He pulls open the door and doesn’t look back. My chest tightens. He can’t just leave. I toss my fistful of change to Nadia and heave my cemented feet forward. I catch the door with my hip just before it closes, sending a ricochet of tea across my knuckles.
There he stands, mellow in mid-sip. And I come out a hot mess.
“Hey, it’s Kyle, right?” I blurt out the question in between sucking steaming milk off my fingers.
“Khi, actually.” He passes me a napkin from his muffin bag.
“Sorry, Khi,” I correct myself, stacking my cups so I can accept the napkin. “I have this weird feeling, like I must know you, or should know you. Sorry, that completely sounds like a pickup line. Which it is not. Not that you aren’t worthy of being picked up. But I don’t know anything about you, except that you helped the lady who lives down the street from me. But I’ve never seen you before and . . .”
I stop myself and breathe in. Another bad habit of mine is nervous rambling around the opposite sex.
“Let me try again.” I exhale. “I got the sense in there you know me somehow.” I slant my head toward the coffee shop. He must be wishing he never talked to me, but he just smiles and nods, as if to encourage my blathering. “You asked if I was okay. Why?”
“I could see you were not,” he says with a soft but assured voice. “I … assumed you shared this same gift.”
“Gift? What do you mean?”
“Compassion.” He looks down to my hand holding the tea. “You were at Mrs. Shen’s house this morning, right?”
“I stopped for a minute, but I …” I shake my head. “How did you—”
He glances in the direction of the Shens’ house. “I was there with her. I walked her back home after she got lost. She’d burnt her hand, and with her husband now gone, she’s been easily disoriented.”
My hand, the same hand that felt warm at her house, begins to tingle again. I stare at it, almost expecting a burn to appear. “What do you mean by compassion?”
“For others. You feel it, don’t you?” He reaches for my shoulder and gently guides me away from the café entrance door. A stream of students exits behind me toward school.
School. I’m going to be late.
“I need to get to class.” A poster in the window for the Open Mic Night on Saturday catches my eye. “I don’t normally invite complete strangers to something, but you know Nadia and you helped the Shens, so you can’t be a crazy stalker, and I shouldn’t have said that, but today’s been so strange already, and you seem …” Warmth rushes into my cheeks. I point at the window. “There’s an open mic night here in a couple of weeks.”
“Yeah, I heard. Sounds cool.” He says it with an awkward pronunciation of cool.
I squint at him, waiting for an explanation.
He squints in return. A wide grin shows no sign of malice, but no explanation either.
“A bunch of people from my high school are going. Likely not your scene, but if you were at all interested ...” Stop babbling.
“Can I let you know next week?” He tugs a journal out of a worn leather satchel and flips to a clean page. Is he trying to get rid of me? I take a step away, ready to retreat, but he looks up, pen already scratching across the page. “Your name is Thea, right?”
My eyes widen. “How did you—?”
“Nadia. She called your name out when she gave you your order.”
“I guess we know who the observant one is.”
He passes the pen and journal to me with number: jotted next to my name.
I place my tower of teas on the window ledge and write down my cell number. How nice it feels to write with a heavy ballpoint pen on decent paper. It’s unusual for anyone our age to not simply pass over a phone when asking for contact information. I embrace this small pleasure and some of the stress of the morning releases from my neck.
“I’m really not crazy or usually this forward, it’s just ... You know what?” I pick up my London Fogs. “It’s nice to meet you, Khi. I hope we can hang out soon.” I push my shoulders straight.
“You too, Thea.” He slips his journal into his satchel, takes a sip of his coffee, and, with another slight bow, strolls away from the coffee shop. Obviously, he’s not under the same strain I am to arrive someplace in the next ten minutes.
Despite my time constraints, I stand and watch him saunter away. The narrowness of his neck reveals his slim frame beneath the bulk of a wool sweater Grams would have proudly knitted. And yet on him, it comes across more than okay. He brushes through his short, sandy-blond hair, leaving it just the right amount of unkempt.
A fluttering sensation rises inside my chest. Am I attracted to him or just fascinated? He is nothing like Gavin, my two-years-running dark and addictive infatuation. But there is something so captivating about Khi. So quietly confident. I have never been able to reel in my nervous chatter or directly ask a guy to hang out with me before. Ever. I need to figure out how I did it and how to replicate it. Imagine if I could be like that with Gavin.
I head toward school, then stop. Something Khi said flashes through my mind.
What other here was he talking about?
CHAPTER THREE
Yellow flicks to red and the cars and people proceed as expected. Myself included.
With practiced grace, I rebalance cups atop one another to search for my phone. Yep, still not in my bag. Instead, I untwist a lip gloss with my free hand and apply some color while I wait. I glance across the street at the looming, two-story building, and my nervous system cranks into overdrive. My palms start to sweat, and my scarf feels more like a choke collar. Did I mention how much I hate when my routine is off?
Other than the apricot lip sheen, I’ve done nothing to my appearance. Khi must have thought I was not only crazy, but a complete slob. I untie the topknot in my hair and toss my curls left to cover the growing bald spot I’m creating. As I wait, I scratch my head, a replacement habit I’ve developed to avoid pulling. But even this happens all too often when I approach school. Whether it’s a good, bad, or downright awful day.
Ridgefield Secondary is where I find myself facing a new set of emotional hurdles each morning: embarrassment, anticipation, anxiety. A flood of overwhelming experiences that sometimes feels flat-out terrifying. And I don’t get it. Why does high school still freak me out so much? At this point, it’s not like I’m new to it. Does anyone else feel this way? Some clearly will need to wait until college to find their eclectic posse of acceptance, but the rest? Everything seems to just work for them. Maybe they’re all better at acting than I am, but I doubt it. There’s a reason I got the lead in the school’s one-act drama festival.
Acting is one more coping strategy that gives me precious moments of escape. If I pretend to be someone else, I can be confident and in control for a little while. And let’s face it, I’m never going to be prom queen or class president. The cross-country team has zero varsity value, and sports that require hand-eye coordination don’t play nice with me. But the drama club gives me just enough social leverage to be accepted amongst the artists.
Even so, each morning a train seems to hurtle through my ribs as I drag myself through the front doors. And I swear there’s a conductor shouting, Watch out, here comes the social misfit!