Discovering Blue [Proto-Story No Longer In Construction]

Chapter One: Elliot

My Imaginary Friend left me to fight off the Monsters by myself when I was eleven. The ensuing psychiatric hospital stay made me a little more than bitter. I guess I can’t blame Cal, though, seeing as he is a figment of my own imagination. That fact doesn’t change the way I’d really like to imagine him back up so I could punch him. Luckily, the Monster haven’t come back since then.

“Elliot!”

I jump at the sudden voice and look up from my English text book to find my good friend leaning over my desk. She’s staring at me intently, tapping her painted fingernails on the desk. I stare at her. I blink a few times to clear my head.

“What, Avery?” I ask finally, leaning back in my chair and stretching.

“Don’t ‘what, Avery’ me, Mister.”

I raise a hand to protest the name but she stops me with a ‘look.’ I lay my hand atop the desk again in a sort of defeated way and wait for her to continue. “Now, are you going bowling with Gene and I tonight or are you doing Calculus homework all night again?”

“You know, it’s funny; although you put Gene’s name first, you still needed to use ‘me’ in that sentence as opposed to the usual ‘I.’ Weird, right? Because if you remove Gene from the sentence it would be ‘are you going bowling with I’ and that makes no sense at all! But maybe, instead of removing Gene from the sentence, you could remove me from the outing? It’s just as simple.”

“Elliot!” she whines, grabbing my hand and sprawling out across my desk. It’s certainly not very attractive, but I don’t think she really cares. “You promised that you would actually go out with us this time.

“Well I was going to, really, but Mr. Pal assigned some extra work for me to prepare myself for the AP test,” I tell her, looking down and playing with the pages of the thick literary text book in front of me, scraping my thumb over the corner repeatedly.

“You requested more work, didn’t you?” she accuses.

I scoff, looking up innocently and saying “I’m not saying that I didn’t not not request more work. Not that I may have not actually possibly done so. Or anything.” I’m hoping the triple negatives throw her off. I’m not a very good liar; obviously. But, alas, my negatives are foiled by her intellect.

“Elliot Michael Pearson, why are you so against going out with Gene and I?” she begs, taking my face in her hands and squishing my cheeks. She’s making it increasingly difficult to explain myself.

“Ah ‘on’t lek pupow,” I manage to get out as she continues to pinch my face, soft fingers leaving red marks on my pale cheeks. She stares at me in confusion, hands stilling momentarily, before letting my face go, smirking. I glare at her as I rub my hand on my face, knowing that my cheeks are bright red now.

“Sorry, what was that?”

“I don’t like people,” I clarify. She gives me a flat look, good humor leaving her face.

“How can you not like people? You’re practically a social butterfly!”

“In school,” I correct. “Not in public. Why can’t I just go to soccer practice, like math, and spend the night with Integrals and Summations?” Avery stares at me as if I’d asked her to set fire to a Children’s Hospital.

“Because that’s not what normal teenagers do on Friday night!”

“The margin for ‘normal’ is questionable at be—“

“Not the point,” she snaps. I close my eyes and groan.

“I don’t even like bowling.”

“Liar. You were on the bowling team for three years.” I glance at the teacher and see that she’s allowing us to have the last few minutes of class to ourselves. Damn.