Perfectly Flawed Read online

  “Zeph, there’s one sitting in my living room,” I point out, knowing that he’s seen the standing piano in my house. Hell, we used to play around on the thing annoying the crap out of my aunt when we were kids.

  “I thought that was Aunt Hil’s,” he explains, his brows knit together.

  I bark out a laugh. “No, it’s mine.” We make it to my locker and I spin the lock, using the combination, until it opens. “Aunt Hil has no idea how to play the piano,” I explain to him. I can’t even picture my aunt playing music of any kind unless it’s the radio. “I’ve had it for as long as I can remember, which you know isn’t too long. I think it belonged to my mother.” I shrug.

  “Hey.” Ryder slides along the neighboring locker, smiling at me. This kid really doesn’t understand the concept of no. There are only so many times that I can let him down.

  I slam my locker shut after shoving all the books I need into my backpack, angered, almost infuriated. “Are you stalking me or something?” I blurt out, completely fed up with the sight of wanna-Bieber standing in front of me.

  I notice Zephyr stiffen beside me.

  “I’m not going to stop, I told you this.” That he did. Damn. He winks—actually winks—at me, like the creepy uncle your family tries to avoid during the holidays.

  “This is bordering on sexual harassment, jackass.” I cross my arms over my chest. “Ryder, you need to just leave me alone. After the song and the poem you left on the whiteboard in my class—”

  “What poem?” Zephyr cuts me off quickly, his hand up to separate me from Ryder.

  “I’m sorry about the poem,” Ryder begins quietly, his eyes cast down in shame. I can’t tell if it’s real or rehearsed. “I honestly had no idea what it meant, I still don’t.” And he wants to date me without understanding the basics of Shakespeare? Strike two against him, if you ask me. “I suck at all the Shakespeare shit.”

  Uncultured swine…

  “That’s apparent,” I mutter under my breath.

  “Just give me another chance,” he begs, jutting out his bottom lip in an exaggerated pout. Zephyr next to me lets out a snort. “Please.”

  “Obviously, Harrison, you never had a chance with her to begin with,” Zephyr tells him, taking a protective step closer. He’s taller than Ryder by at least three few inches and it shows when he stands up straight.

  “I wasn’t talking to you, Kalivas.” His eyes fixed on mine over Zephyr’s shoulder.

  Yeah, there was nothing creepy about that.

  Ryder’s serious, I can tell. He’s bombarded me with song and dance, poetry, stalking, and bullying of my closest friend. If I don’t let him try and woo me—dear God—I might never be free of him until he graduates. Since he doesn’t understand Shakespeare, or basic words for that matter, who knows when that day might be.

  But what about Zephyr? I can’t help but feel little tingles shoot through me when he turns his eyes to me, when he looks at me like I’m the only person in the room. He’s my best friend, he knows me better than anyone does, and he doesn’t like Ryder. That’s very obvious as they stare each other down.

  “Okay, okay.” I try my best to separate the two brutes before someone throws a punch that lands them suspended while the other spends the rest of the night with an ice pack pressed to their swelling eye. “Let’s all just calm down here.”

  “I’m calm,” Ryder says with no conviction.

  “Ditto,” Zephyr mutters.

  As much as I’d love to believe that, the epic staring contest going on leaves little to be desired.

  Holy balls!

  Now, does anyone understand why I feel the need to punch people? And these two, well, they deserve it most of all.

  “If we hang out this afternoon,” I start, offering my only solution to prevent douchery. “And I mean this only time, this one time to hang out, not a date. We try to be friends, Ryder,” I tell him, emphasizing the word friends. “Will you leave me alone? Or, will you at least stop the creepy stalking and serenading me with Justin Bieber?” I ask, offering the only thing I had. My time.

  “This afternoon?” Ryder asks with surprise and excitement. The way he’s smiling at me reminds me of a little kid in a candy store.

  “Yeah,” I answer, adding a long, drawn out sigh to exaggerate my boredom.

  Zephyr steps between us, severing their stare down. “We have practice, Harrison,” Zephyr tells him, catching the look on his teammates face.

