Chapter 7: Checking in with Felicity

After lunch that day, Felicity had gone to her car. She didn't want to stay at that school another second. Tears threatened to overflow from her eyes, but she blinked them away. She glanced into the rearview mirror and dabbed at the corners of her eyes with her fingertips, so she didn't notice the incredibly cute guy walking toward her car.

He rapped on her window with his knuckles. Felicity looked at Beck in surprise before rolling her window halfway down.

"What do you want?" She tried to make her voice sound snappy and mean, but it came out small and weak.

"I came to apologize," he said, running his hand through his dark hair. Felicity could admit to herself that he had nice hair. "I didn't know what you had been going through, and I had no idea that Tori was going to try to set us up."

Felicity nodded. "It's okay. Tori meant well; she just made a mistake."

"Yeah, she does that a lot, but she usually fixes her mistakes." Beck smiled at her. "I really would like to hang out with you sometime. As friends, of course."

Let's see, she thought to herself, hang out with a guy who likes me or go home and cry my eyes out over a guy that I can't have? She chose the former. "I'm free now," she said, a devilish gleam in her eyes. "Hop in."

Hesitation stopped Beck but only for a moment. He went around the front of Felicity's car and sat in the passenger seat.

"Where to?" she asked.

"Are you in the mood for sushi?" Beck asked, raising one eyebrow.

Felicity chuckled, putting her car in reverse and backing out of the parking spot. Then, she headed toward Nozu.

Beck and Felicity sat across from each other in a booth at Nozu's. And the weirdest thing was happening. They were laughing. Felicity tried and failed once more to use her chopsticks properly. Beck laughed even harder. Finally, she just threw the offensive sticks onto the table.

"Screw it," she said, picking the yellowtail, which she had been trying to grip with the chopsticks, up with her fingers.

Beck swiped at the tears flowing from his eyes. "How do you not know how to use chopsticks?" he asked her when he had stopped laughing and got his breathing back under control.

"Uh, because I live in America where our utensils of choose is a fork and spoon." She rolled her eyes at him but was smiling.

"But when you eat the food of foreign countries, you should eat it in their custom." He demonstrated the proper use of chopsticks, picking up a sushi roll with the thin sticks and popping it into his mouth. "Yummy. It tastes so much better this way." His eyes gleamed as he smiled back at her.

"Well, if that's the case, then why are we sitting in a booth? We should be kneeling on pillows and eating at a low table, not sitting in something that doesn't adequately represent traditional Japanese culture."

Beck nodded. "Point taken. You should take that up with the establishment, though. I have no say over how they furbish their eating house."

"For a pretty boy, you're not so bad. Smart, too."

He cocked an eyebrow. "I can't be smart and good-looking?"

She shrugged. "You can. It's just more common for the pretty people to be stupid. At least, that's what pop culture wants us to believe. And it's not exactly like you're going to an academic school." Beck opened his mouth to speak, but Felicity held her hand up. "I'm not saying that everyone who goes to a performing arts school isn't smart. I'm going to one so that obviously can't be true." She smirked. "What I mean to say is that I didn't know what to expect when I got accepted to Hollywood Arts. I mostly thought that all these LA folk would be stuck up and vain."

She saved herself with that one, getting herself out of hot water fast. Beck was appreciative of his looks, but he didn't like being judged because of them. Well, he did like the attention that he got from girls, but he liked it even more when people saw past his looks to the guy that he was.

"I'm glad that we could prove you wrong," he said, the "we" referring to himself, Andre, Robbie, Tori, Cat, and Jade.

"Yeah, me too." Felicity smiled a slow, sad smile, thinking of her friends back home and a certain special boy. She reached for her necklace, a little gold chain with a half of a heart pendant on it, gripping the broken heart in her hand. Adam had the other piece of it.

Beck noticed the necklace and guessed that she must be thinking of her boyfriend. He cleared his throat awkwardly. Felicity looked up at him, her eyes glazed over, not really seeing him.

"Do you want to talk about him?" He pointed at her necklace.

