please vote if you enjoyed! Oh, and comment below if you're a nigahiga fan. Because I've recently been watching his videos like crazy. Especially Every Romantic Movie and A.S.S.