  “We’re allowed one skip,” Ryder tells him, his eyes still fixed on me.

  “For emergencies,” Zephyr bites out harder, angrier, and I swear he’s foaming at the mouth.

  Maybe I should just take back the invitation. I’m immediately dreading it.

  “I think this qualifies,” Ryder tells him. “Come on, then.” He holds out his hand for me, but I ignore it, choosing to follow him out of the building on my own.

  “Jo, what are you thinking, here?” Zephyr whisper-asks as he follows us through the building, passing the dwindling crowd in the halls.

  “What is the worst that can happen?” I ask before Ryder tugs me along to his car, throwing his arm over my shoulder, leaving Zephyr behind to watch us leave. I shrug his arm from my shoulder before we even reach the student parking lot. Hopefully, this will be a good thing. Hopefully, this afternoon will bore him and he’ll move on to his next victim.

  Five

  Ryder pulls his shiny BMW into the Family Fun Center off Highway 99. It was once Funtasia, but that was the last time I was there, many, many years ago. Now it’s just a redone arcade, the same games and mini golf course, same claw machine, same multi-colored ball pit and random water boat game in the back, it’s the same Funtasia with a fresh coat of paint. We get ten dollars, each, in change and try to defeat, crash, bomb, and kill each other in various video games.

  Violence, the only way to a girl’s heart.

  “I didn’t know you were the arcade type,” I tell him as my pixilated character tries to kill his with a roundhouse kick. Ah, I miss the old Mortal Kombat.

  “Every guy is,” he mumbles with his focus on the game in front of us. “They just don’t admit it past a certain age,” says the guy still dressed as a wanna-Bieber. I really thought he would’ve changed after lunch; those pants don’t really look all that comfortable.

  No matter how hard I try, I can’t picture Ryder as a kid moving from game to game, trying to achieve the highest score. I wonder if he was ever lucky enough to enter his initials into the machines back in the day.

  Zephyr was.

  When we were eleven and his older brother didn’t know what to do with us, we practically lived in arcades. He was always happy when he earned the top spot after a lot of effort perfecting his moves and a lot of quarters, ZAK blinked permanently within the machines until someone new, maybe months or years in the future, would beat his score. His score wouldn’t last a week before I beat it. Some of the games still have JEA as one of the top three scores.

  I shouldn’t admit to knowing that but I get bored and venture to my old stomping grounds when the nostalgia strikes me.

  “And you’re comfortable enough to tell me about it?” I ask as his character makes a great hit to mine, it’s knife slicing through my character’s upper body, large drops of blood flying before they disappear. The move knocks me down a life.

  He turns his smile to me. “I’m still wearing harem pants that sparkle, Joey,” he starts. “I’m definitely comfortable admitting that I frequent arcades.” His character dies after mine spits—or projectile vomits—green acid in its face.

  I cheer and do a happy dance, embarrassing myself, but getting him to laugh. There’s barely anyone in the large game machine filled room, only a few young kids with their parents, older siblings, or babysitters, a few kids in their teens, us, and the workers paid to be bored. That’s about it.

  “I feel a little too old to be here,” I tell Ryder as we move onto another game on the other side of the room.

  There’s
just something a little wrong about standing in a room filled with small children when you’re in your late teens.

  “Ignore the feeling,” he tells me as he shoves his quarters into the game. “It doesn’t matter; anyway, this stuff’s still fun for the typical sixteen-year-old.”

  He makes a good point. Holy balls, did I just compliment Ryder Harrison?

  “Whatever you say,” I reply with a giggle as we begin to race each other in one of the car racing games. He wins by running me off the road early on. I always sucked at the car games, Zephyr kicked my ass every time because I somehow always got stuck behind a cow, but Ryder and I play another round.

  “If this is any indication,” he starts, turning the wheel furiously around a virtual turn. “I am never getting in a car with you in the driver’s seat.”

  “I’m not a bad driver,” I tell him, watching my car teeter on one side, only two wheels touching the pixilated road.

