The beginning.
Suddenly aware, I looked up from the table to see a boy wearing a pink polo shirt, with a flipped collar, standing right in front of me. Amazingly gorgeous, Matt had a smile lightened by his blue eyes that gazed at me happily, as was his charm. Nervous, I looked down in a failed tentative to concentrate in my homework, until I froze when I heard his voice call my name.
“Ana.” He said. I have been going to Blury High for eight months and it was the first time I heard him say my name so close to me. Actually, it was the first time I heard him say my name at all.
It was a spring day and I was sitting in the library waiting for my dad to pick me up. He was only coming at four, even though school ended at two. “Hey” was all I managed to say back .Suddenly it was so hot in the room and I couldn’t stop biting my pencil. Grinning at me, he looked back and reached for a chair in the next table. Next thing I knew he was sting across my table gazing at me contentedly. “I’m Matt by the way.”
Or course he was. Matt Di Biagio was simply the hottest guy in school. He was also, president of the senior class and captain of the basketball team. A guy who, according to my earlier experiences in high school, would never – never talk to a girl like me.
“I’m Ana.” I said softly beneath the rush of sensations I was having.
“I know.” He smiled again. Could any one have more perfect teeth? “Math homework?” he asked. “Yeah.” I said. “Algebra was never my strong point.” I kicked my own foot under the table. I had to make sure it was not a dream.
We spent the next hour working on my homework, talking only about ordinary things. Like the weather, the last night’s Friends episode and whether people buy more orange or yellow socks. Surprisingly, he was just like any other guy I know. Expect maybe, for his perfect features. At 3:30 he rose from his chair, went through his hair with his hand and stared at me. “I will see you later Ana.” He said and he meant it. A second later he was gone.
It took me a while to process everything that had just happened, not knowing that what had past was going to change my life. I just had had a normal conversation with a guy I used to hate with all my heart, mainly because I was completely vulnerable to his charm even though I never talked to him. And also, between all the anger, I was madly in love with him.
I am not the girl who life turns around boys, so my passion for Matt was never hard to deal with. Sometimes I forgot all about him and most of it I was too busy hating him to actually love him. With the exception of the times he played basketball at my neighbor’s house, or passed by me in the hall ways. The single glimpse of him made my heart go all the way up in my mouth.
I was still floating in the sky two hours later, lying in my bed when I heard a ball kicking outside in the street. I ran to my window just to see my neighbor Kyle with it. Yet, another thing caught my attention. A little brown box standing next to my car, a
yellow new beetle that was a gift from my seventeenth birthday. I walked down the stairs, to the front yard and opened the box.
That was when everything really started. With the box, I mean. Inside it, I found letters addressed to me that I never received, full of poems and confessions. There were pictures of me eating lunch at school, paintings of my face with my long brown hair and dark eyes, and in a new envelope, tickets to the Knicks game next Saturday.
It all came down so quickly, it was hard to breathe. I just knew, there was no signature in the box, but I knew. He loved me. I dare to think he even hated me too. Just like me. I don’t know how everything went from that point on. That was simply it, it changed my life.
What followed after his first move just came as a reaction. All of a sudden I knew him so well, and loved him so for he also loved me all along. Nothing else mattered, we were together. We never needed explanations for why it took so long, it was over now. I seemed to distinguish him from a past life, his short blond hair, blue eyes that could capture the entire ocean in one single look, a smile that had the power to make a flower blow, I knew every inch of his body.
“I just couldn’t take it anymore, not without you anyway.” He said to me later that night. I smiled at him. “I know.” And I knew. That ordinary spring afternoon was just the first day of the rest of our lives.