Chapter 4

Who's this new girl? Why is she talking to me?

October 4^th, 1994

A blonde haired girl sat at Ms. Carson’s desk while the teacher wrote the word “happy” in cursive on the chalkboard.

“It seems hard now, but cursive is actually easier once you get used to it,” Ms. Carson said, “You don’t have to lift the pencil off the paper when you write your words.” The girl couldn’t be less interested in Ms. Carson’s lecture, listening would take away from her busy schedule of drawing the Empire State building getting attacked by flying saucers.

The little girl finished her picture and held it up to her face, she analyzed it and smiled, “Yup, this is a good one,” she thought. She reached below her to a stack of books and folders that Ms. Carson had given her at the beginning of the day. She shoved the books on top off of the stack; they fell to the floor with a loud thump that thundered throughout the little classroom.

Ms. Carson stopped midsentence and looked at the little girl, “What was that?” The whole class turned their attention to the little girl. That is, except for one. The little girl noticed a short Korean boy in the middle of the room with his head down, like he hadn’t heard anything at all. The little girl looked at the boy with intrigue, wondering if he was asleep.

“Kelly?” Ms. Carson said.

“Oh, sorry, I just kicked my stuff. That’s all,” she said. Ms. Carson turned back to the board and continued explaining how to write the letter “H” in cursive. Kelly went back to her pile of stuff and took out an old wrinkly manila folder labeled in faded pencil marks “Awesome” and opened it up. She was immediately greeted with a piece of computer paper with a T-Rex battling a horde of zombies on it. Kelly smiled and put her Empire State Building invasion on top of it. Kelly started flipping through the hundreds of papers in her portfolio, everything from dinosaurs, aliens, zombies, monkeys, pirates, and lots of ninjas appeared on the pages inside the folder.

Kelly shut the folder and threw it back into the pile. She took her books that had fallen on the floor and stacked them into an uneven pile. She then sat back in the teacher’s comfortable, plush chair and closed her eyes. In an instant Kelly dozed off into a deep sleep.

 

* * *

 

The lunch bell cut off Ms. Carson mid-sentence. The class sprung up from their seats and rushed out the classroom door before their teacher could tell them what they had for homework. Ms. Carson sighed and picked up a piece of chalk. She wrote the class’s homework assignment on the chalkboard and put the chalk back on the tray. She turned around and saw Chris still sitting at his desk, and Kelly sleeping in hers.

“Chris,” Ms. Carson said, “You missed the lunch bell again.” Chris didn’t say a word as he shut his notebook and put his pen in his pocket before he got up and slowly walked out of the classroom. Ms. Carson shook her head and sighed, she didn’t know what she was going to do about Chris. She felt like there really was something wrong with him, like he needed help. She didn’t think it was right for a kid to go through school without any friends at all.

Her thoughts were broken by the sound of Kelly snoring at her desk. Ms. Carson sighed and walked over to her desk. Before she woke her up, Ms. Carson took a second to marvel at the girl sleeping at her desk. Kelly was colossal. When she first walked in the room, Ms. Carson thought that one of the 6^th graders had walked in by mistake. Kelly towered over even the tallest boys in her class. Her hair flowed all the way down to her waist; she used a big black headband to keep it out of her eyes.

Ms. Carson tapped Kelly on the shoulder, she didn’t move. Ms. Carson put her hand on her shoulder and shook her, after a few seconds, Kelly finally woke up.

“Kelly, it’s lunchtime,” Ms. Carson said.

Kelly stretched her arms and yawned, “Oh, good,” she said. Kelly stood up from her chair and started walking towards the classroom door.

“Kelly, could you wait a minute? I want to talk to you.” Ms. Carson asked.

Kelly stopped and turned around, “I’m sorry I fell asleep, I’m pretty tired from the move here and that chair was just so comfy.”

“That’s not what I wanted to talk about. I understand,” Ms. Carson said. Kelly breathed a sigh of relief and put her hands in her pockets. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t get you a desk, I have to fill out a form for the office and they still…”

“Oh it’s no problem at all,” Kelly interrupted.

