Unexpectedly Complicated.

Chapter I: Awkward Encounters.

August 4th, 2012.

"No!" She protests more forcefully than she probably should, but James has pushed her to it,
"There is no way, no way on this planet, not in this galaxy, that Xbox is better than Play Station." She growls. He knows he's overstepped his boundaries. She was a ticking time bomb, this one. He smiles a smile that tells her You can be right this time. Which makes her want to hurt his face. She'd let him be wrong most of the time. He tries to put a friendly arm around her.

Dahlia was not having it.
"You are a petite piranha." He grumbles as he looks at the faint bite marks on his palm, "You have also infected me with Dahlia disease. Woe is me." He flings an arm dramatically over his head, "The agony! The agony! Kill me now, for I cannot support such pain!" He flops onto the ground, resembling a fish out of water.

One month with a cousin who went to drama camp and he is an Emmy award winning actor,or at least he thinks he is.

She laughs at him as he makes a great wheezing sound and goes seemingly limp, on Clementine's white living room floor. This is not the time or place, she thinks, but, then again, James has terrible timing. Not only was it that he was supposed to be helping Eddy with the streamers, god knows he needed it, but she was supposed to be with Clem-"DAHLIA!" comes her wail of despair.
"She really is very dramatic." Dahlia murmurs to herself as she scurries up the stairs to Clementine's room, the room with the pink door and the crown on it at the end of the hallway, the one Dahlia always feels like throwing up rainbows in.

Clementine is on the pink floor. In her pink underwear. And she is screaming. Dahlia sincerely wishes she'd gotten a cup of coffee before coming here, as a headache sprouted somewhere near her left eye.

Clementine is an oddball, but she's Dahlia's oddball.
"Clem? What are you doing?"

Clementine is quiet, and then hops up.
"Dahlia, do you realize, that today I turn fifteen?"
"Uh...yes?" Dahlia is afraid of where this is going, but then again, Dahlia is afraid of a great many things. One includes Clementine, at times.
"Do you realize, that I've never had my first kiss?"
"Uh...is that bad?"
"It's horrible! It's unthinkable! It's atrocious!" Her birthday was a month after Clementine's, and she had never been kissed. She knows she shouldn't, but she asks anyways,
"May I ask why?" Clementine makes a strangled noise, "Sometimes you can be so naïve, Dolly. I'm well into my teenage years and I've yet to kiss anyone! If I haven't even had my first kiss now, I will surely whither and die an old, loveless hag!" Clementine and James should have a drama-off. Dahlia thinks absently as Clementine bounces around, words spewing out of her mouth like there's no tomorrow.
"Clem, put some clothes on, please, for the love of all that is decent please." Dahlia pleads abruptly as Clementine's face turns a very interesting shade of purple.

Clementine proceeds to shove Dahlia into her closet, and peak over her shoulder.

Dahlia does not know what is in her mouth. She feels like vomiting, vomiting violently all over Clementine's clothes in her closet, and some of Eddy's because Clementine liked to steal his sweaters. Dahlia spits but does not vomit, and she stares at the clothes before her, while wondering how she didn't acquire a black eye. Dahlia decides on a simple pink dress, a dress Clementine wanted her to pick.
"Oh Dolly, you know me so well!" She squeaks and tackles Dahlia to the ground.
"Oof." Dahlia groans, as James lets out a string of expletives and an exclaim of "Sorry!" comes from Eddy.

Dahlia shoves Clementine off and stands, dumping the dress unceremoniously onto her head.
"Thank you Dolly." Clementine says, pleased with the outcome of her experiment.
Dahlia mutters something she can't quite hear as she makes her way down the stairs.

James has been tangled up in streamers. He doesn't quite know why it was he whom had to put them up. It was very obvious he hated the damn things. Eddy was frantic, as per usual. Eddy, he means well, James knows he does, and yet...
"It's um...better?" Eddy says as he tries to untangle him. James feels like a mummy.
"Do me a favor, Edward, never, ever make me put streamers up again." He groans, and wriggles around like a worm.
"How did you manage that?" Dahlia asks, trying hard not to laugh. James explains in his best posh accent, stating that he was holding it and the next moment it'd tangled itself around his legs and arms.

It works only because he is British.

His grandmother was fed up with him, so they sent him to live with Eddy, his cousin, in "dreadfully hot" Kansas, which smells of "cowpies and corn". James was the talk of Green Elementary's fifth grade. British, funny, cute, the girls were smitten. They overlooked the fact that he thought way too much of himself. Dahlia had the slightest of interest, if any in him. It was he who sought her out. One of Eddy's few female friends, and one of the few who had no relative interest in him, she intrigued him.

