Cody is bashing down my door.

"Noah! Noah, can you – do you know what today is?"

I peel my eyes open. Why must it be that I am awoken multiple times a week by him hollering outside my door?

"Noah it's – Noah? Can you…can you just open the door, I don't wanna yell."

I get out of bed and nab a shirt off the floor to put on before opening the door.

"What, Cody." I say, instead of ask.

"You know what today is?"

"July 27th?"

"No! Yes. But there's something special about today."

"Your birthday?"

"No."

"My birthday?"

"No."

I begin to tire of his charade. I rub my eyes.

"Gwen's birthday?"

"That's not til December 11th."

"Nice. Okay, I bite."

"I can TAKE MY BANDAGES OFF TODAY!" he shrieks.

"So you're waking me up. At seven-oh-six. Because you want to announce you're taking your bandages off." I say, incredulous.

"I wanna swim."

"At dawn?"

"It's not dawn, it's like, seven thirty."

"Too early for swimming."

"Come on."

"You die if you swim less than 30 minutes after sleeping."

"No, that's thirty minutes after eating."

"No, the sleeping isn't what kills you, it's the me-holding-your-head-under-the-water part that kills you. Revenge for interrupting my sleep."

"I want to swim." He whines.

"Let me sleep." My voice takes on a tone far whinier than his. "Until nine thirty. Promise. Wake me up then, exactly then, and I'll swim with you. Okay?"

"What do I do while I wait?" he says, overly excited.

"I dunno, maybe sleep? I do not care." I enunciate. "Go strap electrodes to Trent's head and fap over his Gwen memories. Hover beside my bed and watch me sleep for two hours. I do not give a damn." I gesture with my hands. I turn around in the doorway and crawl back into my bed. My sheets are cold and inviting, as they usually tend to be on an early summer morning.

"Okay." I hear him whisper. I release a very quiet yelp, and turn to see he's sitting on my floor.

"Lay off the ecstasy, Cody." I groan before shutting my eyes. I feel a pressure on the edge of my bed. Oh, come on.

"Screw this, I'm playing Pokemon Emerald." He says. I can hear the sound of him turning on my Gameboy, which he evidently felt invited to root in my desk for.

"Mute it." I say sharply.

"Okey dokey." He whispers, propped up beside me in my bed.

"I hate you, Cody." I groan as I smash my face into my pillow, personal space limited by his presence.

When I wake up, I can feel a lukewarm point of skin pressed against the back of my neck, and the on-and-off damp heat of breath. Oh, this is just dandy. I figure that point of skin is Cody's nose. Despite the awkwardness of the position, I can tell he's sleeping, and compared to the last time we accidentally spooned in our sleep, this is very relaxed. I'm still a little tired.

I'm facing a wall, and it's impossible to contort myself in such a way to see a clock, but I figure that if it were any later than nine thirty, Cody would already be pouring buckets of water over me to wake me up. Truth be told, I don't want to go swimming, and I don't want to get out of bed, but I'm beginning to see a pattern here that I am willing to do annoying things for my annoying friend.

As such, even though his breath is moistening my hair slightly, and his hand is sort of cupping my chest as if I had an invisible boob, I don't want to wake him. It's like when a parent carries their kid in from the car after a long drive without waking them, because the parent doesn't want to deal with all the bullshit. I really don't want to deal with his bullshit. It's like when my dog wants to go for a walk and starts harassing you with its leash.

I find myself stuck in a brief loop of re-thinking thoughts about my dog. It's something that happens when you're tired. I sort of understand what Cody meant when he said it felt kind of nice to be jammed up so close to another person, especially when you're unaccustomed to contact. His body is compact enough to not force me into the crack between my bed and the wall, but at the same time, his bones sort of jab me, but I probably shouldn't be overanalyzing this, because it's getting in the way of me actually falling back asleep for a few precious moments, which is probably the only thing that will keep me from passing out and drowning later. So I let myself settle into his awkward embrace. Even though his foggy breath is leaving the hair at my nape wet.

My third awakening of the morning is not a pleasant one, though neither of the previous two were exceptional either. Cody tears the comforter off me.

"Swimming time!" He yells.

"Agh." I moan as I squeeze into a tight fetal-position ball. "Do we need to rush to the pool or can I at least confirm I'm awake first."

"Well, I'll need your help with something before I can actually get to the water anyway."

"Smoothies first please." I complain.

"Smoothies first." He says with a smile.

So we have smoothies. His smoothie is more like a diabetes shake. He plops in a scoop of strawberry ice cream, bananas, more strawberries, and a bunch of random stuff. I decide it's a good idea to mix kale with chocolate, mostly because I know it will baffle him that kale blended with chocolate actually doesn't taste horrible. But nothing with chocolate tastes horrible, which is an earth-shattering lesson Cody learned when I explained the concept of Molé to him a few days ago.

God, I love teaching him stuff. He's such a genius in some ways, but there are so many things he doesn't know that seem so obvious to me, things I've known for years. He acts so incredibly cool, but it seems the only book in his mental coolness library is about internet slang. But then, he can try to school me on things like robotics and computer science, but those are things that are best left to the experts, because their workings sound like complete gibberish to the layman.

