Chapter 6

They'd first started going out freshman year. She'd been together with this guy, Danny, since about the first week of school. She really liked Danny.

Danny was fairly inexperienced as far as dating went, but she didn't know that, you wouldn't from the way he acted. Plus, he was gorgeous. Essentially, he broke up with her. It wasn't that he didn't like her. Actually, he liked her a lot. The problem was, he didn't know what to do with her. Should he call her every night? Eat lunch with her every day? Trivial problems, but when you're a freshman, trivial problems are like catastrophes. He tried to act cool, and basically ended up ignoring her. Around October, she finally asked him. "Do you want to go out with me or not?"

The answer wasn't yes, in fact it wasn't even an answer yet that night when she met Ryan. She'd asked Danny's friend to give him the message Friday morning, but she'd neither heard nor seen Danny or the friend all day. Friday night she went out with her friends, Melissa and Dana, and these two sophomore guys. One of them had played soccer with Ryan. "Harper," they kept calling him.

Anyway, they went up to Ryan's house in the hills to see what he was up to. All of them sat around in his living room for awhile, playing Sega while waiting for someone to call Ryan back.

Ryan noticed her right away. He liked her looks right away anyway, but she didn't seem particularly friendly. She was very quiet and fairly unreceptive to any suggestions people made. She didn't want anything to drink, she wanted to keep her jacket on, she didn't want to play winner.

So Ryan instead focused his attentions on the Melissa girl, who had been flirting with him somewhat, but it soon became obvious that she had something going with one of the sophomores. The bitch (as he called her mentally during that first brief hour) actually sat in his kitchen and talked to his dad for awhile. When she was in there, one of the guys commented on her and what a bundle of laughs she was. Dana mentioned that she was upset because she was breaking up (maybe) with her boyfriend.

So Ryan thought about it for a few minutes, then noticed it quiet in the kitchen and went in. His dad had gone back to his bedroom, and she was now sitting alone quietly at his kitchen table, slowly tracing the placemat pattern with her fingertip.

He sat down across from her, and she looked up at him and gave a half-hearted smile, then looked back down at the table. She didn't want to him to think she was a bitch, so she looked back up at him and gave him a more genuine one. It was his house after all, and she'd just gotten through talking to his dad, who was a real sweetheart, so she ought to be nice to him.

"Having fun?" he asked, teasing her a bit.

"Oh, yeah, tons," she answered sarcastically.

He leaned forward. "So, you sad?" he asked.

She just shrugged her shoulders.

"What's your name again?" he asked. "I'm Ryan. I live here," he added.

"I know," she said. "I'm Jen."

That's right, he knew that. "So," he said. "You want to talk about it? Your friend said you were having problems with your boyfriend."

Good, he knows I have a boyfriend, she thought gratefully. "Well, kinda," she said.

"What's the matter? I don't know, maybe I can give you a guy's perspective, if you want."

"Well, aright."

"So, what's up?"

"Well, we've only been going out since the beginning of the year. He's just... I don't know. I mean, I really like him and stuff but he's just such a butt!"

Ryan laughed. The girl had attitude, he could see. "What's he do?"

"Well, he's sorta mean to me."

"What--he doesn't hit you, does he?" asked Ryan, concerned.

"Oh, no! Nothing like that!"

"I was gonna say, I mean, if he's beatin' on you I'd probably have to kick his ass."

That made her uncomfortable, but she just continued talking to him anyway. "No, he just ignores me."

"He ignores you?"

"Yeah, I mean, he never calls me. I have to call him if I want to talk to him. And he doesn't hang out with me at school or anything. We've gone out to lunch a couple times but not lately. So, it's like we never talk, you know? I mean, we never even see each other. Not lately anyway. He says he likes me but I wish he'd just, I don't know," she shrugged.