I'll Be

Chapter Seventeen: Serious

I couldn’t write.

            I couldn’t write anything new, and I hadn’t been able to for the last two weeks. Ever since Sawyer, it became harder and harder to concentrate.

            Constant thoughts of him popped into my brain mid-action. I’d be getting ready for school, and I’d think about him, sitting next to me in his car. Or while I was at practice, wondering if he’d written anything new in the last week.

            Sleep was impossible. I’d wake up from dreams about him, kicked off all my blankets and struggling to catch my breath.

            I’d think about his eyes, and how I never knew what color I’d see when I looked into them. There were days when they would be so dark that I could barely see his irises. Other days, they were the colors of the mahogany wood my mother was comparing for her new project. How they watched me when I walked down the hall, how they’d brighten when they caught me coming around the corner.

            And his clothes. I didn’t think it was possible for a boy to look so good in long-sleeved shirts. He’d wear them just to mess with me, I knew it: they’d cling to him in the cold, the first button undone so his collarbone would be exposed if he leaned just the right way against his locker. I wanted to rip his shirt off in front of the entire school leave marks all over him for everyone to see. I imagined stealing his jeans one day, the way I stole his beanies when he was walking down the hall.

            Mom was right. I was into something big.

            And if I could pinpoint the day, it had to be the first Monday of November that year.

            I walked into school, and to my locker in silence.

            My brain was half-on, lost in the haze of new music, unsolvable math problems and a paper due in less than a week.

            That was probably why I didn’t see the note until after it fell out of my locker and almost got stepped on by Molly.

            I crouched down, lifting it up and slowly unfolding it.

            Teddy-

                  I think my brain might be on fire. I’m serious. After I went home on Friday, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. This is different than the way I can’t breathe when I see you with your guitar, or when you laugh, or when you do that thing where your whole body finds the perfect moment in the song you’re listening to, because you feel it so much. I know you don’t think I catch that, but I do.

         I know it might not mean much coming from me, but if I had known that you would make my body turn into an earthquake, I would’ve grabbed on to you a long time ago.

         Have a good day, my little canary.

         - Sawyer

       He saw me. He saw me, and he wanted me, and I couldn’t even pretend that I was okay.

            The entire day, I was a mess. He’d walk past Liv and I in the hallway, smile, and I’d the air leave my lungs faster than blowing out a candle.

            My friends started to notice.

            Bree watched me sit down during lunch that week, unsure.

            I opened up my notebook, trying to find something, anything to write about. But I couldn’t write, so I started to draw.

            As a little girl, I drew all the time. That’s why Lake Loveland was one of my favorite places in the world: I could see the water and the mountains, people’s houses. It was sort of an omniscient kind of thing, where I was hovering over town, taking panoramas and copying them down on paper. But when I started getting into music, the drawing turned into writing, and the writing turned into singing. But now, all I wanted to do was all of them.