"Hey, thanks for the ride, Boner! I'll see you at school tomorrow, okay? Bye!"
Carol's head snapped up at the sound of Mike's voice coming from downstairs. Boner must have dropped off her older brother from whatever stupid place they'd been to that night. Mike had obviously forgotten that he was grounded from using the car when their parents found out that he'd missed his curfew one too many times. It was so unfair that they grounded him from using the car but yet he could still go out with his friends as long as he got a ride.
The last time Carol was grounded, she couldn't go anywhere at all, even on the city bus! Clearly it was her father who had done the punishing. So much for equal rights for women.
She heard him coming up the stairs and the sound of thudding indicated that Mike had dropped his backpack on the floor in his room. As if on que the music began, blaring through the wall. She could just picture him standing in the middle of the carpeted floor, pretending to play the guitar as though he was the next Bruce Springsteen. She almost laughed. Ha! In his dreams! It would never happen. She couldn't wait to tell Sandy, for he was sure to find it as hilarious as she.
But then she remembered… and her heart clinched in her chest once more.
Oh God… why did simply thinking about him hurt so much? His dark hair, the way he kissed her; the way they'd kissed on her front porch and she found it so hard to stop? When she began to sob again, she realized that she simply couldn't go on like this. She had to talk to someone; anyone.
Without giving it another thought, she walked into the hallway. She could hear the music blaring from Mike's room. His door was closed, but she didn't care. She opened the door and walked right in. Sure enough, Mike was standing in the center of the room, doing a very bad impression of Bruce Springsteen. But she paid him no mind and walked over to his bed.
After pushing several items aside (how could he live in this dump of a room? No wonder he could never find his homework!), she sat down on his bed. The blue and yellow book, identical to the one she had in her room, beckoned to her. Slowly she reached for it, thumbing through the slick pages until she found the picture that she'd been staring at just moments before.
The music stopped abruptly and she looked up to see Mike frozen in place, staring at her. His hand was over his chest and he was breathing hard.
"Dang it, Carol, you scared me to death!" he yelled. "How many times have I told you to keep your stupid face out of my room?"
He'd said the words at least a hundred, quite possibly a million times before, but now they hurt more than she thought possible. For the first time in her life, she felt small and meek.
"I-I know. I-I just wanted to look at your yearbook." Her words were so soft, that she barely heard the words.
"Yeah? Well, go to your own room and look at your stupid yearbook, all right? I'm tired of you coming in here and-."
The second she glanced at Sandy's picture, she began to sob once more. But this time, something happened. Mike was beside her in an instant, his warm hand on her back.