Ms. Carson sat down at her desk, pushed her glasses up her nose, and folded her hands in an attempt to look more professional and studious, “I’m glad to hear that. How do you like the school so far?”

Kelly hesitated and put her fist to her chin and looked around the room in thought, “I’m not gonna lie, it’s kinda lame.”

“Really, what makes you say that?” Ms. Carson asked.

Kelly turned to cluster of desks and pointed a finger toward them, she looked back at Ms. Carson and said, “Are these really all the kids? I dunno, I guess I just liked my big classes better.”

“Well, bigger isn’t necessarily better. I think you should give it a chance, after all, it’s only been your first day,” Ms. Carson said.

“I guess,” Kelly said. She turned her attention to the door and watched as the other classes passed the door on their way to the lunchroom. She started shaking and rocking back and forth with impatience, “Can I go to lunch now?”

“Of course,” Ms. Carson said. Kelly bolted out the door before Ms. Carson could finish speaking. Ms. Carson stared at the door for a few moments, thinking to herself. She swiveled in her office chair to her desk and her foot knocked against something on the ground. Ms. Carson looked beneath her desk to see that she had knocked over some of Kelly’s books and a manila folder, spreading papers all over the floor. Ms. Carson sighed and bent down to reorganize everything. She neatly stacked Kelly’s books and started gathering the papers to put back into the manila folder.

She looked at the contents of the papers and shuffled through them very slowly, looking at each one longer as she went on. She sat and stared at a drawing of a man getting mauled by a horde of anthropomorphic lemons for the better part of five minutes. She put the papers back in the folder and put it back on top of the stack of books, handling it like it was radioactive. She then took the stack of books and put them to the side of her desk instead of under it.

“Well, she certainly seems like a… interesting girl,” Ms. Carson thought. She sighed as she looked at the massive pile of ungraded homework sitting to her left. She took part of the pile and clicked her red pen, letting her mind wander while she graded the papers. She thought about asking Kelly to go talk to Chris, but she decided against it, thinking it would be too intrusive to ask her on her first day. “I guess you can’t force friends onto people. She doesn’t exactly seem like the antisocial type anyway. I just wish there was something I could do to help Chris…”

*  *  *

Kelly charged down the hallway at full speed, zooming past the classrooms and the wall of art in the hallway. Another teacher walked down the hallway with a lunch tray in hand, Kelly ran right past her, almost colliding with her and toppling her over. The teacher turned around and stared at Kelly with an angry glare.

“Hey! No running in the hallway!” the teacher yelled. Kelly scuffled to a halt and started walking as slow as possible. She turned her head around and looked at the teacher who was walking towards the classrooms. Kelly waited for a few seconds. She turned around completely to make sure that the teacher was more than halfway down the hall before sprinting off again. Kelly bolted and turned the corner toward the school’s gymnasium/cafeteria. She could here the teacher yelling in the distance, but didn’t bother responding to it.

The entrance to the gym was straight ahead when Kelly turned the corner from the main hallway, with the lunch window right outside it. The main hallway continued onward leading towards the art room and music room. At the end of the hall rested the library. The line for the lunch window spilled into the main hallway, all the way back to the library’s first bookshelf. Kelly groaned and started walking all the way to the back of the line.

As Kelly sulked her way into the back of the line, she eavesdropped on the conversations around her. Two short, fifth grade boys at the end of the line were discussing the finer points of Doom.

“I can’t get past the Cyberdemon! I’ve been stuck on him for like a month!” one of the boys said.

“Really? I thought he was really easy. What weapons are you using?” the other boy asked.

“I’m down to the shotgun, the chaingun, and the pistol! I’ve got nothing on him!” the first boy said.

Kelly smiled and cut into their conversation, “Go back to the earlier levels and save your BFG ammo this time. It never fails,”

The boys turned around and looked up at Kelly, eyeing her with unease, “Who are you?” the first boy said.

“I’m new here. This is my first day,” Kelly said.

“Oh, so you’re in Mr. Johnson’s class then?” the second boy asked.

Kelly shook her head, “Nope, I’m in Ms. Carson’s class.”