But the first person he'd made friends with was Clementine. Clementine who was his best friend. Clementine, who he could say anything to, and who's parents weren't nearly as strict as Eddy's, and who was a slightly less charming and funnier version of himself.

Clementine wondered if James would mind it if she kissed him.

Dahlia is trying to reason with Eddy, who is flailing around with a pair of scissors as James wails for his life.

Clementine's mother, Mrs. Cho, has given up on controlling the children and retreats to her bedroom where Mr. Cho had gone a few hours ago, where he watches football and she reads Pride and Prejudice, somehow able to ignore the noise of the tv, and Mr. Cho thinks that is his favorite thing about his wife.

An hour later, the house was packed with an obscene amount of teenagers. Clementine had always been very popular, she is, after all, a female James.

Dahlia has never liked parties. Too many people, too much stimulation outside of her mind, too much to take in. She spends her time in a quiet place, or leaves early, and often with Eddy.

Eddy didn't particularly mind parties, but Dahlia's look of utter despair persuades him to follow her outside, as it often does.
"This is it, Ed. These are the last years of this life." Dahlia puts her forehead against the chain of the swing she sits on. Eddy leans against the slide because he and swings didn't see eye to eye.
"It is, I suppose." Eddy is a man of few words, which makes telling him things rather easy, but conversations tended to be one way with him.
"I hate growing up."
"It's inevitable."
"True." She sighs,
"What happens when James goes back?"
"I don't know." Eddy admits,
"He's supposed to go back when he's sixteen."
"Yep."
"Two years. Entirely too short of a time."
"I'm going to miss him." Dahlia sighs,
"Me too."
Dahlia gets a sick feeling at the thought of no James. She feels even more sick at the thought of school.
"Eddy, have you ever kissed anyone?"

I will post more when I feel like it. If you'd like to respond, give me a reason why at least, that you like it, if you have any criticism feel free.

 

*she is a ticking time bomb
,_,

 

Eddy shifts to look at her with his searching brown eyes and slowly nods, "Why?"
"Clem was talking about it earlier. It got me thinking." Dahlia begins, choosing her next words very carefully,
"I want to, I suppose, but not as badly as she seems to."
"I guess it's just about saying you've done it." He tilts his head thoughtfully, and he reminds Dahlia of James. They both did that when they slipped into their own little unperturbed land and rubbed their chin, wrinkled their nose, and furrowed their brows when they were thinking hard.

Dahlia wishes she could disappear like that, into her own little bubble. She wishes she could just block everything out. She watches Eddy think, and she wonders what it would be like to kiss someone.
"Who was your first kiss?"
"Do you remember Penelope Thorton?"
"Yeah. She was my friend."
"Cornered be under the mistletoe at a party, our dads were friends. Her breath smelled like the onion dip and her braces got caught on my lip." He makes a face.
"What's it like?"
"It's wet, gross and tastes like onions." He shudders.

Clementine is having the time of her life. Or, she was supposed to. There's music, there's people, there's everything a good party needs, yet, this feels empty. Fifteen, fourteen and a few sixteen year olds on the couch doing questionable things, dancing, and making a ruckus. Clementine decides this birthday would be no fun at all if she didn't get her first kiss. She scans the crowd. No Eddy, no Dahlia., she observes. The garden.

There is something scary about being similar to someone that you think the exact same things at the same times. Both James and Clementine make their way to the back door.

Dahlia gets off the squeaking, rusting swing and climbs in Clementine's old tree house, which could barely hold her weight, with leaves poking their way into the windows, dust everywhere, and not to mention cobwebs, and Dahlia is terrified of spiders. This isn't a very wise decision on her part. Eddy's still deep in thought. She slides down the pitiful old slide, pretending that she is little again. She misses being a child, she misses the innocence and she misses the magic most of all. She stares at the sky, stars here and there. Dahlia remembers the carpet of stars she'd seen when they'd driven from Kansas to Nebraska to visit her grandma's farm.
"I remember when stars used to be special." Dahlia is caught by surprise, because it's Eddy who's saying what she thinking,
"When we didn't know they were big balls of burning gas. When they were magical. My mom used to tell me that each star is a good soul, and I'd end up there because there was too much good soul in me to not become something better." He looks at her, eyes full of something she couldn't quite understand, and she realizes there's a lot about Eddy she really didn't know. He looks back at the sky.
"I wonder what it would be like to be a star. I assume it'd be very hot. They're just there, burning gas for a time way beyond our own lifetimes. I bet those stars are just like this one, with planets around them, with people on them, maybe not people like us, but people just the same." It was usually her who went off on long tangents about life.
"Maybe." She murmurs, "But that makes us insignificant. People don't like being insignificant."