She shook her head, tucking it back under her shirt. "It's silly, isn't it? Thinking that you're in love with someone at our age?" She chuckled humorlessly. "Adults are always saying that we're too young to know what love is. Maybe they have a point."

"No, I don't believe that." Beck's eyes glazed over as he thought about Jade. He had loved her, despite how things had ended with them. "Being young doesn't mean that we can't feel. We may get too caught up in our feelings sometimes, but at least we're open to experiencing love, finding out what it is for ourselves. I was in love once, and I know what it is." His heart ached as he remembered just how in love with Jade he had been, mourning over the loss of her as if it were a fresh wound.

Felicity saw his eyes crinkle around the edges. She didn't know his history with Jade, but she knew that they had been a couple, and she often sensed awkwardness between the two of them. They must've have been together for a long time; they didn't know how to be just friends with one another.

"Looks like we're both heartbroken," she said, her voice low.

Beck met her eyes. "Yeah," he said.

By the time they returned to the school, classes had ended for the day. Felicity drove over to Beck's car, the sole car in the lot. He put his hand on the handle about to open the door, but he hesitated. He wasn't too eager to leave, and Felicity wasn't too eager about him leaving either. That was what prompted her to blurt out, "You wanna come over to my place? We could watch a movie or something." Her heart thumped against her chest, nervous about his response. In her head, she was cursing herself for saying anything; she didn't want him to think that she was starved for male company or anything. She prided herself over not needing anyone and hated to seem needy, even in the slightest.

Beck hadn't detected any neediness in Felicity's voice, probably because he wanted to spend more time with her, too. He turned to her, grinning. "That sounds great. I'll follow you in my car." He didn't want to leave his baby in the school parking lot overnight.

He did just that, driving behind Felicity as she led him to the small house that her parents had rented in one of the residential neighborhoods. It was a cookie-cutter house, mirroring the other houses in the neighborhood. What it lacked was a porch, which Felicity disliked. Coming from the south, she had a deep love for porches.

Both of her parent's cars were absent from the driveway. Felicity silently thanked God that her parents were such workaholics. Not that she was hoping something would happen between her and Beck; she just didn't want to have to introduce him to them. She was nervous about introducing any boy to them, whether they were just friends or not. They had really pissed her off by their reaction to her and Adam dating. If they couldn't accept him, then she didn't want to even give them the option of accepting any more of her guy friends or boyfriends.

Beck parked on the street, not wanting to park in the driveway in case her parents came home early and blocked his car in. Felicity unlocked the front door, and they went into the living room. She flipped on a lamp, bringing light into the dark room. It was simply furbished, a floral print couch, two end tables beside it, a coffee table in front of it, and a flat screen hanging on the wall across from it. A matching loveseat was perpendicular to the couch, and a DVD player was in a rectangular cubby hole beneath the TV.

"The DVDs are over there," Felicity said, pointing to a bookshelf to the right of the TV. "Pick out any movie you want. I'll make some popcorn and get some drinks."

Beck rifled through the available DVD selections, noticing a lot of good movies to pick from. He had no idea what Felicity was into but didn't peg her as the type of girl who liked romantic comedies. He ended up choosing Punch Face.

Felicity came back into the living room with a bowl of buttery popcorn and two glasses filled with a dark, fizzy soda as he was putting the disc into the player. She put the snacks on the coffee table and sat on the couch. Beck sat on the other side of the couch, leaving a wide space between the two of them. Felicity turned the lamp off, the only light in the room now coming from the flickering TV screen.

"Oooh, I love Punch Face," Felicity said when the title screen popped up. She pushed the play button on the remote.

"Me too," Beck said.

"We have good taste."

Beck agreed, and they both quieted down as the movie started. They watched it in silence but as it progressed, they inched closer to the middle cushion until they were sitting close beside each other, their legs an inch apart from touching. Felicity told herself that it was because they were eating out of the same popcorn bowl, but her heart wanted to believe differently. Beck wanted to think that that was the case, too.

But if that were true, then why, by the end of the movie, were they holding hands?