Pick Up The Pieces

He's Art. Damaged Art, But Still Art

Cassiel ~

"Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!"

- CJ Cherryh

He's Art. Damaged Art, but Still Art.

If you asked me what my worst quality was, I could tell you immediately. It's both my favorite thing about myself and the thing I hate the most. I'm curious.

School was never an issue for me. It isn't that I'm a supergenius who understands everything easily - I'm jealous of people like that - it's just that I don't mind doing the work to understand everything. Science is probably my least favorite subject because it doesn't make sense to me most of the time, but I'm stubborn enough that I'll sit with a textbook for four hours until I understand it. It doesn't frustrate me. I love puzzles; can't get enough of them. There's something satisfying about finally solving it; that last, final piece perfectly in its place.

So, when I'm presented with some sort of enigma, I can't get it out of my head until I've figured it out. This is a good thing sometimes. It's the reason why my parents have never had to worry about my grades, and why I'm always on the honor roll.

However, it's also a bad thing sometimes. Like today, when I find myself sneaking a glance at him for the twentieth time in what feels like an hour.

Adrian Novak-Gonzales.

The strangest, most intriguing enigma I've ever met, and I've yet to figure him out. He's a football player in the same grade as me. We've never truly spoken, even in classes. He usually hangs out with the team at lunch, and I'm assuming he goes with them to wherever they go after school. He's everything that most guys my age want to look like, managing to look beautiful and hot at the same time.

We live in completely different worlds.

So, why am I so endlessly fascinated with him?

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something about him underneath that tough jock exterior that's just screaming at me. Maybe it's in the way he helps the underclassmen with their books, or the way he always holds the doors for others, or the way I see him always smiling at the staff with his small smile. It's secret; like he knows something I don't.

He isn't just some dumb, pretty, asshole jock. Don't know how I know, but I do, and I'm determined to prove it to someone. Myself, or even him.

I had finally decided that I would just talk to him. Bite the bullet and go up to him, get to know him, make friends with him. Hopefully, get him to trust me. Trust him back. That's how all good friendships start, right?

But he wasn't in physics that day. Then he ended up being absent the next day, and then for the entire week. Before I knew it, it had been a month and I hadn't seen him. The spiritual part of me thought that maybe that meant that I shouldn't speak to him. It was the universe telling me that it wasn't meant to be, or whatever. So, then, I had decided to just leave it be. Maybe this puzzle didn't need to be solved.

And then he had pulled up to school the next day looking so damn tired.

That was really all it took. My curiosity was back, and there was no stopping it this time. Except now I had more questions. Why is it that you always look like you're walking out of a warzone? Why don't you ask for help? Why do you pretend to be someone you aren't? So I took a chocolate bar out of the vending machines and brought it up to him.

That conversation hadn't gone well. He flipped out and told me that I didn't need to make friends with him just because a teacher had told him to, citing that he had a bad month.