Between the Lines

- 23 -

Kendal

The folded paper square lands with a soft thud right in the middle of my test, making the line on the seven I’m writing go sliding too far. Huffing under my breath, I flick the paper to the side so I can erase the number and start over.

Since I’m on the last question, my annoyance fades once I’m finished writing the number, and I reach for the carefully folded note.

I don’t know why it surprises me to see Braden’s small, neat, capital-case letters flowing across the paper, but it sort of does. Or at least the way my heart beat skips a little and goose bumps form on my arms and neck feels like surprise. Maybe it’s really that I’m nervous about how he’ll have reacted to my saying I would buy him dinner. Now that I’ve stopped to think about it, that seems like a rather odd thing to do. Why would he even want to go to dinner with me?

The first line on the page should dissipate the nervousness, because he obviously doesn’t think my invitation is weird at all. But as soon as I read a few more lines, the goose bumps turn into a weird buzzing sensation in my fingertips and it feels a little hard to breathe.

I don’t know why he’s so obsessed about my dad. He’s never even met my father as far as I know, and although I was worried about getting caught by him last night, that never happened, so that part of his note makes no sense to me. I can’t fathom my dad coming up at dinner at all, despite the fact that Braden is not terribly far off on his job.

What I am interested in is what exactly Braden is thinking he might do at dinner that my dad would care about at all – though a great part of that question is answered in the next stanza where he tells me I’m gorgeous.

Yeah. I’m in serious trouble here. What the hell is Braden even thinking, sending me a note like this when he knows I have a boyfriend?

It’s true that I don’t think I’m going to have a boyfriend much longer, but adding Braden to this situation is a complication, and I don’t do complicated. There’ve always been days I wanted to throw Kyle off a cliff, but in truth, he’s easy, simple. He’s something I can walk away from after this year and not even have to look back.

This kind of note from Braden is exactly the reason I’m with a guy like Kyle. You’d have to have a death wish to even think this kind of thing about Kyle’s girlfriend. And yet, here Braden is, putting those words on paper, in ink, in the middle of Mr. Brody’s class.

And the worst part of all of it is that it doesn’t piss me off.

I know what I should do, what I would do, if I had any sense of self-preservation, and certainly if I had any regard at all for Braden’s physical or emotional well-being. Apparently I have neither of these things, because instead of taking out a new sheet of paper and writing a kind but firm cancellation of my invitation, I use my pen to circle the first letter of each line that he wrote to me and then sketch a picture of a mirror with an enormous lip-print on it.

I’m having trouble containing a giddy giggle as, against the roar in my mind of what I should do, I scribble quickly along the bottom of the page.

 

I’ve changed my mind. Not sure about dinner – let’s do brunch first. Right after this class.

And then, somehow, even though I’m still trying to second-guess this and stop myself, the note makes it off my desk and onto his.

For a full ten seconds, I have absolutely no idea whether I’m excited or terrified, and then Mr. Brody’s deep tenor shatters the peace in the classroom. “Do you have something you’d like to share with the class there, Braden?”