Rubber Bands

Aja Volkman liked that boy.

Not the football player with the shiny white teeth. All her friends liked that boy.

Not even the boy in music class with the ginger-brown hair her friends thought she liked.

No, Aja liked the cute boy who sat at the back of her math class. The boy with blond hair and glasses and deep blue eyes and a lopsided smile. The boy who doodled and wrote pages of words during class.

The boy who wore those rubber bands around his wrist.

As soon as this boy had caught her adoring eye, she tried to remember him from years past. The braces were new, but he had always had glasses, and...well, she didn't remember noticing the rubber band. He wore it like a bracelet, and sometimes she saw him playing with it, pulling it out and watching it snap back to his wrist.

All of Aja's friends teased her. The boy with the rubber bands wasn't popular. He wasn't liked. He was a loser, they said.

But Aja didn't care. He was cute, and she liked to peek at the pictures he drew and the poems he wrote when he wasn't looking. They were good for a seventh grader. She didn't even quite understand them.

In eighth grade, the boy with the rubber bands ended up in more of her classes, and she watched him more. His group of friends was made up of some of the nerdy music boys. He had lots of siblings. He was in the school band. And some of the other boys picked on him a lot.

She hated seeing her friend be hurt like that, but she couldn't do anything to stop it. Besides, he didn't know her at all. She wasn't his friend. He was just hers.

High school came around quickly. Aja began to see a little less of the boy with the rubber bands. He wasn't in her honors classes; he took middle level ones. But she liked to watch him at lunch.

His glasses and braces were gone and she nearly didn't recognize him on the first day of school. But as he gestured with his hands to explain something to the skinny boy Aja knew was his best friend, she saw the rubber band on his wrist. The same plain rubber band he'd worn for two years.

So she watched him at lunch and in the halls, but she was starting to get nervous about the boy with the rubber bands. There was always an element of mystery surrounding him, a sad sort of mystery. The pictures he drew in middle school seemed to come from a sad place. And he wore black a lot, like that black sweatshirt he wore almost every day in eighth grade.

But now she didn't see the smile that he used to always put on anyway. She didn't see it when he talked with his friends at lunch or when he left for home at the end of the day. He played with his rubber band a lot.

The boy with the rubber bands was sad.

And that made Aja sad. Her crush had lasted two years so far. She felt like she knew him.

As freshman year came towards its end, Aja saw the boy's friends poke and prod at him during lunch, their looks of worry worrying her. The skinny boy rubbed his back when he would slump with his head down on the table, and the ginger-brown haired boy from seventh grade music class talked to him incessantly with a hopeful but sad face.

Aja wondered if she should finally say hi to the boy with the rubber bands, as the last week of school was fast approaching.

But the constant unfriendly vibe he gave off scared her away.

Over the summer, a strange thing happened. Aja started to forget about the boy with the rubber bands. She met a new boy, one who...well, was quite nice to look at.