And as much as I can't tolerate stupidity, his endears me. It seems more like naiveté than stupidity, like he's a kid who I can teach, and as I said, that really feeds my ego. And yet, even when he's speaking of his jargon-ridden computer nonsense, I have to admire the passion in his voice, something you usually only hear when he speaks of Gwen. Or of going swimming today. Ugh.

I realize that right now I'm staring at him while sucking down my thick concoction through a straw. He's struggling with the blender, trying to rinse it out. An unusual friend. He's gotten to me, and there's something ironic about that, although I can't quite highlight the exact passage that makes it ironic. I just feel it.

He looks up at me, expressionless for a moment, then gives a gap-toothed smile. He sits across from me at the table and drinks his smoothie as well.

"I'm so pumped to go swimming." He says.

"What is your obsession with swimming?" I mumble

"I come from the east coast! I used to have ocean all around, now I'm in the centre of the country, and the only water at the camp was infected with nuclear wastes, and I was forbidden from swimming in the pool for weeks, and I'm gonna lose my mind if I don't get back into the water."

"So, are you going to, like, grow your fins or something?" I venture.

"H2O buddy. Just add water."

"H2O is nothing until you add water."

"It's oxygen and hydrogen."

"That makes water, though, you don't need to add any water."

"I was trying to make a pop culture reference, Noah, please let me be."

I take another long swig of my drink. "So, what is it you wanted me to help you with?" I reach the bottom of my cup and suck hard to get the remnants out, scraping the side of my glass with the straw.

"Oh." He says, remembering what he'd asked me for. He pulls the straw out of the glass, licks it, and chugs the rest of his drink, foregoing the straw altogether. "Okay, we need to go back to my room just for a sec."

We slide off of our stools and leave our cups in the area for dishes. We head into the back hallway, down to number 108. He fumbles for the key in his pocket, and opens the door. As soon as the door shuts behind me, he pulls his shirt off over his head. He has his pale and bony back to me. The skin on the back of his shoulders is not exactly flawless, but my eyes are drawn to the bandages wrapped around his chest. Like a samurai or something. It's sort of badass.

He turns to me. "What I wanted was for you to help me get these bandages off. That's another thing I'm kinda excited about." He shrugs with a grin. "You told me my scar is gonna make me look cool. I hope it's true."

I approach him. "Uh, sure." My eyes trace the perimeter of his chest as I circle around him. "Where do I…start?"

He pokes his fingers around his ribs, gently to the sternum, around his back. "Um…I don't know where they start." He jams a finger under the top bandages and pulls it forward, un-tucking a piece of bandage right behind his left armpit. "Oh. Okay."

"Lemme help you out there." I grunt, lightly unravelling the peach-coloured bandage around his torso. I roll it around my wrist as it comes off of him. "God, did they wrap you up in a kilometre of this stuff?" Finally, the bandage reaches its end, but that was only the mantle of the multi-layered crust known as his bandaging. "Maybe the full-body cast they showed on TV wasn't so far off."

He laughs. "This is the part that I was actually worried about. There's gauze, like, taped to my chest, and I don't wanna tear my skin clean off."

Once again facing him, I wince as I try to get my fingernails under the tape. "This is definitely gonna sting." I whine. I try to pull it off slowly.

"Agh! Just get it over with!"

"No way, you'd regret it if I went fast."

He keeps his fists tight as I peel the rest of his tape off. Tiny bits of his skin pucker as the tape tears away, I can only imagine that it stings at his invisibly small chest hair. I have to count myself lucky it isn't happening to me. The ribbon of tape reaches its end; the gauze piled against his wound falls in a clump. There is a very light line of yellow and a dot of brown on the gauze, but it is not bloody or disgusting like I expected. Cody's eyes are still shut. "How does the scar look?"

I look at his face, and down at the line on his chest. It's slightly discoloured, a line about as long as my hand from heel to fingernail. It leaves a slight indent, with a raised edge, diagonally on his chest, from an inch above his nipple to right below the opposite collarbone.

"Yes, good news, it looks pretty badass." I whisper. I lift a hand to his chest and ghost my fingertip very lightly against the skin right below the scar, careful to not dig into his not-fully healed scar. I glance upwards for a moment, to see he's opened his eyes and he's examining the wound himself. He laughs lightly.

"I'm going to impress everyone with this."

"Unfortunately, most people aren't thrilled to be told they're going to be 'impressed' as someone takes their clothes off." I reply, eyes not vacating his chest. I feel more confident that I will not hurt him with my touch, and still focused on that mark across his chest, I trace the scar with my index and middle finger, from the clavicle down to the lower extremity. I breathe so silently, focusing on every detail of his damaged skin.

I stop my fingers, but do not lift them from his skin. My brow furrows and I look up. His eyes meet mine, and he lets out a tiny, breathy chuckle. For the most miniscule moment, things seem more silent than usual. With my hand motionless against his chest, I begin to hear the sound of my blood pulsing right behind my ears, a cloudy sound, like a pounding beneath water. I feel some kind of heat within my veins. A tight feeling in my throat. This concerns me. I'm looking straight into his eyes, they're not quite blue and not quite green, and I never really put much consideration into his eye colour until just this moment. I let a tiny stream of air through my lips before I avert my eyes. I drop my hand and turn my face to the right.

