Heartthrobs Don’t Date Wallflowers (Texting the Boyband)

Chapter 12

twelve

Watching Zach through the window quickly became a pastime of mine. A creepy pastime, sure, but a pastime nonetheless. I tried to justify it to myself by saying that it was the same as watching him from the balcony every time they had a bonfire, but I guess looking inside his window was a little bit different than watching them in the backyard. Either way, I found myself doing it every single day that week. And on the day that the locker slam happened, I saw him watching me back.

My heart almost stopped when I saw him there. I wondered if he knew how much I’d been watching him. If he was appearing here to tell him to quit it and to leave him alone. Could I play it off as something casual? As just a one-time thing somehow? But then he held up a notebook. On it was a hastily written note :

You okay?

I frowned for a second, confused by the question, but then he pointed at his hand, and I realized he was talking about mine–the one that was still swollen and aching every time I moved it. I could almost feel his hold on it again, the way he’d cradled it so gently as he guided me through the halls this afternoon.

Without taking my eyes off him, I slipped my notebook off my desk and grabbed a marker. As I took the cap off of it, I realized that writing with my hurt fingers was going to be difficult. But I was atrocious at writing with my left hand, so I would just make do.

What was I supposed to say? What could I write that would be short enough to fit on the paper while still being readable for him? Eventually, I just settled for something simple:

All good

I was basically holding the marker in a fist, so the lines were messy and I wrote it so big that the tip of the A reached the spiral bound of the notebook and the G fell off the edge of the page, but it was the best I could do.

When I held it up, Zach didn’t look satisfied. His brows were pulled together in a cute little divot and he was biting his lip hard. My eyes stayed trained on his lips– had they always looked so soft? –and I forced myself to look away before he noticed. He wasn’t writing anything else, so I turned the page and wrote something for him:

Really. It doesn’t hurt

Well, I tried to but I mostly got really and hurt to fit, with doesn’t squished in between because I wasn’t sure how to space it correctly. When I held it up, he frowned even more, and I wondered whether he could even read the “doesn’t.” Maybe he just thought it said “really hurts.” Well, that would be a fun little sign, wouldn’t it?

I threw the notepad onto the desk and did a thumbs up–with my good hand–instead. I wasn’t sure that really made it better, but his worry lines disappeared a little bit, and on him, that little bit of a smile was enough.

He ducked down to write something, and I awkwardly stared past his shoulder as I waited. His bed was made today, unlike the other times I’d looked in there, so I could see now that his comforter was a simple, dark color. I swore the only colors boys ever had in their rooms were navy blue and black. It was like they were allergic to any sort of color.

He sat back up and held up a sign.

I’m really sorry :(

The hand-drawn sad face took up half the page, and was all uneven and droopy, and I couldn’t help but laugh. From the way he dressed and was so silent, I assumed he tried to play a bad-boy persona in the band, but with the way he was acting now, I kind of wondered whether he was actually just... a big softie.

My right hand was starting to hurt from trying to bend around the marker, so I had to use my left hand to try to scribble out “it’s not your fault.” But who was I kidding? I couldn’t write with my left hand so I shortened it to NOT UR FAULT. But even then, I overestimated my ability to write it and it ended up both slanted and squished, and really just a hot mess.

A blond boy walked into the room behind Zach just as I put the notebook down and it took me a second to recognize him as Neil. He leaned down to say something to Zach, who nodded seriously. Zach scribbled something quickly and held it up for me.

See you later

My heart sank as I realized our time together was done. I didn’t get the chance to hold up my own goodbye note to him before he got up and started to walk off. Neil glanced back at me curiously once, and I quickly ducked away, not wanting him to recognize me. It was probably a hope in vain, since they all knew I lived here after Zach told them in Starbucks, so he would easily put it together. But for some reason, I didn’t want people to know that Zach and I were becoming friends now.

If whatever this was going on between us could even be considered friends.

I chucked the notebook and marker back on my desk and fell onto my bed. There was nothing to do around the house, when both my parents were at work and Poppy was at school. It was just a huge, empty, and lonely house, where I was completely alone. I laid there and wallowed in that for about two minutes, and then decided that this was not the way I wanted to be spending my life.

For a second, my hand itched towards my phone, with the instinct to text someone. For just one second I wanted to text my ex, and then I remembered that I wasn’t talking to him anymore. And then it hit me even harder, but that was the first time I had thought that since the day I first texted my ex. It was crazy how used to a new reality we get. The way that he had been completely replaced in my mind by some boy that I didn’t even know. Not Zesty, who didn’t even know my name or what I looked like, yet I somehow felt closer to than anyone else. How exactly had that happened?

I sat up and left my phone in the room so that I wouldn’t be tempted again. I went downstairs. The house was cold and lonely, but I might as well try to get used to it a little bit. I spent most of my time in my room until now, because we hadn’t had furniture, but now the living room was actually furnished so I should start hanging out down here more.

I walked in and dropped onto the couch and clicked on the Youtube logo. I guess none of us had used it recently, because the last thing it was pulled up to was the Take Five official channel. It must have been Poppy who used it last, when she was here for the one weekend before she went back to school. I should have turned it off, set it to something else, picked literally anything else to watch, and yet I found my hand hovering over the play button. Before I knew it, the video started playing.

The most recent video was from a couple of weeks ago. It was a Q&A livestream of Neil and Hudson. I thought I’d get bored after a couple of questions, but before I knew it, I was completely sucked into the variety of questions they were being asked—though I found myself waiting for Zach to appear, even when I knew he wasn’t going to.

I could tell that the livestream was from a few weeks ago when it came to a question about if they had girlfriends, because Neil said that he didn’t, and I knew he was dating Sloane’s little sister now. But when it came to Hudson’s turn, he said he did have a girlfriend and started talking about her as if it was news. I wondered if this was the first time he’d announced it publicly. Afterward, they joked a little about the possibility of the other boys getting girlfriends.

“Girls are practically throwing themselves at Jude,” Neil joked. “But I think there’s only one girl he’s interested in.”

Off-camera, there was a faint “Hey!” And the boys laughed.

“And I think Zach’s going to be the last one to get a girlfriend,” Neil said. Hudson laughed and nodded but grew a little more serious when he started reading comments.

“Okay, okay, we see that you’re all interested in him!” Hudson said. “But I think Zach isn’t the kind of guy to fall easily for a girl. He’s pretty reserved and keeps to himself. I think it would take him a while to open up.”

“But when he does fall, he’ll fall hard,” Neil said. My heart clenched strangely at the words, though I couldn’t place why. I guess I was right earlier in thinking that Zach was different in real life than he presented himself as in the band.

I wondered how many people actually knew that about him, truly knew it. Sure, they heard the other boys talk about it, but how many people had actually seen this Zach? How many people knew Zach as he really existed, and not as the persona that he put on the world?

If I had to guess, I would assume there were only a few.

And somehow, I felt like I was becoming closer to being one of them.