The Girl Who Sat in the Corner

Chapter 6 - Chat

Wesley stayed home "sick" for two days. His mom left too early and came home too late to notice. Esmeralda quietly understood and covered for him without asking too many questions. "You do what you need, mijo."

He read the Tegmark paper that Kronk had given him and lost himself in researching the intriguing theories and working to master the physics behind them. As he was drifting off to sleep the first night, an image drifted through his head where the borders between different times and dimensions were not barriers, but the thinnest of boundaries, like the walls of cells, that would be possible to penetrate if one only found the right key. It created a beautiful picture in his mind.

On the second night, he decided to return to vid.io. He had blocked Kai from his mind since the bus ride. He hadn't seen her but knew she must have been there that morning. He wasn't quite sure why she should matter anymore than the rest of the students on the bus, but she did. Maybe it was because that he could imagine that the was the only one who wasn't laughing at him. But he realized he was probably kidding himself. Laughing or not, there was no way anybody was going to give him a second thought (unless, like Platt, they had bad intentions).

He was just planning on seeing if she posted anything new but a red badge in the menu bar told him he had two messages waiting.

"Thanks for all the comments" It was from Navajo ninja, from the previous night.

"Hey" That was from about a half hour ago.

His first impulse was to log off. But the anonymity of being online and unknown gave him the courage just to browse around for a while. He went to her page and tried to figure out how to find new posts. Silently, he chuckled at himself. He had coded a couple of artificial intelligence routines for games that went beyond the best commercial software, yet he still didn't know the first thing about social media sites.

While he was poking and prodding tabs and drop-down menus, a message window popped open on the bottom of the screen.

"WB!"

It was from Navajo ninja.

"Hi," he replied. And then, finding another level of courage he added, "I really like what you've posted. Great stuff!"

"TY!" He was pretty sure he understood, but double checked anyway.

"No problem. I really liked it. You're interesting and we feel the same way about a lot of stuff."

"Too bad. I really don't feel good about a lot of stuff."

"Yep," he replied. "You're really talented. I wish I could do stuff like that. I'm okay at math but kind of suck at writing"

The conversation went on and as it did, the messages came faster and got longer. Though they both knew that it isn't okay to ask where somebody lives, at least they figured out they were in the same time zone and were online at about the same times. They were the same age and in the same grade, struggling with adjusting to a high school that felt huge. Neither of them liked crowds and were both uncomfortable in crowds and always seemed to be in the middle of them at school.

He worked up a bit more courage, "You criticize yourself a lot but I'm beginning to think that you're really nice. Super talented, too."

A long pause.

"Welp, I'm ugly and pretty worthless to most people. Friends don't hang around me for long for some reason."

"You're really, really wrong about that," he shot back. "I think you're really pretty." Then, he added with more than a little truth, "You have incredible eyes. I can't get them out of my head sometimes. And you seem like you're kind and somebody who really cares about people."

Another long pause.

"Um, I don't know what you look like. Do you have Skype?"

He panicked. "No. No camera here. On a big, clunky desktop. I'm not much to look at anyway. You're not missing much." He didn't like lying but didn't want to give himself away.

"Oh, too bad GTG, it's getting late. Hope we can chat again!"

"Me too. It was fun."

They signed off and as he got ready for bed, he realized he was feeling some things that were very new to him. On one hand, it was scary. On the other, it felt kind of nice. But he wasn't quite ready to connect the fun chat session with the reality of the dark, silent girl who sat in the corner of his homeroom that he secretly pined for.