The first boy looked up at her with a pitiful look, “Wow. How many grades did you get held back from?”

“I’ve never been held back,” Kelly said. The two boys stared at her in silence, their eyes wide. They scanned Kelly up and down several times, unable to believe what they were looking at. Kelly finally broke the silence, “What?”

“How… how old are you even?” the first boy asked.

“Eight,” Kelly said, “Why?”

The boys’ jaws dropped in awe; they turned to each other, then back at Kelly, then back to each other. They eyed Kelly like she was a wild animal about to attack before they turned around and went back to their conversation, moving up in the lunch line as far away as they could from Kelly.

Kelly frowned and started walking back towards them, continuing to listen in on their conversation, “Anyways,” the second boy said, “You just aren’t good enough at the game. I could probably beat with the Cyberdemon with just the pistol.”

“You liar! You probably beat him by saving up missiles!” the first boy replied.

“That’s because I’m smart. Maybe if you weren’t such a dummy you wouldn’t have used all your missiles on the regular demon guys,” the second boy said.

“What I would do…” Kelly began.

The first boy turned around and glared at Kelly, “Do you mind?”

Kelly backed off a few inches away from them; they both stared at Kelly before turning around again, talking in a whisper so she wouldn’t hear them. Kelly sighed and put her hands in her pockets.

“Jerks. Whatever, they don’t deserve to be friends with me anyway,” she thought. The smell of nacho meat filled the hallway, “Oh well, at least it’s almost food time.” The line seemed to go on forever, what was only a five minute wait felt like an hour.

The line had just turned the corner and she could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. The very smell of nachos made Kelly’s stomach growl. Kelly wondered about the quality of the food here, back at her school in New York the food tasted okay, but it wasn’t anything to brag about. It did the job after a long, boring day of lessons. She tried to hold on the hope that the food here would far surpass the food in New York, but somehow she doubted it.

Then an insidious thought crossed her mind, she took her hands out of her jean pockets and put them back in. She wiggled her hands around and felt for something coin shaped in her pockets. She turned her pockets inside out and groaned.

“Thanks for giving me lunch money Mom,” Kelly thought. She sighed and walked out of line. The kids behind her scrambled forward to fill the gap that she had left, fighting over who was in front before she left. Kelly walked into the gym and scanned the crowd of tables. She slowly walked through the clusters looking for a table with an open spot. It seemed like every single table was filled with kids, some closer friends even shared seats to fit everyone in the clique on the table.

“What, are they gonna make me sit on the floor?” Kelly thought. She sighed and awkwardly stood in the middle of the gym, looking around. She had no problem sitting with strangers, but there didn’t seem to be any seats at all. She considered walking back to Ms. Carson’s room.

“Maybe she’ll give me money. I’ll say I didn’t have to pay for lunch at my old school. That’s a good excuse. She’ll totally give the ‘poor new kid’ three bucks to eat,” She was about to turn around and leave before she took one last look around the room, in one last hopeful attempt to find a place to sit with the other kids.

A little table with a lone boy sitting at it caught her eye.

She smiled and fist pumped the air before walking over the far corner of the lunchroom. She didn’t take her eyes off the boy as she walked toward him. Kelly analyzed everything he did to prepare herself for a conversation. She noted the boy’s eastern appearance and the notebook he was writing in.

“Maybe there are some ninjas in his family. I’ll ask him that, everyone likes ninjas,” Kelly thought.

Kelly walked right up the table and put her hands on it. Chris didn’t even look up from his notebook. Kelly cleared her throat to get his attention. Again, Chris stayed completely focused on his writing. Kelly eased herself into one of the chairs surrounding the table.

“Hi!” Kelly said. Chris nearly jumped out his skin. He looked around in confusion, wondering where the voice had come from. “I’m right in front of you,” Kelly said.

Chris looked at Kelly and blinked a few times, like he was having difficulty comprehending what was happening right now, “Hello…” Chris said.

Kelly leaned down on her arm a little to meet Chris at eye level, “What’s up?”