  From his snort I can tell that he doesn’t believe me; he’ll never trust me drive him anywhere. Like I’d ever get the chance. Or want it for that matter. This relationship—whatever the technical term for what we are may be—is short term. Nothing will become of us hanging around an arcade. I need to make sure of it.

  But I do like the way he looks at me.

  Damn, stop it!

  “I wonder if we could get into Chuck E. Cheese?” he asks as he tries to sideswipe my pink car. Yep, I picked the pink car. He zooms past me, leaving my car in a pixilated cloud of swarming dust.

  “That’s where I draw the line, buddy.”

  “It wouldn’t be weird or anything,” he tries to tell me as his car crosses the finish line. Black-and-white checkered flags shoot from the sides of his screen, WINNER flashing along his screen while I get LOSER.

  “Yes it would, that mouse freaks me out,” I complain, remembering the one birthday party I had there because Aunt Hil thought that I’d like it. Boy, was she wrong. I cowered behind Zephyr every time the mouse tried to hug me, and don’t get me started on his mechanical counterpart in the robot band that stands on the stage. Their eyes follow you everywhere you go. “It’s creepy.”

  “It’s mechanical,” Ryder defends, hiding his smirk.

  “And I’ve seen Maximum Overdrive,” I counter with my arms crossed.

  Confusion quirks his face. “What’s that?” Ryder asks. I almost tell him he’s lucky that he hasn’t seen it.

  “Stephen King short story turned horrible, horrible movie?” I ask sarcastically, not everyone’s seen it. It’s one of those movies that I wasn’t supposed to watch at ten years old but the curiosity got the better of me. I stole it and watched it in my room when Aunt Hil went to bed one night. “Emilio Estevez? Mechanical things taking revenge on the public? Swarm of angry trucks, one with a creepy devil face on the front? Nothing?”

  “Maybe I’ll watch it some time,” he offers, as if I’d care if he watched a movie I liked let alone a movie I thought was ridiculous, pathetic, and so not worth my time.

  “I wouldn’t bother,” I tell him as I scope the room for a different game. The thrill of this place is already fading. Maybe a claw machine should be next. “It’s kind of bad.” That is the understatement of the hour.

  “I’m not sure if I should be intrigued…” he trails off, looking to me with a mixture of confusion and curiosity on his face.

  I wave my hand through the air as I make my way toward the nearest claw machine to peek inside, scoping out the goods. “Don’t be intrigued, just stick to whatever movies you like.” As I peek through the dirtied plastic window of the machine, I spot those reject stuffed animals that no one really wants, the ones that are missing limbs or are low on stuffing to where they look deflated or some of the sides aren’t sewn correctly. I move on, wandering through the room, already bored. Ryder follows me and I start to wonder about what his interests are. “What types of movies do you watch?” If this friendship were to work, we’d need some common interests.

  “I’m a big comedy fan,” he tells me, pride filling in his voice. I like comedy… sometimes. “I watch anything with Will Ferrell or Sacha Baron Cohen.” Now he’s lost me. “What about you?”

  I’m not that big of a comedy fan. I have to be in the mood. “Uh, a little of this, a little of that, you know.” I’m into everything, really, except zombies. I don’t do zombies. Except Fido. I love that movie. “What about books?” I ask, swiping my hand through the dusty side of a game machine.

  “I’m not really a big reader.” Of course you’re not. “If a book sounds interesting, I’ll just look for the movie or wait until the movie comes out.” I have to fight the urge to facepalm. “You like to read?” he asks me.

  “I love it,” I tell him with enthusiasm. “You should see my book collection.” It takes up a lot of space. “It’s a great escape,” I tell him, loving how I lose myself within the pages of a book. How has he not experienced that?

  “I guess I just don’t have time for that stuff,” he mutters with annoyance. How can anyone not have time for reading, I make time for it. “I used to be big into comic books as a kid but that’s as literary as it gets.” That’s so not the same for me. Like, not even close.

  “Oh, comics.” But I don’t tell him that, I leave my real thoughts hidden because now I see how little we have in common. I don’t want this to continue beyond friends if we have nothing in common.

