Stuck Between The Pages

Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR: CRUSHING

I will take a serious approach to a subject usually treated lightly, which is a nerdy thing to do. 
-Benjamin Nugent

Robin's

I'm really good with numbers, math is the one thing that is consistent and always makes sense to me. So, I've kept count of the things my poet has given me over the years.

The notes started in eight grade, that year I only got 6 of them and thought they were a joke. I kept them anyway.

In freshman year of high school, I got 17 and started to think it wasn't a joke. But then nothing happened over the summer, they didn't tell me who they were, so I started to think it was a joke again.

Then in sophomore year, I got 22, bumping the number up to 45 .

Junior year I got an even sixty, making me believe that maybe, they're counting too. I don't think it's a joke anymore.

This year, I got 23 first semester and a mere 4 this semester -well, five now.

The newest poem I found laying in one of my books read like this-

To make sure what I'm feeling
Is at all valid
I have tried to see you
A thousand different ways
Now I have just found
A thousand different ways
To love you

-and, in other words, someone confessed to me they're in love with me for the 132nd time.

That means I have literally received over a hundred love letters, poems or the occasional joke from someone who's in love with me but won't tell me that to my face. 

Whoever this is is infuriatingly funny -which annoys me even more because even when thinking those words stupid Keagan Monikol is the one I think of. 

He's infuriating. 

And sometimes funny. 

That's all. 

He's still a jock who leaves after school to do god knows what even if we want to study together, never has time for anyone else, disappears after every game if only to get to the party his team is going to first.

Keagan is still just -he's just a dumb football player.

One with brown eyes and black hair, one that's not special, one that doesn't even try to act smart or serious, one who-

I need to stop thinking about it.

He just makes me so...angry.

The only time I haven't been mad with him in some way is actually the same day he made me the most mad -the day I was stupidly assigned to sit next to him in our AP Calculus AB class by Mr. Jael.

How he managed to get in and pass the class until second semester is beyond me.

I said something in the hall to Nell and I can't even remember what it is, I was honestly upset at the time- -like I said, he makes me mad and then I can't think- -but Keagan heard it.

And those dumb brown eyes of his looked like Bambi when he stared at me.

It made me feel bad.

But the jock didn't say anything, he just walked past us and then joked about it two weeks later.

He's someone I can't understand.

I hate not being able to understand something. Maybe that's the nerd in me, I don't know. All I know is that everything can be explained by something simply and then something more complex.