I thought about her every day after that. No matter what I was doing, she was on my mind. While I worked on school things, all I could see was her smile. When I tried to listen to music, all I heard was her laugh. Everything reminded me of her, which frightened me a little. I had never experienced anything like this before. I didn't know how to respond to it, so I did my best to ignore it. Which just made me think about her even more.
I couldn't go to her house for the rest of the month because of something that was happening with her family. I didn't ask what it was, that would have been rude. So I only saw her at school - in English. And we sat on opposite sides of the room. It was agonizing. I spent the entire period just staring at the back of her head, wondering if she could tell I was looking but finding myself unable to turn my gaze away.
We still had to work on the project though. She came to my house instead until it was done. She seemed a bit more distant than she had been the first time we hung out. I can't quite describe it. We had fairly lengthy intervals of not saying anything and just staring at one another, though. Those were the things that I spent hours at a time thinking about at night, while I stared up at my ceiling trying to sleep. She consumed my entire brain at those times and I had absolutely no control over it.
Chloe sometimes saw me in the halls and would smile broadly, an expression that was incredibly infectious. She would force me to stop and talk to her, which I was more than willing to do, though I'm pretty sure it always made us both late for our next class on account of the fact we were nearly unable to pull ourselves from the conversation.
I can still distinctly remember what happened one day, I'm pretty sure it's embedded permanently into my memories. I couldn't forget it if I tried.
It was the end of the day and I was heading to the door, to leave the school and walk home. But I felt a hand grab mine, successfully terrifying me beyond belief, and I was spun around. The next thing I knew I had been engulfed in a very tight hug. I was confused but I hugged this person back, basically sure who it was though I wasn't positive.
When the person finally let me go I saw that it was in fact Chloe, absolutely beaming, her white teeth almost blinding. She enthusiastically told me about how she had gotten a very good grade on a test she hadn't studied for at all, in a class she wasn't doing very well in. I still couldn't comprehend the fact that she had just hugged me, so it took me a few seconds to coherently congratulate her. Following my response, she actually hugged me again, furthering my state of dysfunctionality. When she let me go that time, she had to leave and get on her bus.
For the rest of the day, or probably the rest of the week, all I could think about was that hug. She had hugged me so warmly and so tightly it was impossible to forget yet it was annoyingly impossible to exactly remember how it felt. She didn't hug me again for a while after that. Maybe she could tell how much it affected me and she took it the wrong way. I wasn't sure.
But all I knew was that it was fairly odd to be this hung up on one hug.
And it scared me.
It was so great spending any time with her. I went over to her house as much as possible but I never did meet her parents. She said that it wasn't important, and they didn't really care about any of her friends.
I found some things out about her. She really liked to read and she liked watching chick-flicks. She usually listened to music when she fell asleep, and she would sing only to herself when nobody else was home, which I thought was adorable but I didn't say so aloud. Her favorite thing in the world seemed to be rain, she said that whenever it did rain her chest felt lighter and she could barely stop smiling. Before she moved to my town she lived in New York, where she did acrobatics for most of her life. She didn't do it here, because we were a smaller town and we didn't have places for it. Her parents also didn't have the time to drive her. She claimed that it didn't bother her much but her eyes got distant whenever she talked about it.
I told her things about myself too, but I felt like she was more interesting than I was.
We were getting closer. It was such a great feeling. Every time I left her house, she would hug me, and I was ecstatic for the rest of the night.
I was starting to feel something though. And it was a little scary. I couldn't identify it. I felt stuff like this before but just for a few seconds, a day, tops. This was lasting for weeks on end.
I remember one day, we went to her house after school like we often did, and we sat on her couch together. She wanted to watch a movie but she didn't have any left on DVD, so she just flipped through channels. She stopped at something that seemed interesting.
It was a foreign movie. I don't remember much about it but I remembered that it started out at a wedding of some kind. There were these two couples, one of them was engaged, I think. Later on in the movie, things progressed and two girls got together instead. It was making me feel a little awkward so I pretended to be on my phone a lot of the time. I didn't know why it made me feel so weird. She seemed totally fine.
Chloe would make comments every now and then, like she often did. Usually it was just funny observations that made me smile. But one thing she said stuck with me. For a long long time.
There was one scene where the girls ran off together somewhere. It was just a brief romantic montage. I would glance up from my phone every now and then.
She sighed heavily, before mumbling to herself, "I just wish somebody would love me like that..."
I remember how tense that made me. I felt like I couldn't even move for a half an hour, straight. Because that one sentence stuck in my head. I didn't know why. But it was a little startling. I stared at her for the majority of the rest of the time I was there, trying to do it discreetly, memorizing every detail of her face.
When I had to leave, at around 6:15, and she gave me one of her hugs goodbye, it felt different than it ever had before. It lasted longer. I think it was a little tighter. When she closed the door, leaving me on her doorstep, I stood there for a few lingering seconds in an attempt to stop zoning out. It didn't really work. I practically stumbled home.
