Dreamer☀️ {Completed}

20. ⛅️

"You have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you. I never wish to be parted from this day on." - Pride and Prejudice

My feet thumped lightly in the hallway. I had a bright smile on my face. Everything was coming together, finally. It was about time something went right in my life. Perhaps the world finally decided to pick up a sewing needle and stitch my life back together. Or maybe I was the one fixing it. Maybe I was the one who created all the holes in the first place.

I opened my locker with a smile, pulling my books out and putting my coat up. When I turned around, people were staring at me.

Maybe they weren't used to seeing me so happy anymore. They were expecting to see that gigantic storm cloud still hanging over my head, weighing me down like it's been doing since sophomore year.

Perhaps that cloud has now ventured towards someone else, and is causing them misery instead.

Perhaps I just learned to dance in the rain.

As soon as my locker door shuts, my eyes find Derek. He's twisted away from me but I grin. The sadist in me wants to sneak up behind him and scare him, make his heart jump from within his chest. The sap in me decides that's not necessary. Why would I want to scare someone who I happened to adore? Instead I'd just annoy him about my project. I wanted to rub in as much as I could about how awesome my project was. We'd been teasing each other about it all weekend but he suddenly just stopped.

I see him leaning against his locker with a thick book in his hand and a frown on his face. He doesn't even see me coming. His fingers are wrestling with the lock while he curses the jammed thing, finally yanking it open with as much strength as he could muster.

Geez, I needed to stop laughing at other people's suffering.

"Hey! How's your project going? I can bet it's not going as good as mine!"

He doesn't even look up. He just shoves his book in his locker and storms off, ignoring me completely.

The smile that once graced my features slides off and is quickly replaced by a frown. What the hell was wrong with him? He must be having a bad day.

Derek was never one to ignore somebody. While Autumn wasn't the confrontational type, the rest of us were. We never shied away from things.

Well, I didn't. Not until sophomore year at least.

The thought plagues my mind until lunch. Some people could get over things easily, but not I. I was one of those people who still got haunted late at night by something stupid I did in the third grade. It shouldn't really be shocking that now I was worrying about grumpy Derek and his hormonal attitude this morning. Haden reaches our table with a smile on his face, fingers pushing his hair back as he jumps up and down like an excited school boy.

"They're selling confetti cake in the lunch line so Autumn's going to annoy the lunch ladies until they give her at least ten slices," he says easily, sliding into the seat next to me and I let out a laugh.

That sounded like something Autumn and I would do in sophomore year, before I completely abandoned them.

"Is everything okay with Derek? He kind of blew me off this morning and made me look like a complete idiot."

Haden frowns too at this, scratching his head in confusion.

"He wasn't in first or second hour today. I didn't even know he was at school."

Suddenly I see he and Autumn make an entrance into the cafeteria. Autumn's balancing a bunch of cake slices on her tray while Derek looks solemn. His jaw clenched when he saw Haden and I and I frowned in confusion, looking over to Haden to see if he caught it.