STORM

“Storm, what’s wrong?” My best friend, Max with eyebrows looking down, strands of hair flying east with the wind. Sunlight makes her dark skin glow brighter than the sun itself. Blue eyes filled with worry glaring at me as if I were her child.

“Nothing, Max” everything was wrong.

It was my senior year of school, already 2 months in and everything that I had planned for my senior bucket list of sorts had gone wrong.

Don't get me wrong, I'm just like most of you, I hate bucket lists I just want to be free without a list caging me to do things out of my comfort zone. But it was a project assigned by our teacher and I never miss an assignment.

So I did it for the most part,

Get A Boyfriend.

Get Accepted to my dream school.

Try new foods.

Go on a vacation.

Meet and have one new friend.

Road trip with class.

And 20 other more….

Some of them, our teacher came up with but for the rest, we had to figure out what we wanted by actually doing them and then writing a whole essay about our experiences.

It did go right for about 36 days, 12 minutes and 15 seconds. In which I have procced to watch my now ex-boyfriend make out with Yuri, his childhood best friend. He wasn’t doing this behind my back since he had already broken up with me, telling me that he had fallen for someone else after a month together.

It was heartbreaking since he was my first boyfriend and more importantly on my bucket list.

Which meant that I had to start all over because he couldn’t last for the whole year and led me around.

“Earth to Strom” I hear Max say with an alien voice capturing my attention since I had spent our lunch break daydream.

Ring

Ring

“I’m sorry, Max i’ll make it up to you with a brownie and ice cream after school!” I sincerely apologized to her while we grabbed our bags and headed back inside the school.

“Hey! You better. You still owe me from last time” She grabbed my upper arm controlling my body to face her as she gave me her meanest face. Her pointer finger pointed at me signally at my mistake.

I rolled my eyes and responded with attitude “Of course I do”

She rolled her eyes as well but made it her mission to drag the hand that was still on my upper arm to our last class of the day, Art class.

We sat on our stools next to each other with our art equipment in front of us. A blank canvas waiting for our teacher’s introduction to begin.

“For Your first project of the Year, you will have to draw or paint something that brings you comfort, it can be an animal, person, place…”

Something that brings me comfort? My best friend? Oreos? A warm blanket while I'm in bed watching a movie?

There are a lot of things that bring a person comfort but was I willing to share it with the class or go the safe route?

My thoughts were interrupted when Greyson Knight came in with his sharp bruised face and dark messy hair late to class. He was about 6’3 towering over everyone in this school handing his fake late pass to the teacher who was completely over his actions with me included.

He walked directly past me to his usual seat in the back doing whatever he did which did not include our assignment but somehow got them done in time. He’s smart but dangerous. Every time I get caught by his dark stormy blue eyes I feel like I'm caught in an unknown storm that I can't figure out if it will end badly or not.

I used to have a crush on him ever since we were childhood best friends, I probably still do in the back of my mind. As I am one often staring at him wondering what went wrong with us.

He was my comfort place.

But no one can know now except for Max.

“Girl, stop staring at him! And focus on our project that's due in three weeks!” She waved her hands in front of my face as I gathered my focus away from my former best friend and onto my crazy Maxie who kept listing her ideas for the project out loud.

“I wasn't staring at him, I was just observing”

“Is that the new word for stalking?” She side-eyed me as we fell into laughter which was silenced by our teacher as she was passing through each person.

“shut up! I am neither stalking him nor am I staring at him like you do with Tyler!”

“That's different!”

“How?”

“Because I said so! And I'm making progress with him while Greyson doesn't even care about you” Her words made me freeze as I knew the relationship between me and Greyson as we could never be together in that way. But I had hope that he would at least talk to me before senior year was over. Before I lost my last chance with him I had to go away to my dream school. If they accepted me. If Greyson accepted me again.

“I know but I have hope that we'll make process this year.” I worried about my voice because before I knew the bell rang to go back home and miss seeing the face of my childhood best friend until the next day.

But is there even hope? Greyson was the first one to leave without leaving me a glance as Max looked at me with concern.

“I'm sorry storm, maybe it's time to move on”