Chapter One

Chapter Two

The story of our relationship's somewhat turbulent beginning...
 Imagine the girl's surprise when she discovered that the boy had been assigned to her fifth grade class.
 As if it weren't enough that she became embarrassed at the drop of a hat now this boy, the boy that somehow had the power to read her mind and know how to embarrass her, would be in her classroom every day.
 She both loved the idea and hated it.
 She was looking forward to the start of the school year so she could tell her classmates that she already knew the new boy...the cute new boy...and that she even played at his house sometimes.

She wanted to stake some sort of claim on him.
 They didn't seem too impressed.
 The boy was also now on her bus route and it seemed that he was asserting his presence in every aspect of her life, to tease and embarrass her.
 She wished that he would flirt with her the way he did the other girls in the class but she knew she wasn't as pretty as them.  Not in a depressive or self-loathing way, but in a matter-of-fact way.
 It was okay because she preferred to remain mostly invisible.

So she wouldn't be embarrassed.

(Everything embarrassed her and she hated it.)
 Besides, she knew she had the other girls beat because she could pretend to loathe him and act like she didn't care.
 She knew this got his attention more than a cute face or aggressive flirting and it bothered him even though he wouldn't admit it.
 She refused to play with him, gave him dirty looks and even, on several occasions, called him a jerk.

She liked him.

She liked the way he seemed to know how to do everything...things she didn't know how to do.

He had a pocket knife.

He'd been to Florida.

But he didn't treat her like the other girls...he treated her like a boy.

And she didn't know if she was proud of that or if she hated him for it.
B

You can see the rest of this session here under "Leach Girls".