Love Him

Part 12

I showed up to school tired as hell on the first day and exactly five minutes before the warning bell rang. I waited in line and got my schedule last minute. I only noticed I had a bunch of texts from Josh once I was seated in my assigned homeroom class. The texts were from minutes ago, asking about my whereabouts. I quickly sent him an apology and explained that I had arrived a little later than planned. He automatically sent me a text back, asking what my schedule looked like. Before I could reply, my homeroom teacher began to welcome our class, so I set my phone down. *

Me and Josh ended up reuniting at our first period class. He was already there with Nick, Lance, and Mariah - surprisingly. He greeted me with a much needed, sincere hug. We compared our schedules and found out that we had almost every class together except for maybe two. But those were only option courses. He was pretty ecstatic about having every other class with me. I couldn't complain either. *

The first three weeks of school were decent and uneventful. My sleep pattern didn't improve much so I arrived to school late often in the morning, which meant I never got to meet Josh at our spot at 8:45 a.m. like he always suggested. I knew it made me seem like I was uninterested in hanging out with him, but how was I supposed to explain to him my sleeping issues without seeming like a sissy? I honestly preferred to leave him with no explanation.

My sleeping problems caught up to me during the last week of September and I missed school on a Monday and Tuesday. Monday was due to extreme fatigue from no sleep. On Tuesday I had a family doctor appointment and was assigned a sleeping prescription - Melatonin - after it was decided that I had insomnia. Back at home that afternoon, at around five, I got a call from Josh. I knew I would. I hadn't been as active on "The Squad" group chat, so no one really knew what was going on with me. Not even Mariah. I texted her the most and she kept me up to date with school stuff, but she didn't know about my situation. She never asked and I couldn't decide if I was grateful or not.

As my phone rang and Joshua's name popped up, I battled over whether I should pick up or not. In the end, I did of course. He sounded happy to hear from me. "I haven't seen you in the past two days. You gonna be there tomorrow?"

I looked at my dresser mirror and nodded at myself surely. "Yeah. That's the plan."

"I was thinking that maybe we could meet at our spot during lunch." Oh. "We haven't really hung out in a while... or, kissed..." Ah. "So, I don't know- if you're up for it tomorrow, we should really meet up."

I suppressed a sigh. "Um, yeah. I'll- I'll see. I might need the lunch hour to catch up on stuff, but we can figure it out tomorrow."

"Yeah, sure. No pressure." After getting off the phone with Josh, I couldn't decide how I felt. I could feel slight disappointment from the fact that he wanted to meet up so he could get a kiss. I didn't even know that he intended on continuing whatever it was we had before the break. We hadn't seen each other over summer break and had barely spoken. Now that school was back, he was into it all again? What was this? Was a school relationship all he wanted? And then he'd get to go M.I.A over the summer? I didn't like it. I suddenly felt positive that this wasn't gonna work out. I just had no idea how I was gonna explain that to him. I never thought I'd have to at some point. *

I found an excuse not to meet up with him the next day. And also for the rest of the week. The pills I was taking helped get me to sleep, but caused me to have extreme migraines and drowsiness during the day. This led me to missing three consecutive days of school on the first week of October, which was also my birthday week, where I turned sixteen on Wednesday. That afternoon, at 2p.m., I found the strength to get out of bed. I held onto my pounding head for support and checked my phone. A group chat message from Joshua was displayed. It had just been sent.