Hello y'all! I'm getting close to finishing this short story, so here's the next chapter!

Please do leave a review, I'd love feedback on my interpretation of JxC :)

I do reference a wonderful poet by the name of Pablo Neruda whose love poems I highly enjoy. The particular poem of his I refer to is called 'Your Laughter' and I find that it's a fitting poem for this pairing!

So without further ado...here's some introspection!

"And Neutron?"

All day, Libby's words had echoed in his head. During chemistry, during gym, and even during calculus. Now, the words seemed to throb with a particular intensity as he walked home. Why would Libby even ask Cindy that?

It confounded him beyond belief. Cindy Vortex hated him. She belittled him, told him on a daily basis that his inventions were failures, and took special care to argue with him about every little thing. If there was an argument to be had, Cindy would have it. If there wasn't an argument to be had, Cindy would create it. She lived to push Jimmy's buttons. It was a fact of life, something as certain as the value of pi…and yet there was something there.

It was no secret that he and Cindy thrived on competition. Some of his best work, he grudgingly admitted, had been the result of challenges posed by Cindy. Without her, he was certain that he wouldn't be on his toes day and night to maintain his 101% average in almost every class.

Of course Vortex had him beat in English, his Achille's heel. English was quite literally another language to Jimmy. Verse and meter could not be parsed into atomic units. Grand expressions of love and loss had no place in the cut and dry world of science, and that was the way he liked it. The joy in science was that it remained blissfully objective. Equations were constant, conversions were constant, natural laws remained stationary. English, however was open to interpretation. Cindy seemed to love English for this very reason. From a young age, her grasp of language and human emotion had far exceeded Jimmy. This had always been a source of irritation to him- he who could understand and explain the quadratic formula by the tender age of five, he who could recite the Laws of Thermodynamics in his sleep- could not head nor tail of literature.

Cindy never missed an opportunity to rub her mastery of the written word in Jimmy's face. And yet, as he considered this, for the first time, a realization dawned on him slowly, but surely.

He was loathe to admit it- but he admired Cindy's painless comprehension of Byron, of Shelley, of Fitzgerald. He admired her deep understanding of passion and pride, of matters of soul and heart. He could picture her as she stood last week in class, holding the poem she had chosen to bring to share. Her voice rung clearly in his mind, reciting with great vigor and sentiment, the ardent poetry of Pablo Neruda. My love, in the darkest hour your laughter opens…and if suddenly, you see my blood staining the stones of the street, laugh…because your laughter will be for my hands like a fresh sword.

Jimmy stood frozen in his tracks. How was it he remembered these lines from memory? He couldn't shake the image of Cindy's hands trembling as she held the piece of paper in her hand. He couldn't shake the image of Cindy's gentle blush at that last line- that last line about laughter being a fresh sword…

And as if a springboard, from there his mind proceeded to play flashes of Cindy's smile…her light laughter…he longed to remember the rest of the poem, he longed to understand this girl who seemingly hated him…it came to him in staccato bursts and he felt like everything was closing in on him. The world whirled around him and his thoughts were littered with images of Cindy…he took a deep breath and continued walking.

"And Neutron?"

Something in Libby's tone…even Jimmy could tell there was some hope there, some distantly unasked question lying in the query. Was he to take this as a sign that Cindy did not just think of him as a rival? That she expected him to-conform to societal norms, to ask her to this dance she agonized over?

He went back to the start and worked through it. His name had appeared in a conversation regarding Cindy's lack of a date to prom. Oleander, Nick, Carl, Neutron. It went against everything Jimmy knew- why was he even on this list?

It was giving him a headache to think of all this. And lingering still was that aching impression of Cindy's disappointment seared across his brain. He felt that he had let her down in some way by not asking her to this dance.

But what was there to let down? It would only matter to her if- if she actually wanted to go with him. And that was beyond impossible, right?

His eyes widened for a second at the very thought. It was ludicrous- Cindy wanting to go with him to anything. Ah- well, that wasn't quite true. She had make it a point to push her way into all his childhood adventures, begrudgingly or not. She was in every single class that he was in. She was in some ways, always around, always going with him to everything. And so in that sense it would be reasonable for her to want him to go with her to this dance too, right?

And there had been some less than hostile moments between the two- their first kiss so many years ago in that alley, their soft contact following really heated arguments, and so many others. They weren't as antagonistic to each other as one would assume…and of late, while there had certainly been a fair share of squabbles and blowups, there had been concessions…there had been times when the two would gaze over at each other and look away quickly as if a single look would burn their eyes.

Jimmy sighed. It was so hard to fathom the exact juncture he had reached. It both annoyed and upset him, and he wasn't sure if he was right in his absurd ideas about Cindy's possible dejection over his failure to recognize some vague hint she was throwing him-

But he remembered once more Neruda's straightforward lines. Maybe it didn't matter exactly where they stood- as long as she was happy. It surprised him to realize he prioritized her happiness above all else…maybe because her laughter was to him the mental equivalent of a fresh sword...