(l i k e t h e m o v i e s)

Cammie stretches.
(The clock in the top right corner of the screen says 2.15 and it's a school night and she has a history presentation tomorrow and that essay and it's her mother's birthday next week and she has no idea what to get her an-)

She uncrosses her legs and shuts the laptop.
(Breathe.)

Cammie rummages through her cardboard box of clothing for that pale blue men's XL t-shirt and those Matryoshka doll pyjama pants that shrunk in the wash. Sighing, she stands, bare toes glorying in the fleece of the flea-market Persian rug.

She watches her clothes fall to the floor in the chipped, mismatched mirrors lent against the walls.
(She tries to imagine how it would feel if it were a boy undressing her like the movies. Slow and frustratingly tender.)

Cammie's bones ache. Her bed beckons. That shitty beat-up futon.

She lays there, eyes open, that one stubborn son-of-a-bitch spring in the mattress digging into her back.
(Lays there dreaming of a time and a place where a boy will kiss the tattoo on her bared shoulder-blade and want her.)

-She wants impossible things-

Cammie wants to fast-forward through all this high school bullshit and move out of this boring place.
(To finally be who she wants to be and not her parent's project and meet boys like Zach who make her bleed and to meet people that wonder and want to know her, while she wonders and wants to know people.)

Things are hard when you are invisible.

A chameleon.

Once Bex told Cammie that she is the kind of girl she looks for in pictures.
(Quiet. D-i-s-t-a-n-t. De tached.)

Nobody notices her.
(She is unremarkable.)

Ah, but this brings us to the boy who did.
(That goddamn boy, those goddamn eyes.)

(A single look from him is enough to knock her breathless.)

Sometimes, Cammie wishes things could have been different. That she hadn't startled and shied away when he touched her hair that day fresh out of school.
(That sultry afternoon. The smell of rain on hot pavement.)

Cammie can't help but remember it all with complete clarity. That perfect half a smirk on his face (half joking?) as he smoothed her (average) brown hair from her (average) green eyes.
(Cue her clumsy flinching.)
(Cue the jutting out of his perfect lower lip.)

-He is a beautiful boy used to getting his way. No human being has touched her in months-

But then any trace of regret vanishes as she remembers that Zach Goode isn't the kind of boy that holds; isn't the kind of boy that slowly unbuttons a shirt.
(No; he is the kind that flirts and uses and darts away when you get too close.)

And if a boy ever got close and left, she would explode.

So instead of ever trying to make her feelings known, Cammie lays there with an empty longing.
(Forsomethingthatdoesn'texist.)