~28~ Falling Up

(Zac’s POV)

Nothing. A month of absolutely nothing. For once, I was actually forced to focus on my studies because I couldn’t mess around with Luke and them, or be distracted with girls. The only person willing to talk to me was Brian. No one knew what to think of me except the people at the scene of the crime.

I looked up at lunch and saw Angel walking out of the cafeteria with Lulu.

You know, if I had never looked in a mirror, she might have been the most depressing person after all of this. But why? It’s not like she lost her best friend, or boyfriend, or anything at all. All she lost was any feelings for me.

“Just talk to her,” Brian said. I looked over to him as he worked on his math homework.

“What’s the use,” I sighed, closing my book. I grabbed my stuff and started to leave.

“Where are you going?” Brian asked.

“Just away from here,” I answered. I started to make my way to the back of the school by where the old gym used to be. The school just decided to leave it like that. Considering we already had two new gyms, the old one was nothing anyways. It was just a bunch of ruble now.

“I don’t know how you can come here without any fear,” I heard someone say. I rounded the corner and saw Lulu and Angel playing on the dirt mounds.

“What would I fear?” Angel asked confidently. “There’s nothing left to burn.”

“Right…” Lulu trailed. I leaned against the wall and watched them. “Same ole Angel. Not afraid of anything. Not drowning, or burning, or—”

“It’s not about that though,” Angel snapped. “It’s just…why should you be afraid of something that’s completely out of your hands.”

“And if it was?”

“Then we’d have something to worry about,” she admitted. I sighed and slid down to sit against the wall. She worried about me than, but did that mean she feared me in the process? Along with Joey and Brian? Even Devin, maybe? It didn’t matter though because she stayed with either Lulu, or Joey. She despised the rest of us. And it was my fault. I should’ve just told her from the beginning…

“So how are you and Joey?” I heard Lulu ask her. By now, my head was resting on my knees in depression. I didn’t even wanna hear how well Angel and Joey were doing.

“It’s…complicated,” she answered. Wait, what? I lifted my head. “He’s…more protective and I just need to breathe sometimes…”

He was suffocating her so that the same incident won’t happen again. But as I see it, she’s still pissed off at him. Either way, I had convinced myself that she would only ever hate me and I expected my feelings not to be returned. I stood up and kicked small rocks as I made my way to my next class before the bell even rang.

(Angel’s POV)

“I just don’t wanna lose you,” Joey said. We were laying on the stairs and having a serious talk that’s been needed for a month, now.

“Well I don’t want you to lie to me,” I reasoned.

“I promise I won’t,” he said, raising my hand and kissing it. I produced a smile and he reached up to kiss me. I kissed back against his soft lips and then his hands moved to my waist. I pulled away and saw him to be smiling. He lifted me to stand by my waist and pressed his lips back to mine. He hitched me on his hips and then carried me up the stairs, still making out. The first thing I felt was my back against my bed. I pulled away when he was above me. I looked with the corner of my eye and saw the glass of water by my bed floating.

“Well aren’t you happy and sh!t,” I commented. He rolled his eyes.

“I am not…” he started to lie, but I gestured to the water. “Oh. Well, what do you expect? Now I don’t have to control it…not like I can when I’m around you.”

I playfully rolled my eyes and kissed him. We made out so intensely that his hands roamed beneath my shirt before he stripped. I ran my hands down his body, but when his hands played with the back of my bra, I started to hesitate. I shifted and then he stopped. However, it only led him to undoing my jeans. That went too far in my mind and he could tell when I parted from him.

“What’s wrong, Angel?” he asked in a calm voice.

“I can’t do this,” I said.

“Why? You didn’t have a problem saying you could do this when we were at Zac’s,” he said. I looked over to him.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“You heard what I said,” he said as he rolled into a sitting position on the side of my bed.

“Well I’m hoping that I didn’t.”

He sighed and then turned to me.

“Why is it that when we were at Zac’s, you said that you had sex, but the next day I hear from everyone else—Zac specifically—that you’re still a virgin?” he asked.

“It was a stupid game!” I reasoned.

“It doesn’t matter, Angel,” he said, raising his voice.

“Why does it even matter?” I asked. “If you were looking for me to have sex with you, then—”

“It’s the fact that I don’t like hearing that bit of information from Zac,” he interrupted. I stayed quiet. “The fact that…you’re more willing to talk to him and be open to him when I’m your boyfriend.”

“What are you saying?” I asked confused. “I’m not open with Zac. I’ve just known him longer and I’m sorry that when I get pissed off at him, I just start rambling to him.”

