Chapter 2

For weeks I sought him far and near

But not again did he appear

At last a sigh and I gave it rest

And took respite from my fruitless quest

When I got home I tried to forget about the strange encounter, but the next morning after my parents had left for work, his image kept returning. By the time I had finished lunch he seemed to be in my mind constantly. Part of it, I'm sure, was that I was just a little lonely for someone my own age. As I said I hadn't met anyone since we had moved here. But part of it was also that for some reason he generated a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I thought about him.

I decided on making a one dish supper and quickly put it together and shoved the glass baking dish into the oven. I set the timer so that it would be ready at five thirty and then took my bike and headed back to the county park. I spent the afternoon just lurking around the main parking area, sitting on the little kids's swings and so on. Of course what I was really doing was looking for the mysterious boy. However, not another person appeared that afternoon. About a quarter of five I headed home and arrived just ahead of my parents. Then after dinner I headed back to the park once more and hung around until nearly dark, but was once again disappointed.

The next three days were almost the same. Oh, I didn't go there every afternoon but I did return after supper each night. At least by then I had learned to take a book with me so I didn't just fidget around all the time. Still he never appeared again. To a somewhat lesser extent I repeated this almost every day for the next four weeks, still without success.

School would be starting in two weeks and that began to take up a little more of my time. Mom took me to the mall a couple of times so I could pick up a few new things and I did see some other teenagers there, although I never got a chance to talk with any of them. Even for high school there were lists of required items so I also went shopping for notebooks and binders and so on.

Always before I had been within walking distance of school but this year I would be riding a bus. We found it would pass our house about seven fifteen so I knew I would have to be up and ready by then. This wasn't really a problem because I had always been an early riser. So on the day after Labor Day I found myself standing out by the road at five after seven in the morning, carrying a backpack with my pencils and notebooks, and waiting for the big yellow bus.

Right at seven fifteen it arrived and I climbed on board to find only four other students. It turned out that I was near the beginning of the route so for the next thirty five minutes I sat and watched as another thirty students joined us. At least this should mean that I would be one of the first off in the afternoon.

When we arrived at school I found lists telling me which homeroom I had been assigned and a map telling me how to find it. This wasn't a gigantic school, but there were still over a thousand students. I made my way with others - some looking quite familiar with everything and a somewhat smaller number looking almost as confused as I was myself. Eventually I found Mr. Braxton's room and went in and took a seat along with twenty some other students.

Not surprisingly the first days still seems somewhat of a blur. I was taking English, Geometry, Biology, German, Health and Physical Education, and something called Intro to Computers which appeared to be concerned with teaching us to use word processors, spreadsheets, the Internet and a few other things that most of us had been doing for the past eight or ten years or so. Oh, well, someday the adults would catch up with us.

Over the rest of that week and the next I did meet a number of people. I got along well with most of them but I wasn't developing any especially close relationships. I mean there were a couple of girls I talked with quite a bit and we usually ate lunch together, but I didn't really feel that any of them would become a really close friend. We did talk about boys and they pointed out several, but I only met them briefly. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was still wondering about the boy I had seen that day in the park. Did he go to this school? Maybe he attended a private school or was even home schooled. I didn't spend a lot of time wondering about him, but every now and then he did enter my mind and I still got that funny feeling in my stomach when I thought about him, although I wasn't obsessing about him or anything.