He had never liked Davie all that much. He wasn't fun and he wasn't creative and he always spent the afternoon being chased around by girls. One year they had to sit next to each other. Davie always asked what he knew about sports and TV and cereal brands. He would always shush him and try to keep doing his homework. Once, Davie asked about Ramona.
"Why do you hang out with her all the time? Doesn't she get annoying?"
He had kept right on matching the words in the box to their correct sentences. The cat chased the rat.
"Why is she always so excited? Is it like, she drinks coffee or something? Why do you bother hanging around with her?"
The rat avoided the cat.
"Why does she like me so much? You're her friend or something, right? Why doesn't she chase you instead? Don't you like her?"
Howie raised his hand and asked for a bathroom pass. He stood in a stall studying his shoes until the lunch bell rang.
All through lunch he watched her as she chatted with everyone else on the table, trying to explain the significance of the banana sticker on her forehead. He wasn't listening, she had already told him about the sticker.
He didn't realize that he had forgotten to finish his work page until he was packing up to go home. He didn't like the last sentence, it wasn't very imaginative, and it was a bad ending.
The cat caught the rat.
And he didn't know why. He guessed he liked her, he didn't see a reason not to. And of course she liked him.
Davie was a dumb kid. He didn't talk about tools and cars and didn't think things through.
But neither did she.