Young Writers Society

Chapter 1

About a month had passed since Lucas's freshman year in highschool started before he started getting distracted by Evelyn in class. Perhaps it was because she had lived next door his entire life, or maybe it was because both of their parents had been friends since college, but Lucas couldn’t think of a single childhood memory where she wasn’t there. They were, as Forrest Gump would say, “like peas and carrots.” They walked to school together, they went to class together, they sat near each other, ate lunch together, waited for each other's clubs to finish, they walked home together, they texted each other at night, they hung out on the weekends. However, something about highschool made Luke look at Evelyn differently.

At first, it was just little glances towards her general area during class or he had thoughts about her wavy brown hair. By September, he would find himself completely focusing on her like she was the only person in the world. He noticed when she smiled, the way she would shake her right leg when she was trying to think of an answer to a question, ...other things.

Though that may have just been his tendency to hyperfixate on things and not necessarily him being interested in her, or that’s what he told himself. He didn’t want to have to deal with the repercussions of first love. After all, he had seen what unrequited love could do to a person. In seventh grade, Evelyn confessed to the boy she liked and was unfortunately rejected. She didn’t hang out with Lucas for a whole week afterwards and it took her two months before she could be within ten feet of her crush without crying. He knew that he didn’t even want to risk feeling pain like that, especially considering his only friend (Evelyn) would be the person to hurt him. Sure there were people in the book club who he thought were nice and all, but as far as friends went, he only had Evelyn.

Evelyn had always listened to him, even when he was talking too much. Unlike Mom, Dad, or anybody else, Evelyn always listened. She may not have always known what Lucas was talking about, but she would always listen intently to whatever he had decided he wanted to ramble on about. Out of courtesy, he listened to her talk too. She mostly talked about volleyball or tv shows she was watching, but that didn’t bother him, he could lower the complexity of his conversations every once and a while if it was for his friend.

“Hey, Lucas,” the teacher said, making Luke lose his train of thought “name three parts of an animal cell.” Luke looked at his teacher with a blank expression. “Come on Luke, we just went over this.”

“Oh Sorry,” he said, still thinking about the right answer while fidgeting with his pen, “I was just processing what you said.” Luke struggled for a second before he remembered 7th grade, when he had taken notes for Evelyn in science, because she couldn’t stop crying. “Um, the mitochondriac-”he blushed a little out of embarrassment. “ Sorry, the mitochondria, the nucleus, and the cell wall.”

“Good answer.” the teacher said quickly and then she moved on to teaching the class again. What was Lucas thinking about? Oh, right. Evelyn, of course, and how he didn’t have a crush on her, her beautiful brown eyes or her pretty smile, her wavy brown hair, or her che-. He caught himself. No, you can’t be thinking like that, you’ll only become more awkward than you already are.

…

Three hours flew by since their last class together. (not that he was keeping track or anything) Evelyn had about fifteen minutes of volleyball practice until she was ready to go. He watched as she set the ball perfectly to the spikers. He knew how hard that was, he had watched haikyuu!!.

As they walked home together, a conversion began.

“Hey, you seemed a little out of it today. What's gotten you so distracted?” she asked.

You. a tiny voice in Luke's head replied.

“no. nope. nothing in particular.” he choked, obviously distracted.

“Are you sure?” He nodded as she continued, “you know you can tell me anything, right?”

“I don’t really think I can tell you about this one.” he said, immediately regretting his decision to do so.

“Oh? You can’t tell me? Is it about a girl?” Evelyn said teasingly. His face went red with embarrassment. “Wait, really? Who is it? Tell me!”“No” he said quietly

“Come on, please!”

“No, I can’t tell you, since you know them.”

“Hmmm, ok” she squinted suspiciously.

…

After arriving home and eating dinner, Lucas went straight to his room. Upon entering his room and sitting down, he spaced out. I wonder if I could eat a bee without being stung. In theory I could, but there are multiple complications like is the bee moving or is it dead. I wonder what Evelyn’s doing. Doesn’t she take a shower around this time? Lucas’s mind went to places it shouldn’t for a couple of minutes before he got distracted by another thought. This led him down a rabbit hole of thoughts and all of a sudden it was 11 pm and the lights were now off. He texted Evelyn “goodnight” and then promptly fell right to sleep.