I won't play stupid about that moment. I won't pretend it didn't happen, though I'm clueless as to why it did.

He seems completely unchanged by the passed moment. I think it lasted longer within my mind than it did externally.

"Could you hand me that little roll of stuff sitting on my vanity?" he says.

I hurry over to the sink and grab the roll. "What do you need this for, now?"

"Ah, waterproofing." He says. "I wish I didn't need to take so many precautions. I wanna raw-dog it with that swimming pool, like, now."

My shoulders slump and I smile. "Okay, Codester, let's head out."

Sometimes, I hate the hell out of swimming. If it's hot outside, why get into a puddle of coldness? I would like to sit on the edge of the pool, sipping smoothies, reading books, something like that. Although I know one of these days I'm going to learn my lesson the hard way about reading books alongside the pool, but until that day, I tempt fate.

Except not right now, because Cody's intent on swimming with me. The moment the pool was in our view, he cannonballed right in. I'm little more timid in my gradual moistening. First a foot, then up to the calf, then to the thigh. The whole 'getting my balls wet' part is pretty hard, but it only takes a moment until that has passed as well. The hardest part is fast approaching, the part where I'm up to mid-chest. Once the hair is wet, there's no turning back.

Cody is swimming laps from edge to edge.

He groans loudly as he passes me. "Come on, dude, I know you're a lazy guy when it comes to sports, but it's just swimming, it's relaxing."

I'm feeling that awkward sensation of my nipples getting hard because of the drop in body temperature. I don't like that feeling, it makes me feel like a woman. Not because women get cold, but because it reminds me I have nipples, which as a man, really are unnecessary features and just yet another place for awkward hair to grow.

Cody paddles closer to me. He stands up straight with his feet on the pool-bottom, facing me.

"Get 'ducked'" he says.

"Ducked? Is that a Nova Scotia thing?"

"The rest of the world doesn't say 'ducked'?"

I roll my eyes.

"Count of three?" He says with a hopeful grin.

I loosen my grip on the pool's edge and step towards the centre of the pool. We still stand face to face. I feel the slightest tingle in my chest, which shudders up to my ear. It is very reminiscent of what happened earlier this morning, but then, my lips break into a smile. He starts to count.

On three, we both plunge under the surface. The water has to be at least twenty-five degrees Celsius, but it feels icy against the warm skin of my cheeks. I pry my eyes open under water. I can see Cody's blurred image across from me, sitting on the pool floor. He unfolds his legs and shoots to the surface, and I follow suit.

I emerge from the water with a gasp, and so does he, resulting in us sort of spraying water at each other. I push a clump of my hair out of my eyes and smear it back in a sort of glossy, criminal hairdo. I look incredibly stupid with wet hair. He doesn't, though, he looks like a kid in his inflatable backyard pool, ecstatic to be free-floating.

As I fiddle with my hair, Cody smashes me in the back of the head with a rainbow beach ball. I turn to him, eyebrow arched. For a second, he almost looks scared that he offended me, but I grab the ball and toss it back at him. This induces a sequence of us tackling each other, violently smashing each others' faces into the water's surface, and chasing after the ball. I get out of breath very easily, but I'm shocked that I'm actually having a moderate amount of fun while exercising. Subsequently, Bridgette and Tyler get involved, and I allow them to pull my weight as well, making some feeble attempts for the ball, mostly just to hit Cody in the head again, though I avoid his chest because that fascinating scar still seems too fragile to me.

Things get less fun when Eva shows up. I'm not sure if maybe 12:45 is still considered 'early in the morning' to her, or what, but she's grumpy as per the usual and decides to take it out on Tyler and his incompetence, so the pool pretty much becomes a bloodbath as she inflicts as much damage as one humanely can using a hollow, inflatable ball.

Under the cover of intense splashing, I crawl out of the pool and recline in a pool-chair to dry off. Cody is engaged in a sort of…hair-pulling match with Bridgette? Maybe. I snicker, and my eyes catch the scar again. There's a transparent film over it to keep the chlorine out, although it's mostly healed. I'm not sure what fascinates me about the scar. Maybe it's just because Cody can be such a child sometimes, yet he's got that war wound, certainly not a playground scar. And then, contrast that with the fact he likes to pretend like he's some big man on campus, but he looks thirteen, and he still sleeps with stuffed animals. I'm sure if I were talking about a character in one of my books, this would all mean something.

He hobbles out of the pool, slowly, like James Bond, who isn't sexy at all. Not that Cody's exactly sexy either, he walks with a pained gait. He sits in the seat beside me. I look at him expectantly.

"Eva kicked me in the chest." He says, wheezing. "She was all like, 'you're a pussy!'" He takes on a deeper tone of voice, to imitate her. "And I was like, bitch, I got clawed by a bear." I can tell he didn't actually say 'bitch'. "It's not my fault that you grew up in, like, Russia, and you're used to bears playing in your treehouse or shitting in your outhouse, or what, your, your, your, statues of Lenin, honestly, man I don't know what they have in Russia."