"But we are insignificant, we're just another species on a rock that circles around a star." Eddy replies, his voice infinitely calm. They're both quiet as they watch the stars.

Clementine and James watch the two of them, as they stare at the sky, both equally intrigued by the stars.
"You guys are too philosophical." James says loudly, making them both jump.
"You just stare at the sky and even make aliens sound like it came from Old England."
Dahlia hates when James interrupts moments like these. James loves to do it.
"Oh well, we like it." Eddy shrugs, and James freezes. Dahlia is the first to realize something's wrong.
"What were you doing out here anyways?" James' voice cracks. Clementine blinks, and realizes a millisecond too late, that he's falling.
Clementine reaches for him, but Eddy is faster, catching him before his head hits the ground.
Before James' world goes black and he manages to utter the word no. James hates being so weak, helpless, never able to live without others, as self sufficient as a baby. His focus may be about himself, but they had all become a part of him, in a sense.

James's attacks had been happening since he was ten. Some sort of nervous system disease, repeated to him over and over, whispered over his shoulder, used against him, James just blocked it out. All he knew was that he would never be able to really be normal. They told him constantly that he could still like a normally life with epilepsy. They lied to him, like everyone does. They got that stupid, pitying face when they were informed, a face he was far too familiar with. Pity was something James couldn't stand.

 

*being so similar
*all he knows is

 

The party is over soon after that. The house is partially damaged, but Mrs. Cho is asleep and Mr. Cho is just relieved he didn't have to call the cops to his own residence, again. Clementine is thinking about that guy who was wearing a lampshade on his head, sitting behind her couch to avoid her father nagging her to clean, when Eddy quietly sits down on the surprisingly clean blue couch and stretches. Dahlia's dad had come to pick up the groggy James and Dahlia, but he chose to stay to help clean up. James wanted to stay, but Dahlia refused to let him, and he went with it. Eddy used the word "whipped" to describe his situation. Mr. Cho was okay with this, he liked Eddy. He wanted to be a doctor, respectable parents. Good boy, decent boy. He even liked him enough to be deemed almost worthy of his daughter. Well, almost was an overstatement, more like he wouldn't mind it if all the other boys in the world died and she married him.

"I hate myself." James murmurs so only Dahlia can hear, just as Dahlia's dad comes to pick the two up. Dahlia wants to hug him, but doesn't. She simply grasps his hand.

Clementine hops up, and climbs over the couch, onto Eddy's legs. By now, though, she is in her pajamas, her very pink pajamas.
"Nice of you to drop in."
"Eddy, how long have you known me?"
"A very long time." He grunts as he absorbs the pain.
"Do you think I'm pretty?"
He looks at her face.
"Yep." Clementine knew Eddy was one to be blunt and brutally honest; she could trust his opinion.
"Then why have I never been kissed?"
"The right person hasn't come around."
"Have you kissed someone?"
"Yep."
"Who?"
"Some girl a couple years ago. It was uncomfortable." Eddy wonders what the obsession is with kissing with these two girls. She takes a deep breath, looking as if she's about to burst, and suddenly buries her face in his chest, and she doesn't know why, but she cries.

Eddy is terrible with these things. He awkwardly pats her back, and breathes in her curly hair, trying desperately not to sneeze. She cries for a long, long time. When she's done, she looks at him. She doesn't look like the dainty actress in a movie, her face is red and her eyes are puffy, his shirt soaked. Hair is plastered to her cheeks, and she looks miserable.
"Why are you crying?" He mutters as he moves her curls out of her face, and he feels terribly uncomfortable.
"I don't really know." She lays her head on his chest and listens to the steady beat of his heart.

Eddy doesn't know what this means. Then again, he's very uneducated in the art of deciphering the human mind. He just puts his hand on the small of her back, with nothing else to do. She looks up at him and he gives her an awkward smile.

Clementine is partial to Eddy's smile. It's so unlike James', which are very often full of insolences and self-assurance, and is more of a smirk than a smile. Eddy's is crooked and is the most endearing smile ever, and she likes to look at the way his face lights up, when he actually smiles. She knew this smile is forced, and she wants terribly for it to be genuine so she can just look at his face. She tries to collect herself as she tells him, "Good night, Eddy," but her voice cracks. She pecks him on the cheek and scurries upstairs. Eddy settles on the couch, bewildered and with a warmness seeping into the pit of his stomach.

This is the end of Chapter I. Chapter II will be there eventually. I do have to edit it, you understand.