Chapter 2

There was a myth in the book club that if you ever needed advice, you could pick out a random book, flip to a random page, and the first word or sentence you read would be advice from the universe. Obviously, this had some logical flaws to it, Luke thought. What if you chose a Stephen King novel and the page you flipped to said “and then he killed all the pets and sent them to the sematary”? He'd obviously never read Pet Sematary before, but he was just a 14 year old kid. You can’t really expect him to have read Stephen King, especially considering he could barely make it through 300 page books. There was just too much uncertainty in this method for him to be comfortable with it. Despite saying that, Lucas often left many decisions to chance.

“The county fair will be held on school grounds on Friday, October 15th.” Lucas’s homeroom teacher said. Everyone knew there were three times you confessed your love at Oak Woods High. Christmas Eve, Valentines day, and the County fair.

“October 15th?” Lucas thought out loud, “That's only a week away!” a couple students giggled as Lucas realised he had said what he was thinking out loud and immediately became very embarrassed.

“You are correct,” The teacher reaffirmed, “that is only a week from today.” Lucas started panicking internally. Should I take her to the fair and tell her how I feel? Do I even know that I like her? Is it too soon? If I do like her and I wait, will I be able to last all the way till Christmas before telling her? Do I have to wait till Christmas to tell her how I feel if I don't do it at the fair? As thoughts continued to race through his head, he began fidgeting with his pen. For some reason, twirling a pen around his fingers often brought him back from his internal panic attacks.

Ok, let's think about each of these questions individually and try to come up with answers. First he answered the last question he asked. No, you technically don’t but it makes the confession a lot less climactic. Then he answered the next question. Well, if our attraction to her keeps on growing at this rate, absolutely not. Onto the next one. How am I supposed to know? He continued his thought process. Well, it would be awfully strange if that wasn’t what was going on. He proceeded to his first question.

…

He had started thinking about this question at about 8:30 in the morning, but by 2:30 in the afternoon, he still had no clear answer. Normally when he ran into challenges like this, he would ask Evelyn about them, but that was off the table. He had made a pro’s and con’s list (it was mostly 50/50), he had looked it up on the internet(believe it or not, wikihow was not helpful in this situation), he had looked for council in his clubmates in the book club (they were all single and inexperienced too). But the real conflict inside him was one of logos vs. pathos. (logic versus emotion for those out there who haven’t taken AP Language and Composition yet) His head was telling him that there were too many risks, but his heart was telling him it needed to let all of these emotions out. It was like a debate where he was the moderator.

“There are simply too many risks involved in a confession of love.” his logical side would declare, “What if she says no? How awkward would it be having to see her literally every day after that?”

“yes, dat is tru mwister logic man, but has you thought of dis?” logic would look over inquisitively. “I wants to kiss her”

“Damn. That's a good point.” logic would say, “ but what about…” and Lucas would be in the middle, getting pulled back and forth, like the easily influenced teenage boy he was, in this endless game of tug of war.

The bell rang. It was the end of the school day and time for his club. He swiftly left the classroom and began walking through the hallways to the library.

“That seems like the best idea I've come up with all day.” he muttered to himself.

The school library was pretty large. It had multiple rows of wooden bookshelves for each genre. There were four main areas in the library. To the immediate left of the entrance, was the fiction section. It contained fantasy, sci-fi, realistic fiction, just about anything one could desire. To the right was the Non-fiction section. It contained a lot of different types of non-fiction. That was about all Lucas knew about the non-fiction area as he wasn’t overly fond of non-fiction. In the back right of the library was the research area. It contained copies of all the textbooks you may need for classes, as well as collections of studies. It was also the location of computers that could be used to find studies on whatever you may be researching. Occasionally Lucas would go over there because the computer seats were spinny chairs. In the back left of the library was a reading area. It had a couple tables for group studying as well as plenty of comfy chairs.

As soon as Lucas walked into the library, he went to the first bookshelf he could find in the fiction section, and picked up a book. He flipped to a random page and the first line he read was, “and so, not knowing whether or not to confess, she had done what she had always done in these tricky situations, and she confessed anyways”

hi, this was my first ever time really doing creative writing, so please give me any feedback you can.-ISF