“That’s not it!” Joey actually yelled at me and stood. I felt all the water from the glass fall right back into place. Great. He’s pissed. He stressfully sighed and then it was quiet. “I’m sick of learning things about you through him, or Brian, or anyone. Just…be yourself around me and I’ll get the picture.”

I swallowed at his words and he looked away from me, only to walk out.

(Brian’s POV)

“Dude. You can just grow weed and I can blaze,” Zac laughed. From the ground that I laid on, I sat up to look up at him on the hammock.

“Or maybe I can grow a coconut tree and mature the coconut to fall on your head,” I suggested. “It’s not like you have any brain cells left.”

“Ouch,” he said sarcastically. I only laughed and repositioned myself on the ground, growing another grape vine for me to eat off of. Safe to say that we were bored.

“So how was Luke’s trial?” Zac suddenly asked.

“Why do you care?” I asked.

“Just asking for conversation…”

I sighed and added my hand over my face.

“He is in jail for life considering he’s eighteen,” I started. “It’s not like  the case could be so big considering all the secrecy, but he has just about every charge out there except probably…public nudity.”

“We could’ve got that back in freshman year,” he said.

“Which year?” I asked, referring to his failed grades.

“Shut up!” he responded. I only laughed at his failure. He was quiet though. “You wanna know something though?”

“Humor me,” I allowed.

“I never actually failed a grade,” he said. I laughed.

“Haha, yeah right. I’ve seen your report card,” I teased. I looked up and he looked down from the hammock, the sun shining right behind him as it died.

“Just because I’m not some top percentile nerd, doesn’t mean I’m not passing,” he said with a serious face.

“Dude. You’ve been in summer school every year that I’ve known you,” I reasoned. He shrugged.

“I took extra classes,” he reasoned. I scoffed.

“You’ve gotta be sh!tting me,” I said.

“I sh!t you not,” he assured. Who would’ve thought he’d actually want to spend his summer taking extra classes? Not even I did that. “I graduate early.”

“How early is that?” I asked.

“At the end of this year,” he answered.

“Why would you take a whole year off?” I asked. This time, he can’t blame it on the drug. This was all on him, planned out years ago.

“I don’t like dealing with high school all the time,” he admitted.

“So you rather just deal with college already?” I snorted. Even worse.

“I’m not going to college,” he said. Wow. Big shocker there…

“Then what are you gonna do?” I asked, concerned. Now that I knew him, I knew that he was pretty smart under the surface. He was a lot of things. “Pyrotechnics?”

“Har har,” he mocked. “I’m gonna be in the fire department…or at least that’s what I planned on doing.”

“Just can’t stay away from that fire,” I laughed, growing a thick tree behind me so that I could sit up and lean against it. “At least you’re ahead of schedule.”

He didn’t seem too thrilled about it. I frowned.

“I thought that being a fire fighter was the number one job I wanted to do, or police officer, but now I see that I screwed all that up,” he started. “You’d think being able to control fire would be a bonus, but when I start to care about all those people, I’m not doing anyone a favor.”

“Just by stepping up to be the person to save another, is enough,” I said in a calm voice. He sighed and then rolled back onto his back with his arms folded beneath his head. “I can help you, you know? On the whole triggering powers thing.”

“I doubt it,” he scoffed.

“Think of it like this; if someone else figures out all this sh!t and takes your mom, or sisters, or…Angel, are you just gonna let them push you around because you’re caring too much, or—”

“Look, Brian,” he hissed down to me. “Stop bringing Angel into everything.”

“Why not?”

He rolled over to face me.

“She is your ex girlfriend and the person that hates us right now, so just shut the fu** up about her,” he ordered.

“No,” I denied. “I’m bringing her up because she’s in all of this mess because of us—because of you—and I want to help you control your powers so that she’s never hurt—”

“Are you kidding me?” he interrupted. “When I’m with her—h3ll, when I’m not with her, that’s just an assurance that I’m too at ease and weak to do anything because I’m always caring about her. If you teach me to trigger memories of hate and anger so easily, it only puts her in that much more danger and neither of us want that, so just drop it.”

Wow.

“So you rather her be with some guy who’s powers react every single time around her?” I whispered, referring to Joey. “Yeah, because that’s real safe, Zac.”

“Just drop it!” he concluded. He swung his legs over the side of the hammock. “I’m gonna go check up with Rivers and Sherman, so don’t wait up.”

He left me thinking about how the h3ll I was going to get him and Angel together—or at least on speaking terms. Sure, I loved her, but that’s exactly why I was doing this. Only, there were three people loving her right now and two thirds of them were stubborn and in the way of common sense.