How Would You React

I close my eyes and say to myself, "I hope that when I open my eyes, I wake up and realize this is all just a dream, and I’m not here, and you guys aren’t doing this to me." I laugh to make it seem like I’m not anxious and angry, and they laugh too.

David. Lucy. Symphony. Brooke. Elaine. I’ve never dreaded eating lunch with them this much. Floyd acts oblivious, but I don’t think he is as clueless as he seems.

"You’re really starting to annoy me," David snaps, rolling his eyes.

"Just do it!" Symphony exclaims, and Brooke nods.

"Now or never," she says, still nodding.

"You know what guys?" I say, and they all look at me intently. Floyd is talking to Elaine, and I’m glad he isn’t paying attention to me. "Fuck you," I mumble. They laugh again. How is this amusing? I close my eyes again. I open them. I’m still there, in the cafeteria. It is approximately twenty minutes after noon on the last day of April. I take a deep breath and turn to him.

"Floyd," I say, and he turns to face me. I don’t play with or mutilate my plastic silverware. I don’t look to my friends for support. I look straight into his icy green eyes. "How would you react…" I start, and pause for a moment. I feel six pairs of eyes burning through me. "…if I told you I wanted to go out with you?"

His eyes don’t leave mine, and I don’t look away. I can’t this time. I can’t.

My mind races incoherently while he says something about how it would be weird because he knows me too well, and our dads know each other, blah blah blah. And then my thoughts stop abruptly, as if someone had pushed a Pause button, and I hear him say two words.

"I’m sorry."

And it hits me. I just told Floyd how I felt about him. And he just turned me down.

"Okay. Well, then I won’t ask," I say with a small smile and a shrug, and he smiles back.

I’m sorry.

The words echo in my brain as Floyd says something to the rest of the table about how they shouldn’t have been pressuring me to do something I didn’t want to do. Since when did he care about my feelings?

Since when did he know how I felt?

His answer was so smooth, so fast. Almost painless. Almost as if he had been planning it. He had known I was planning, and he had planning also. I had been planning my fairytale, and he had been planning the sweetest way to destroy it. Trying to figure out how to break a heart as gently as possible.

Does he see the hope shining behind my eyes shatter? Does he see a part of me collapse? Does he feel the heart he had had in his hands for so long fall to pieces?

And then it is over. David grins. Brooke and Elaine smile proudly. Symphony leaves because the show is over. Why are they proud of me? Why are they so happy that I made an ass out of myself?

I look down at my hands and notice that they are shaking. I fold them and place them in my lap, hoping Floyd doesn’t see them. But he is too busy talking casually to Elaine, leaving me alone while his rejection sinks in.

I close my eyes again, hoping to see my bedroom. The giant ceiling leak above my head. The dull yellow color of my walls. But when I open them, I see five pairs of eyes, and a few sympathetic smiles, which I do not return. I pick up my tray and take it to the window at the front of the cafeteria. The entire room is out of focus, and I want to disappear. I wonder if they talk about me when I leave. I wonder if Floyd talks about how happy he is that it’s over, and it didn’t seem to bother me. But it does. 

The last few minutes of lunch pass slowly, and for the rest of the day, I walk around in a daze. My angry music blasts against my eardrums, and I find myself on the brink of tears a few times, buried in the safe haven of the back stall of the first floor bathroom. I dig my fingernails into my skin, pinching myself, willing myself to wake up from the nightmare, but I never do.

Does he regret it?

I doubt it.