  “Yeah, I’d always get the new Batman and Superman when they came out.” I force a wide smile on my face as he continues to speak. “I drove my parents insane. Do you like comic books?” He stops to look at me, hope in his eyes.

  Time for that honesty I love to use. “Not so much.” I walk toward another game, anything to move this conversation along.

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he says behind me. I do know what I’m missing.

  We find ourselves in the dreaded awkward silence—that lull in the conversation that seems to grow larger and deeper the longer you stay in it. I try and search for some common interest between us, one that can make this friendship or, whatever it is, worth it.

  “What about music?” I ask. Music is a good topic; everyone loves music.

  “I like music.” Bingo!

  “That’s great,” I exclaim loudly. “Like what? What do you like to listen to?”

  “Well, I guess that I kind of lied,” he starts. Crap! “I mean, I like music, but I only listen to what’s playing around me.”

  Lord, give me strength.

  “Uh, what?” I ask, turning to face him. I tuck my hair behind my ear as I knit my brows in confusion. He can’t mean that he only listens to the radio? That would just be absurd and boring. And they only play the same ten songs over and over—it’s annoying. No… he has to have some music taste specifically for him.

  “Like, whatever’s on the radio, you know?” Crap, no I don’t know. “Whatever my sister would play in the house, whatever my parents were listening to.” And I have officially lost interest in Ryder. “All those songs I sang to you my sister told me about. She’s the big music person in the family; she got into Juilliard two years ago.”

  Now I’d like to go home. I want to go home and hope that Ryder just leaves me alone because now I know that none of this—nothing—will ever work out between us. He doesn’t like music, reading, decent movies, he doesn’t even ask me what I really like, that alone I have a problem with, but I gave him a chance.

  “Uh…” I start out, trying to think of a way to convince him to take me home, when I look up at him and see he’s staring at me. “What?” I ask cautiously, swiping at my cheek in case there’s something crawling on me that I can’t feel.

  He takes a step closer to me, and another, and another, until he’s so close that I can feel his heartbeat, I can hear it, and there’s something tender and sweet about that. It’s intimate, the feeling of being this close to someone. It’s… weird.

  “I’m just here with the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met,” Ryder tells
me, his blonde curls falling into his eyes as he looks down to me. His ocean blue eyes pierce through me but, sadly, they’re not what I want. They’re not the familiar warm chocolate gaze that renders me speechless most of the time.

  Ryder doesn’t know anything about me, he doesn’t want to get to know me, he just compliments me, and how can I argue with that? I can’t argue with that when I just want him to continue to look at me as if I’m a dessert he wants to devour. Before I can think clearly, Ryder backs away and takes my hand, leading me to his car.

  “I’m taking you home before I do something that I’ll regret,” he tells me before he closes the door for me.

  “That’s a good thing,” I mutter to myself when he’s walking around the car.

  “We need to do this again,” he says when he pulls into my empty driveway, my aunt already at work.

  For once, I agreed with him.

  We did.

  He wasn’t as bad as I originally pegged him to be.

  After his football practices, we hung out. We studied together, we saw a few movies, we went to the local restaurants trying to pathetically pass themselves off as diners; we were growing into genuine friends. Who coulda thunk it? I never saw the moment arrive when I would call Ryder Harrison my friend. It was odd and weird—very weird. He even sat with me at lunch, no matter how annoyed and openly mocking Harley got or how wide and toothy Kennie’s smile grew; he didn’t seem to go anywhere other than wherever I was.

  It was like that for a good two weeks.

  Then it all went to hell courtesy of my best friend.

  Zephyr wasn’t too happy about it—none of it. He avoided the topic, aggressively, when Jamie brought it up, sometimes even throwing a hissy fit perfect for a toddler on a sugar high.

  “You’ve been awful cozy with Ryder Harrison lately,” Jamie began conspicuously one day on the way to school, trying her best to gather the latest gossip directly from the main source: Me. I guess that her usual sources are dry in new information; Ryder and I have been keeping things quiet. Well, at least I have. “What’s going on there?”