Leap of Faith

23:33

“Seriously, will you just sit,” I’m being ordered from the shadow. “It’s making me nervous that you’re acting a little crazed.”

“I’m not crazed,” I protest. I might look a little crazy if there were lights here and the boy could see me, but my mental state is not crazed. “I’m just bewildered.”

“Bewildered?” I hear a mocking laugh in his words but I choose to ignore it. It’s not worth picking a fight with this guy if I have to spend half an hour in here with him. “Are you sure you’re a senior at Capshaw Academy? No-one I know speaks like that.”

That much was true. Not a lot of people in our class would use words like that, but I’m not really like most of the student body at Capshaw Academy. I’m not of the blonde hair-blue eye variety, nor do I cheer and walk around with half my ass hanging out of my super high cut shorts. I’m not into what people think of me, because if I was, the label ‘freak’ would sting me. Instead I choose to wear it as a badge of honor. Why would I want to be like the majority of the girls I know?

I’m good at math. Very good, in fact. It’s in my genes, or at least that’s what my father likes to say. He’s a professor at Caltech and holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from MIT, so naturally he thinks I’m genetically wired to be a math whiz. I’m very good at photography too, not that Dad wants to hear that. He likes to think of it as a hobby and not as a possible career path. Ditto about Chemistry. And every other class that I’ve taken that isn’t math.

Anyway, I’m getting off track. The point is that I’m not like the girls I go to school with. And that, to me, is a good thing.

“Who are you?” I ask the darkness. “Actually, no, scrap that. Where are you?”

I feel a cold touch on my ankle that makes my legs go like jelly. Literally like jelly because I’m suddenly falling, crashing down on the boy that shares this closet with me.

“Falling for me without knowing my name?” His voice is a whisper at my ear and it sends shivers of the good kind down my spine. “I’m Theo.”

I try to get back to my feet, but instead I feel a pair of hands grip me at my waist, picking me up and dropping me softly to sit at the side of a very muscular body. His biceps must be amazing if he can pick me up like that as if I weighed nothing. I wrap my tiny hand around one of his muscles and note that the wingspan of my hand barely gets around his arm.

“Uh,” I murmur as a ploy to regain my ability to speak. “Nice to meet you Theo. Am I allowed to say that seeing as I can’t actually see you? No matter. I’m Catherine. With a ‘C’.”

"Ok, Catherine with a ‘C’,” Theo shuffles away from me, presumably to the corner that he’d been hiding in before I got here. “What brings you to my closet?”

I refuse to answer that. “I don’t want to talk about it.”