I laugh rather raucously, uncharacteristically so. His delivery of those words, their innocuous diction despite their failed attempts at poignancy and insult, the way he looks at his own hands and a wrinkle appears beneath his eye. For the third time today, I feel something funny, less so than the second, and much less so than the first, but it's there, subtly.

I am not a fool. I know full well what it means to have this stirring. I've read books, I've lived a life, I've had eight older siblings and a hundred friends. I know the feeling of falling when it comes. For a short moment this morning, I was very attracted to Cody. I know it happened. I recognized it for what it was. But this conscious recognition doesn't make it any less baffling that such a strange feeling uncovered itself so abruptly.

I peruse the form of his body, reclined in repose against the plastic seat. I don't feel attracted to him right now, at least, not in the sense that I actively desire him. There's something about the confident but fragile nature of his body that interests me, and it all comes back to that scar. Yet, I don't feel attracted to him at this exact moment.

I will say, honestly, that this morning in his room, I wanted to kiss him. It happened without any warning. I looked up at him, hand on his scar, and some strange mist settled over me; a mysterious dust spread by some erotic winged god, and it was really freaking weird. In that tiniest moment of silence, amongst all the other loud moments we'd had, everything felt very topsy-turvy, exciting yet calm.

And now I'm here, watching him as he falls asleep beneath the large parasol stretched above us, and I wonder if that moment is to re-occur.

I know for a fact that it happens sometimes, where you just sit with someone you've known for a while, and they make this expression, or something in their voice, and suddenly they're so much more beautiful than before. And for the tiniest moment, thoughts pass through you, a sudden cascade of possibilities, of floodgates, but as fast as they were opened, they close. You ignore that it ever happened.

It happened to me in seventh grade towards my art teacher. She was definitely female, but very beautiful. She was trying to show my desk-neighbour how to do something. She was folded over, and the way her dark hair cascaded as she straightened her lean body back into an erect position – for the briefest moment, I felt attracted, and like that, it was gone, and it never happened again, so maybe this is the same thing.

Yet, he's not a teacher, he's not a girl, or anything else completely inaccessible to me. He's my admittedly irritating but rather cute summer-camp friend. I stare at him again. His eyes are shut and a thin, exhausted, satisfied smile plays at his mouth, a child getting his chance to swim. Very endearing, I will be the first to admit. I know he's not sleeping, but I know his eyes will stay shut.

I prop myself on my right elbow and awkwardly maneuver myself onto my side. I plop back down into the chair with a crack, face smashed against the smooth, fake-grained plastic. As he does not watch me, I watch him. I watch the air fill his chest, and stretch the pale skin around his scar. I follow the gangly form of his body down to the jutting points of his pelvis, and his bellybutton – he's so skinny that his belly button lies like a flat swirl against his abdomen instead of a hole that goes in. I'm not sure why I'm focussing on every little detail about him now. I guess I got used to him without ever truly taking his identity into consideration. I didn't even consciously register his eye colour until this morning.

I've scanned every inch of him, as he slowly roasts dry in the shade. The sun has left his pale skin slightly pinker, the melanin of his freckles gaining definition on his nose. At this moment, I decide he's beautiful. I'm not sure how to handle the revelation.

Because he made me swim with him, I gave Cody a bit of payback in the form of sitting him in front of the TV and watching 30 Rock. He doesn't like 30 Rock, but I remind him that I don't really particularly care for swimming. Which isn't entirely true, I'm sure I like swimming a lot more than Cody likes 30 Rock, and I'm sure he likes swimming more than I like 30 Rock, but what kind of weird payback would it be if it were so small?

For the first segment of the show, the first ten minutes or so before the first commercial break, I would jab him every time he'd start mentally wandering. Either he'd tip-toe his fingers towards the remote, which would be met with a slap on the wrist, or he'd lean his head back like a hallucinating clairvoyant, eyes narrowing and mouth lying slack, at which point I could tell he was getting sleepy.

So repeatedly, I would poke him in the ribs with the side of my hand as he began to slip again into dreamland, but once the show was about half-over, I ultimately gave up on keeping him conscious. As he murmured something about 'letting Sarah Palin get an office job", I let him fall asleep, open-mouthed, head against the cushion of his seat.

The position he sleeps in leaves his throat stretched taut, adam's apple protruding from the light, strained skin. His maw is open like a carnivorous fly-pitcher plant, and air gets sucked in between his parted teeth, rushing noisily in and out of his throat. I make a smirk at him, though I know he can't see me.

I don't get irritated by the sound at first, but it slowly worms its way between me and Alec Baldwin, so I place a gentle finger against his nose and tilt his head downwards, bringing his jaw back together and muffling the raucous buzzing of his vibrating uvula. He tips over and falls face-down in the seat cushion between us, forehead against my thigh. It's not enough to be cute snuggly sleep, because God knows we've had enough of that, and the contact certainly doesn't make me nervous. That means that either he's a friend-friend or I've fallen so far for him, without my own knowledge, that I've already hit the long-term marriage phase, and although that seems like the easier part of a relationship, I wouldn't want to jump right in.

I look down at the patch of neck directly beneath his ear, and snicker at the somewhat unpleasant memory of that particular locale. It takes on a different meaning now, I think. It's weird to think of it that way – that at the time, I'd rather be spooning with Trent than Cody, and now, ah, I'm not so sure.

