I sighed as I drew a circle in the dirt with my index. It was three days before school.
Three days.
Lloyd and I still hadn't spoken.
It had been two days.
Two days.
I know, I know. Misako told me to talk. But I didn't know what to talk about! We spent three hours in complete silence, staring at the ceiling while my mind raced and pulsed and screamed at me to find something to say. Something to break the tension. Something to get us back to the way we were before.
I guess a part of me knew that after he revealed his secret, things wouldn't go back to exactly being the way before. It never would. I knew. I was wiser. How we decided to act about the information was up to us.
The last two days were tedious and boring. After getting home via Kai's dragon (because Lloyd didn't move from his spot which kind of made me feel a little sad and guilty but also,,, constant mood), I found myself face down on my bed and frustratedly screaming into my pillow. Mum came in only to find me with tears and snot trailing down my face while sobbing uglily and angrily - angry at myself for not trying to make things right. She said nothing, but instead returned with a whole block of chocolate she had stashed away and rubbed my back while I devoured it in record time.
"He broke up with you?" Mum predicted softly after I managed to calm my hysterical hormones down.
"What?" I sniffled incredulously, raising my gaze to hers with owlish eyes. "No!"
Mum sat back, dumbfounded. Her face pulled into an expression of confusion.
"Ah?" her eyebrows raised. "Then, uh, what's going on, honey?"
"It's-" I paused to wipe my nose with my sleeve. "It's nothing. I can handle it."
Mum's gaze dropped into an unamused frown. I began to regret pushing her away and shrunk a little under her hardened face.
"Look, honey," she said soothingly despite the steeled look in her eyes. "You're seventeen. You can't expect yourself to be able to tackle everything in the world alone. You've got friends and family that love you and want to help you."
Mum smiled as I slumped a little in resignation.
"Come on, spill," she urged calmly, squeezing my shoulder fondly. "I'll do what I can to help, I promise."
I shakily sighed, caving.
"Lloyd's fourteen," I mumbled, staring at my hands. "Well, mentally fourteen. Physically eighteen."
Mum continued to smile. I glanced up, waiting for her reply. It came soon after.
"What the fuck."
I winced remembering the odd conversation I had with her, retelling the story Lloyd and Wu had told me. She simply blinked and shook her head before heading off to bed early, a lost look in her eyes.
It didn't do too well for my nerves.
I was sitting in the park, crossed legged before the water feature. Nya had texted me and told me to wait there. I had an inkling of a feeling that she was up to something, but kept my suspicions to myself.
I sighed and threw myself back against the grass, staring disdainfully at the blue sky. The temperature was dropping day by day, nearing autumn which was just a few weeks away. The height of summer had been and gone.
That would've meant that it's almost been three months since I met Lloyd. Three months seem so short, but the summer felt like an eternity. So much had happened - meeting him, finding out he's the Green Ninja, meeting his friends and then his family, kissing him for the first time, him being possessed by Morro, defeating the Preeminent, saving Ninjago and...
Admitting that he had lied to me.
He wasn't eighteen.
In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't even the age gap that bothered me. Sure, at the age that we're were at currently - my seventeen (almost eighteen) to his fourteen, I know a lot of people who would look down on that. But in a few years, it wouldn't matter anyway! Three-to-four year age gaps are nothing in adulthood.
It was the fact that he wasn't upfront to me about it that bothered me. Sure, I got that he had to keep his secret identity as the Green Ninja from me and I was fine with that, I totally understood - and I guess I could see why he was reluctant to tell me about his age, but I was worried about when - or even if - he was going to tell me. Was he just going to spend the rest of his life pretending to be somebody he wasn't? An age he never was?