Chris looked back down at his notebook, but didn’t write anything, avoiding eye contact with Kelly, “I… well… nothing…”

Chris pretended to read what he had written in his notebook. Out of curiosity, Kelly leaned forward a little to try and read what he wrote. Chris slid the notebook back to obscure it with his body.

“I’m sorry, but do I know you?” Chris asked.

“Nope,” Kelly said, “I just moved here today.”

“Oh,” Chris said. He picked up his pencil and started writing again, hovering over his notebook like a bird protecting its children. Kelly leaned forward a little more to get a look at it, causing Chris to draw back even more. Kelly leaned forward to the point where was right in his face.

“What’s your name?” Kelly asked.

“Chris…” he said, not looking up from his writing.

Kelly stood up her seat, and held her head up with her fist, thinking. After a second or two, Kelly said, “That’s a nice name. You don’t really look like a Chris though. Just so you know.”

A second passed and Chris stopped writing. He looked up and gave Kelly a confused stare, “I… thanks? I guess?”

Kelly leaned forward again and looked him in the eye, “No problem!” Chris’s eyes darted back to the table. Kelly’s eyes followed him down to his notebook. “So what’s in the notebook?” she asked.

Chris picked up his pencil again, “Just… stuff…”

Kelly put her head on the table and tried to get another look at the notebook, “Well, what kind of stuff?”

With one swift motion Chris brought his hand down, blocking the notebook from Kelly’s view, “Personal stuff.”

“Can I read it?” Kelly asked, sliding her arms slowly towards it.

Her fingertips were on the cover when Chris instinctually brought it back and put it in his lap; he gave Kelly a cold stare and raised his voice, “No.”

“Is it a love note?” Kelly said. Chris didn’t respond, he opened up his notebook in his lap and began writing under the table. “Come on, I’m the new girl. Who will I tell?” Kelly asked.

“No, it’s not a love note. But you’re not reading it,” Chris said.

“Okay. Fine,” Kelly sighed. She put her head down on the table and kept staring at Chris, thinking of something to ask him. Finally, she said, “Where’s your lunch?”

“I don’t eat,” Chris said.

Kelly lifted her head off the table and cocked her head to the side, “Why not?”

Chris looked up from his writing and shrugged his shoulders, “No reason really. I just don’t get hungry.”

Kelly’s stomach growled, she groaned and put her hand over her stomach, “Man, I’m starving. My mom forgot to give me money,” Kelly said.

Chris stopped and put down his pencil; he put his hand in his pockets and dug around. He took three dollars out and tossed them in Kelly’s direction.

Kelly’s smile lit up the room; she snatched the money off the table and yelled in glee, “Thanks! You’re awesome!”

Before Chris even got the chance to say anything, Kelly shot out of her seat and sprinted toward the gym doors. Chris shook his head as Kelly disappeared behind the door. Mere seconds later Kelly came sprinting back with a tray of nachos in hand. She put the tray back down on the table and started shoveling nachos down her throat.

“Mph fff hmm mmmphhhh!” Kelly said. Chris gave no reply. Kelly held up one finger and swallowed her food, “Thanks! I thought have to end up eating you or something.”

“Don’t mention it,” Chris said, not really paying attention to what she was saying. He did a double take and looked back up at her, “Wait… what?”

Kelly giggled with glee, “Kidding!” Chris gave her a disturbed look before going back to his writing. Kelly looked around the lunchroom at all the other tables while she slowed down on her nachos.

“So, why do you eat all by yourself?” she asked.

“I… I dunno. I just like eating alone,” Chris said.

Kelly frowned and stood up, “Oh, I’m sorry. Should I leave?” She asked.

Chris shrugged his shoulders and looked up at Kelly; he then looked back down as soon as he made direct eye contact and said, “I don’t care.”

Smiling, Kelly sat back down. However, as soon as she touched the seat the lunch bell went off. The other kids in the lunchroom all started to filter out of the gym. Kelly sighed and stood up again while looking down at her half eaten nachos.

 “I’m sure they’ll let you finish your lunch. You can stay for a little bit,” Chris said.

Kelly sat down once more and thought of things to say, creating an awkward silence while she stared at Chris. After a minute or two, Kelly finally broke the silence and asked, “So where are your friends?” Another awkward silence ensued as Chris looked up at Kelly with a confused look, like he didn’t understand what she just asked him.