Some small part of me wants to pat down his hair with my hand, but at the same time, the urge isn't very strong and I'm not one for mushy gestures. I'm sure the naïve yet big-pimpin' kid in my lap would be a bit freaked out if I did. Although upon further thought, it would be the first time anything I've done has really rattled him.

I still look up at the television most of the time. He might not like 30Rock, but I do. Plus, I don't need to watch his unassuming face anymore. I already decided today that he's handsome. I don't need to re-assess it so soon.

I'm being very analytical about this, but somewhere inside, it sort of terrifies me. I don't usually have a 'crush' on a close friend, I always feel random sexitude for random people. Like the Trent scenario. I think about the times where I'd sit at a table with two friends, knowing full well that every glance Friend A gives Friend B has meaning, yet B never sees it. It must be quite arduous.

So as such, I figure, if Trent died so easily despite the occasional erotic dream, any particular stirrings that Cody's naked, scarred chest can arouse in me will die in their own turn, no pain, no foul. My skin burns on the one part of my leg he touches, but maybe it's just that he pinches down on my sciatic nerve. The pressure of his head on my thigh is getting more noticeable. It sort of hurts.

It doesn't have to.

My eyes widen, as I suddenly remember the conversation Cody and I had outside those short days ago. It only hurts if you let it. Not my thigh, of course, though I'm sure if I tossed Cody onto the floor, the pinching tingle in my thigh would go away. He meant the love thing, something about 'letting it go'?

Usually, I would take that to mean 'move on' or 'forget it, buddy, she's way out of your league', but I think what Cody meant by it was, you can like someone a lot without clinging to the pretention that one day they will feel exactly the same. That, honestly I'm not so well-versed in how this could happen, but somehow you can manage to rejoice in their joy despite them remaining distant and unreciprocative to your desire?

From my perspective, I feel like that's a good way to explore from unexpressed tensions. In addition, another thing on my growing list of things that aren't fortes: empathy. Whether empathy for the downtrod, or sharing joy at another's accomplishments, if it doesn't directly involve me, I'm not really the master at caring. Maybe that's something I admire about him. He seems so aloof and uncool, but there's something about him that shows he's got a side of being a very nice guy, unassuming and generous. That's really sweet, and so unlike me. I can't promise myself I would not boil over in envy and anger if I couldn't have someone I wanted, and for that, maybe Cody was a little bit on target with his assessment of me. I'm just not nice enough to 'let it go'. I would suffer if I were in love, and not in a selfless way either.

And despite everything I just finished telling myself, I feel this soft feeling in my – my heart, I guess, when I look down and see him sleep peacefully on my slightly numb leg. I'm beginning to need to pee, but I don't want to move him until it's absolutely necessary. There's this fluffy feeling, not throbbing and anxious, that his presence gives. Just from being around him. Being my friend. If that's the unbraided edges of the falling in love phenomena, I'd be willing to allow it. If I tell myself now that it won't hurt, even if he never wants me back, then I can accept it consensually before I've ever forced to accept it. And seeing as he's in love with a girl and he has major single-target-vision problems, it seems pretty definite that it would go that route.

The need to urinate overcomes my desire for deep thoughts. I bend my torso over in my seat, and gently nuzzle the side of his cheek with my nose, too timid to let my lips get near again. I know it's creepy, but it's almost an experiment. I gently lift his head off my leg and, once I'm standing, replace it on the cushion. He does not stir.

I walk away. I will allow my mind to go where it wants with this, I'll allow memories of the awake-a-thon morning to be my new dreams. If I accept that it's all I'll ever get, it will never need to hurt me.

July 31, 2009

Day 4 of 'letting myself fall for Cody'.

Situation normal.

Nothing to report.

Okay, I believe that my above statement does pretty much cover the current situation. I'm not sure if maybe I'm doing it wrong or something, but every teenager ever has totally overestimated the amount of suffering that goes into having a crush on someone. To their credit, they probably live in a Taylor Swift song, and they probably like the most popular kid in school or something. Me, I only need to deal with someone who, though he doesn't want me, won't find anyone who's not me any time soon, and when he does somewhere down the line, I'll be too busy living in a different province to care.

Okay, fine, I guess I should probably rant a little more about stuff that happened, but really, there wasn't much. We watched about 20 episodes of '1000 Ways to Die' and he made fun of me for not being able to take pleasure in all the hot Asian girls on the show, to which I retorted that anyone who watched our show should be slightly turned off of hot Asian girls. We had some weird tiki barbecue night that I sort of didn't care to go to, but I mean, it's my house too, so I went. There was pulled pork, and Cody hugged me because I was the only person who agreed with him during some asinine argument. I'll be fair and say that did excite me a bit. But it also made me sort of cranky because it was 'cute' and I'm not accustomed to calling things cute unless I'm referring to doggies, kitties, or sarcastically alluding to something that is decidedly un-cute.

Truth is, we're stuck in this damn loser house like it's a compound. We can't go out in the city, because we don't want people knowing the results of our contest until the episodes are all aired, and seeing as only one airs a week, and about three or maybe even four are filmed in a week, I'd say we'd be stuck here til, ah, Christmas.

