FAST CAR - Awsten Knight ✓

ii. soggy waffles

Syrup dripped off of Awsten's fork and rolled down his soggy waffles, much like the drool from his mouth which was still stinging with the taste of freshly squeezed, no-pulp-added orange juice. His fingers tapped on the sticky table that was stained to the core with the scent of pancakes and other various breakfast and lunch foods.

Awsten was oblivious to his all surroundings; all of them except for one thing. Gracie Mae Davidson. Awsten didn't even consider her a person anymore. She was pretty much just this thing. This beautiful, unattainable thing that he was borderline obsessed with at this point. He was in love with her and had been since the day she was born.

They weren't even friends, the thought of her just kept him going. Kept him going through his parents' rocky marriage and his dad's unstable job. He was surviving on a literal thing that he had no connection to at this point in time. Not anymore, at least.

Gracie was sitting across the room from Awsten- who was with his snooze-fest-loser-friends -with Krista and Talia, the school's two biggest, most popular, bitches. And (Awsten didn't know this), but Gracie absolutely hated them. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair as Krista started going into more, unnecessary detail about her and her boyfriend's latest make-out session. Yikes.

If she was a ballon, her hatred for those girls would've popped her long ago. She would no longer be Gracie the balloon, but Gracie the all-mighty dead-and-gone little, hatred-filled thing. Gracie the popped balloon. But after Awsten and Gracie somehow ended their friendship, she felt like she had nowhere else to go. She truly had no one else to turn to. So, she did want any sensible girl would do and became friends with the only people who would accept her. This just so happened to be a group of popular girls. And she just so happened to despise them. Those stupid girls only really hung around Gracie because she had a connection to all the baseball jocks anyway.

You see, Gracie made the town's travel team the second she was old enough to try, and Awsten didn't. To be frank, he couldn't. She was there to comfort him from that the entire summer, she left him to pick all the movies and all the snacks, Grace even let him drag her to the arcade three times in one week. But at the very start of the seventh grade, they had this weird, unspoken agreement to not speak anymore. Neither of them liked it one bit. Both of them were too stubborn to actually admit that.

So, she moved on and made the middle school's ball team, however, Awsten didn't. She even made varsity her freshman year, but by then Awsten made had made the executive decision to give up his dream of playing major league ball to fall in love with music. It was rhythms and notes now, no longer bats and balls. He liked it better anyway. There was less time to be hungry.

Gracie looked like a walking ray of sunshine to Awsten who was seemingly stuck in a year of perpetual rain. Her yellow sweater seemed to make her blue eyes pop today and those denim shorts just caused him to drool even harder, hence the soggy waffles. Grace, on the other hand, naturally didn't seem to notice him anymore (however, if she did see the boy, she'd probably be drooling all the same), and he went on longing for her attention, which he knew was most likely never uniformly happening again.

They were best friends, but that had ended.
They were still neighbors, of course, just not friends. Of any kind. The fact that they lived within literal feet of each other meant absolutely nothing to either to each other anymore, hurt them every single day. I mean, really, how could it not? Their friendship meant everything to them when they younger, but as time went on, the two realized that the world's bigger than a few feet. They gradually found out about the other people; The ones who existed outside of the few hundred who lived in their small town. They fell into new crowds and wanted new things.

Something poked Awsten's left shoulder and suddenly he was back in the diner next to his high school on a random Monday lunch break. Awsten's new best friend Vincent was doing his best to drag Awsten back to school for the sixth period. Awsten wouldn't have really cared less if Vincent dropped dead. He didn't like him too much.

"Bud," he started. "We need your twelve dollars for the food that you drooled on. Oh, and your girlfriend waved before and you didn't wave back." She really didn't wave though. For if she had even seen the boy, she would've probably forced Awsten to have an actual conversation with her. Anything to get away from Krista and what's-her-face. Even if it meant breaking the code of forever long silence.

Awsten crossed his arms mumbling something along the lines of "she's not my girlfriend," while rolling his eyes.

"Oh, what's that?" One of the other boys, Mike, had asked. He laughed as he sarcastically held his hand around his ear as if it would magically help him hear better. "Didn't hear ya."

"She's not my girlfriend!" The extremely grumpy boy said a little louder.

"Oh, what's that baby boy? Not your girlfriend? But you're always staring at her?" Vin joked. It was like poison to Awsten, slowly killing him with nothing but ease.

"Huh? Are you a stalker Awst?" Mike asked, again with that dangerously contagious laugh of his. Awsten flung his sticky, plastic fork and the other boy, who unfortunately sidestepped it. Awsten wished it had landed in his hair. Still, Mike pushed on. "Do you sit at her window at night with your camera and t-"

The last boy, Matt, stood up from the booth stopping the abusive chatter abruptly.

Vin and Mike were already standing but Awsten was still sitting and shaking his head violently while pulling singles out of his pocket one by one to pay for his untouched waffles and a half-empty glass of orange juice that Vin drank himself using nothing but a red and white bendy straw while Awsten was spaced out and thinking about Gracie.

"Guys quit it. It's not his fault that they're not friends anymore." Matt sighed. Awsten always figured he was a good kid, but the truth was really just that Mathew knew exactly what it felt like to lose someone close to you. He simply couldn't stand it when they made fun of Awsten for missing Grace. "He misses her. What're gonna do? Sue him?" There was a little too much emphasis forced into sue. "Huh?"

All of that was just the end of their freshman year, which was close to two years ago now.

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