His stomach flip-flopped nervously as he climbed the steps of the school bus.  He saw her bright orange hair the instant he moved his gaze upward to cast it down the aisle.  As usual, the seat behind hers was empty. Because by now it had been established that that seat in the middle of the bus was the one in which he sat every day, though he had stolen it from her less than a month ago.

He let his heavy knapsack slide off of his shoulder and drop into the seat with a heavy plop before collapsing beside it.  Again, as usual—as though his life, or this part of it anyway, were nothing more than a repeated routine—she turned in her seat to face him, and smiled.  Her teeth shone so brightly in contrast with the dark blue lipstick she was wearing.  He returned the smile wanly, at first only nodding when she noted that he looked tired, then deciding to throw in a comment about the class they both had been in last period of this day:  "Child Studies nearly bored me to sleep."

She laughed, and in his ears, the sweet sound drowned out every other sound wave bouncing through the noisy, Friday-afternoon bus.  He pulled his tired eyes away, feeling himself give in to the cowardice that had consumed him for the past several months.  He really was tired . . . not in his peak physical condition to tell her, though his mind was screaming at him to just do it, and end his relentless torture.

He had grown up knowing nothing but her presence in his life.  They had gone to school together since they were five years old; later, at the start of middle school, she became a close friend to his then–on-again, off-again girlfriend, Stephanie.  He had fallen asleep during a movie in eighth grade and the girls had drawn pictures on his bare arms and legs with pink pens and permanent markers.  Luck of the draw had stuck him in all but one of her classes this semester, which had set his mind churning painfully over her after a whole two grades of nearly-total separation, leading him eventually to the conclusion that he had felt for her since she wrote her initials on his leg, loved her for the most recent year-length chunk of that.

But first . . . there lay his question like an obstacle in the way.  The one he dared not ask, fearing that the answer he would get would not be the answer he wanted.  He wanted another of those laughs from her in response, those laughs that chided, Silly boy.  He wanted to be wrong.

He glanced into her eyes, and knew then what had to be done.  If she was happy with the way things were, he would vow to never to rob her of her beautiful laugh by changing them in the slightest and he would hold to that vow until the end of his tortured existence.  But, he had to know.  If he could ever be the one to make her so happy as she now seemed.

He braced himself for the heartbreak he was certain was impending.

"I was talking to Tom the other day," he mused, in what he hoped was a nonchalant manner, while kicking himself mentally, knowing that while she seemed convinced, his bad acting hadn't bought him over.  "He was telling me you and Stephanie were in talking to him at work."

"Oh, yeah?"  She was picking at a hangnail, but her eyebrows were raised and her head tilted up toward him in genuine interest.

His heart was pounding.  His question wasn't going to be worded as a question, because that would make him appear interested, and he would not allow that breach in his cover, not when he felt he had already let slip too many of its flaws to her.

"I didn't know you and Jesse were going out."

In the moment, as long as the blink of an eye, immediately after his query in disguise had been voiced, he imagined that he heard her chiding laughter, and everything was as he had always thought it was.

Then it was real.  She was laughing.

She was laughing at him.

He had never been so happy to hear someone laugh at him.

That bliss was crushed when her words escaped between her sounds of joy.

"You didn't know?"

As an additional twist of the knife, she added, "Have you been living under a rock?  We've been together"—and here she checked the date on her watch—"like a year and four months!"

Speak.  Speak, damn it, his mind demanded.  Hide your pain.  Throw a blanket over your broken heart and react as though she didn't just knock it off a seven-storey building.

He shrugged, turned his eyes coolly to the window, and replied a tad defensively, "Well, I don't keep up on these things.  I could care less who's with who and for how long."

Bull . . . shit.

He thought over his shattered dreams.  He thought of how beautiful she was, and how great a person Jesse was.  How much closer than he to her type Jesse was—tall and strong, with the ability to dye his hair and the confidence to wear black and chains and heavy eyeliner and shrug off criticism.  How he could never compete with Jesse, how stupid he had been to think he even deserved these few minutes of this wonderful young woman's time.

Biting his lip, he tossed his hopes, rendered futile, over the seven-storey building and watched them crash into the ground next to the pieces of his heart.