So maybe all this beginning to like Cody bullshit comes from my enforced Stockholm syndrome of being trapped in this luxury lobster trap for over a month, no one of value beyond him to keep me company!

I know that's not true, and I'm glad it isn't. I'm not sure if I ever would have bothered to notice him once in my old life, but sometimes a foreign situation can bring with it new perspective, good things, yadda yadda, inspirational blathering, but it's true.

Both of us have a synthetic quality to our personas that we forego when we're together. To be fair, my synthetic persona is like, say, any of the robotic replicant characters from Blade Runner, whereas his is more like C3PO, in terms of blatant phoniness. I'm realizing now, with a bit of terror, that I respect him, and I'm sort of scared of respecting people. At least, it's not what I'm used to. Maybe that's why I'm less 'phony' around him. I don't need to pretend to like him.

In fact, as I sit with him on the sofa once again, and he scolds me for never having tons of Pokémon cards as a kid like he did, I realize how genuinely I really like him. In fact, in another life, I could be in love with someone like him.

Day six.

He and I took a leisurely lunch today. We sat around poking at the oddly shaped potato wedges on our plates. He said they tastes like a leather wallet. I asked him how he knew. He said, 'like a cow, except made of paper.' And I laughed.

He said if he pulled on the corners of his eyes, I sort of looked like a girl. I said I was too hairy to be a girl. He made a very pathetic attempt at a gay joke before tugging at the corners of his eyes with his fingertips again. I pleaded with him, 'stop that!'. So I grabbed his hands and held them against the table for a dozen-odd minutes. Maybe not so much. But we were holding hands, and that was pretty cute, and he's pretty cute, and he's pretty dumb, and I really like him. It's funny.

I did my best to ignore the chortling from Izzy that I could hear from across the room. Yeah, she's here now. I don't really like her, but she won't leave me alone. And by that I mean she sort of follows me and dumps a few non-sequiturs my way, and I never know what to say. Maybe this is a stroke of luck, but she tends to leave me alone when I'm trying to hang out with Cody. Except sometimes she's dangling over the banister or hiding behind furniture, and I'm not entirely sure why.

But it's like playing 'Where's Waldo' because I don't notice her right away. Actually, I'll go out of my way to ignore her because, as I said, she doesn't interrupt my Cody time and I would appreciate it greatly if it continued that way.

So in any case, my fingers stroked with imperceptibly light touch against the backs of Cody's hands, as I waited for him to pull them away from me. He stalled longer than I'd expected, but I didn't want to be the one to break away. When he ultimately did, I stifled a smile. Maybe he's naïve, or maybe he knows.

So there you have it. This is my story of how I began to like Cody, and it hardly even involved my pulse racing. At least, up until now.

"Ugh, get my shirt wet, why don't you?"

I'm kind of embarrassed. Because this is my first time on TV again since I was eliminated from the competition, and just like how the competition liked to show off many of my least glorious moments such as kissing Cody and being very shitty at sports, the camera decides to pay attention to me once again when I just so happen to be sitting with Katie and Sadie. Ugh, what if the general public believes we're friends? I know I sound like a bitch because of how much I hate everyone, but the truth is the only people I cannot stand are Justin, Gwen, and Katie and Sadie. Their voices, their clothes, Sadie's…muffin top! Izzy has her moments. Lindsay is just irreparably dumb so I actually have sympathy for her. But Sadie, honey, there is no excuse for those shorts. Just because you wanna dress like your girl-friend doesn't mean you need to buy the exact same clothes in the exact same size.

But I digress. I'm with these lovely ladies at the juice bar. Sadie got bit by a 'shark', which, as I gently reminded Katie, do not swim in chlorinated water. Much to my not-surprised-at-all, Izzy's latex-covered melon-head bobs up from under the water.

"That was me! Sorry, I just got the sudden urge to bite something! Do you ever get that urge!? Just to…to dig your teeth into something! Grar!"

I spend all of four seconds wondering if maybe she was spying on me. If she somehow wanted to be friends with me or something, why doesn't she just ask? I mean, I wouldn't really like that, either, but I've made compromises before. I think the difference between making friends with someone like her as opposed to, say, Heather is: if you made friends with Heather and you maintained a decree of absolute transparency with her, you'd have a powerful ally. With Izzy, you're in just as much trouble of waking with a horse in your bed whether she's a friend or an enemy.

I pull off my soaked shirt and notice the camera is still on me. I roll my eyes a little, in hopes they won't decide to slow down the footage of me peeling off my clothes and play 'Careless Whisper' over it, adding it to my compilation of 'Greatest Noah Moments'. The dicks. They probably would too.

Standing next to the cameraman, Chris gives me a prompt about my elimination, asking me to comment.

"Apparently I'm not bossy, manipulative, or 'dangerous' enough. You can't say I wasn't a team player, though." I say, voice dripping in sarcasm. I know that's sort of untrue, but I figure the editing squad will butcher whatever I do, and if I say anything more complicated they'll reconstruct it into some parable about me banging Chris and sacrificing DJ's bunny to Lóki.

Then again, this is immediately followed up by squealing from Katie and Sadie. So anything I say will probably look genius. The camera people also ask everyone in the immediate vicinity to comment on their general experience in this competition. The ironic thing is, I've almost forgotten about the competition entirely. It's been almost a month since I was part of it. This seems more like a mediocre stay at a summer bungalow than a reality show. I really didn't get anything out of it. So I suppose when it comes my turn to speak, that's about all I can say.

Oh, remember how I said the whole 'liking Cody a tiny bit' thing hasn't gotten my pulse racing yet?

Well that spell is officially broken.

As soon as I mention the inanity of my stay here, the lackadaisical adventure that this competition had been, Izzy explodes from beneath the surface of the water. I don't have time to wonder how she heard me, but with a sly grin she yells:

"He kissed a guy!"

My heart starts pounding, out of surprise of the sudden noise, but mostly from embarrassment.

"I did not!" is my automatic reaction.

"Did!" She replies, mockingly.

I get into a fatuous back-and-forth with her over whether or not I kissed Cody. I did, of course, but it wasn't really a 'kiss', and I was sleeping, and I was actually thinking of Trent! And in addition, I will not let her win a did/didn't fight!

As if he knew I was thinking of him, Trent pipes up. My pounding heart clenches in another snapping beat.

"Um, I can break this tie. He totally did."

Oh my God, oh my God, how does Trent know? Did Cody say it, or, or did Trent know I was dreaming about him? This is incredibly embarrassing. I feel so pilloried. Why must this happen on television. I open my mouth to talk but a small airy squeak comes out.

"I have…no comment."

Thank Jesus, Lindsay comes over screaming in ecstasy to draw attention away from me. My heart calms down, but the side of me that faces Trent burns a little, and my eyes shift around in search of Cody, hoping desperately that the topic doesn't get brought up with him. On second thought, he was completely innocent in all this, so his view might compliment my own.

Ugh, whatever.

Every time Trent mentions Gwen, I want to stab myself, and every time I try to say something witty, someone throws something at me. I get knocked into the pool and decide to stay there, just to ignore everything else for the rest of the afternoon.

After a few hours of this, we break for dinner. Around nine o'clock, once the sky begins to darken, we all gather around the pool for some final comments and for this weird unexpected twist thingy that I don't quite understand yet.

A very sunburned Cody takes a seat beside Trent. Trent has his guitar as usual. Despite my faint residual lust for him, he makes me so angry when he has that guitar or when he talks about Gwen. I'm not sure what goes through my mind, but it's the strangest mix of attraction and disdain. Maybe I'm just cranky that I can't have him. But then again, I don't want him. Maybe I'm cranky that such a shitty personality is in such a hot body.

"You really want Gwen to win? But she rejected you on international TV for someone cooler, hunkier and more stylish!" Lindsay says to Cody.

Maybe I'm just mad he loves someone so shallow and deliberate.

"Thanks for reminding me, Lindsay." Cody replies

He's gotten better at using sarcasm, I guess it's from hanging out with me, but he still hasn't gotten a handle on using the sarcastic 'tone' as opposed to simply saying the opposite of what he feels.

"Gwen is my dream girl. But I'm not her dream guy. If she's happy, I'm happy." His eye twitches slightly at this, and I notice.

"That's really cool, dude." Trent says, slapping Cody on his sunburnt arm. Maybe what I hate about Trent is that he hurt Cody, unintentionally, and not just by slapping him right now, but because of everything. Or maybe I just don't like Trent at all. I don't need to think about it anymore. It makes me feel guilty that I ever felt any draw towards him now. Cody can grin his little gap-toothed smile all he wants but I know there's something hurting there.

And now I just feel stupid for thinking about all of this too hard.

It turns out that we have the chance to vote off a camper – that's the big twist. The spiteful side of me wants to vote off Gwen, but just moments ago I heard Cody hope for her victory, so that would be unkind of me, as a close friend of his, to go against his wishes just because I don't particularly like her. I won't vote for Heather. She did horrible things to win, and it earned her a lot of hate, and I think if you're willing to sacrifice your pride to win, you deserve the crown. Duncan creeps me out, but the longer he stays on the island, the less likely I am to wake up with an unwanted labret piercing. I think maybe Owen deserves to win, too, because he's just an innocent, stupid tub of lard that never hurt anybody. Actually, he's the only one who was never truly mean to any other person.

All this time I spend thinking through my options ends up being completely wasted. Chris has the whole thing rigged for us to vote off Lashauna. Leshonda? Leshawna. I never remember what her name is. My family is from an ethnic group where there are plenty of 7-syllable last names, yet I'm still more confused by the average urban African-Canadian. Well, everyone in my family has names out of the freakin' Bible, much easier to remember.

She arrives by boat less than an hour later. None of us have the guts to greet her, because we all know it's our fault she's here.

On my way to my bedroom that night, I pass Cody's room. The door is open, and I invite myself in, not before knocking lightly to ensure that if he's doing something weird like giving lotion service to the one part of his body that isn't sunburned, that I don't walk in on it. He might be kind of cute, but that really isn't something I need to see.

I slip in. He's lying starfish on his bed, arms extended. He groans lightly. I lean against the door-post, arms crossed smugly.

"It attracts the ladies, eh?" I say finally. He glances up at me and moans.

"Noah." He says weakly.

"Well, I'm sure attracted!" I say with a shrug. I approach his bed and sit down on the edge. He rolls slightly towards me, with a groan.

"You're lucky you're brown." He mumbles.

"We can burn too. It's not my skin so much as the fact I spent roughly 3 of the 4 hours of filming under the parasol. "

"Don't burns fade into tans?"

"Cody, you're half Scottish, half Swedish. You're screwed."

He lets out a cry of 'Wah!' before rolling onto his side. I can almost hear the sound of his skin sticking to the sheets and peeling off, like velcro. I let out a sigh. "I'll go retrieve you some lotion…"

I make the annoyingly long trek all the way to the currently-unused infirmary (we got Harold out of the pool before the street post ballast drowned him). I hurry back with a squeeze bottle of after-burn.

He still lies on his bed in a similarly pathetic position. I feel sympathetic for his misery, which is unusual for me. I plop down beside him again.

"Here you go." I toss him the bottle. He squirms into an upright position. He squeezes a blob of transparent jelly into his palm and works it into his forearms.

"You know…" I start. "The sunburn probably damaged your scar, it's going to show up stronger now."

"I'm totally okay with that." He says. "I like my scar. It's impressive."

I have to admit I enjoy his scar too. I snicker. "What kind of 'ladies' did you think you were impressing with your tan? Not sure if you looked at Gwen lately, but I'm pretty sure it's the paler; the better with her."

He chuckles meekly at my comment. "You're right. I just didn't want to look stupid so I ran with it."

"Same." This is met with incomprehension. "Oh, I mean, Izzy said I kissed you, I said I didn't, then I guess I sort of ran with that."

"You so did."

"I know, I know, but we don't want the fandom getting any ideas, huh?"

"Fandom?"

"Oh yes, there are probably people who make fanart of you. There are probably people that have internet shrines for you. Me, not so much, no one likes Indians, and everyone probably forgot me."

"How could anyone forget you?" This time, his tone was on par with sarcasm, but the statement was not a sarcastic one. He begins to rub the goo into his scrawny stomach.

"You're noble." I say suddenly. He looks alert. "About the Gwen thing. You're not obsessive and wanting, you just accept things as they are. It's a skill many should learn."

"It's passiveness." He says, with a touch of sadness. "You either have it or you don't."

"It's not passive to accept something you truly can't change, it's only passive to be assaulted by arrows and to not take arms against them."

He makes a face. He doesn't understand Shakespeare allusions. It morphs into a slight smile. "I'm not sure if it's reassuring or kind of depressing that I know it never could have been any different." He turns away from me slightly and hands me the bottle. "Could you..?" he whispers, trying to reach his back.

"She's too negative for you anyway." I prod. I use one hand to smear the lotion into his shoulder. I try to make the activity as un-erotic as possible, because it's kind of awkward. I don't understand how he repeatedly lets me do things like this, doesn't it make him feel a little…gay? I resume: "What do you even see in her? Beyond, I dunno, a blue lipstick fetish?"

"I don't know man, she's smart. And witty…." He pauses. "Sarcasm is sexy."

My heart gets tight for a little bit. I would hate myself if I had to admit I have something in common with Gwen Blaszczyk, but there it is, plain as day, we have some commonalities. But worse even than admitting I'm anything like Gwen, I feel as though I'd be a second prize to him, in her absence. Yet even that would be rewarding, and more than I could ever expect to attain. It's so outlandish, I realize. I'm sitting here, rubbing lotion into Cody's lobster-red back, and I want him more now than I ever have. Very outlandish indeed.

The dark, throbbing buzz returns to my ears as I lose myself in thought. Everything seems quiet. My own voice has drained into silence.

He turns to me slowly and utters my name. I see his face once again, and like before, another small level of newness appears in it. Another microscopic detail I'd never noticed. I stay silent for a moment, breath caught deep within, gazing into his eyes with this aura of unfamiliarity.

"Noah." He says again.

I realize I've stopped touching his back. My hand is floating limply beside him, no longer connected to his skin.

"I can take it from here, bro." He says. "You seem tired. It must be because you actually moved more than 10 metres today." He says, a bit drained, but still happy. As if he weren't just contemplating his 'true love' or some silliness abandoning him for that guitar-playing raven-haired Adonis.

"Weren't you sad just a second ago?" I say, genuinely confused.

"Not really," He says, looking up from his lotion-streaked hand. "I love her. That's all I need to know."

"Then you should hope she wins." I say.

"To find someone like her, someday…" He says wistfully. "That would be a victory of my own."

That took me awhile! Technically, I've been nibbling at this chapter all year. I really love writing NoCo dialogue, it just flows so easily for me, maybe because I have my own nerdy friendships that I observe occuring in life to base them upon. Now there's romantic feelings developping, and it only took 25000 words! Happy shippers? lol

Thanks for reviews! I feel the NoCo fandom is dead now compared to back in the original run of the series (Anytime before the start of 2009) because, well, the most recent TDI franchise doesn't even have any of these characters in it. Doesn't explain how D/C is still popular even though they broke up at least three years ago...

Anyway, spread the NoCo love! Brown popular nerds + white awkward nerds = a beautiful thing.