“Like, who do you talk to when you’re not alone at lunch?”

Chris pondered Kelly’s question as he tapped his chin with his pencil, “Well… I… my dad, I guess, and my dog…”

Kelly’s hysterical laughter interrupted him, “You talk to your dog? Can you teach me how?” Chris’s face turned bright red as he tensed up and looked back down, “Seriously though,” Kelly asked, “Who are your friends?”

Chris’s voice dropped in volume as he talked in almost a whisper, “Nobody really…”

“What? No way. I’m sure there’s at least ONE person here you talk to,” Kelly said.

Chris said nothing as he shook his head.

“Aw! That’s so sad!” Kelly said.

“I don’t care… really…” Chris mumbled.                                   

Kelly folded her arms and gave Chris a stern look, “You mean that you never, ever get lonely? Not ever?” Chris shook his head slowly, still avoiding eye contact with her. Kelly frowned and put her hands on the table, “Is this how you spend every day? All by yourself?”

Chris nodded his head up and down, keeping his eyes glued to the table. Kelly looked down at her lunch tray and started to eat in silence. Minutes passed as the two sat there, not making eye contact. Finally, Kelly broke the silence.

She stood up from the table and put her hands on her hips, “I’ve decided something!” She paused and waited for a response from Chris, “Hey! Look at me!” Chris sighed and begrudgingly looked up at Kelly.

“So,” Kelly said, “I’ve decided that we’re going to be best friends. I’m the new girl, I don’t have any friends, and you’re just a lonely little guy…”

“But I’m not really…” Chris said.

“So we both need a friend. From now on, we’re best friends. Deal?” Kelly said.

Chris turned to his left. Kelly turned to see what he was looking at and saw one of the custodians standing there, impatiently tapping his foot while holding a soapy washrag. She sank back into her seat as he gave her an irritated look.

The custodian looked down at Chris and said, “Hey kid, I thought I told you yesterday you can’t stick around here. I’ve got things to do!”

Without saying a word, Chris stood up from his seat and ran off before either the custodian or Kelly could say anything more. The janitor turned his attention to Kelly, “Hurry up! I need to wipe down these tables!”

“Yes sir!” Kelly said, giving the janitor a salute. The custodian turned around and started walking towards another dirty table, grumbling. Kelly looked back down at her half eaten nachos.

“What a strange little kid…” Kelly thought.

* * *

The crisp, autumn wind blew bits of leaves and grass across Chris’s face as he walked down the old dirt road back to his house. Behind him he could hear the sounds of buses chugging and filling the air with exhaust. He stopped and moved off the road as the sounds got louder behind him. Chris let the train of buses pass by him; the thunderous sounds of the engines disturbed the silence.

Not that it was truly silent, The sound of leaves rustled in the gentle breeze, the cawing of crows came from the power lines above him, thunder boomed far off in the distance. He looked up. Mighty clouds completely covered the sky, casting a shadow on the earth. Chris closed his eyes and stopped, just to take in the sounds and let it all sink in. It was a feeling of transcendence, like he had just slipped away into another dimension, away from the petty problems of the world. He felt like he could just lie down in the grass and take a long nap.

“HEY! BEST FRIEND!” A voice yelled off in the distance behind him. Chris’s eyes snapped open and he swiveled around to see who was yelling at him.

“Oh… great,” he thought. The girl from the lunch table sprinted towards Chris as fast as she possibly could. Within seconds the girl was about two feet from Chris, about to collide with him. Chris side-stepped out of the way and the girl blew right past him. She stopped and kicked up a cloud of dirt as she came to a halt. The girl walked backwards towards Chris, nearly tripping over her gigantic, clumsy feet. The girl stopped right next to Chris, “Hey budster! How’s it going?”

He said nothing at first; he simply stared at the girl that stood before him. When he was sitting down, it was hard to get a picture of exactly how tall she was. But now that she was standing right in front of him, it was easier for Chris to analyze her appearance. Her sheer height had him taken aback. The girl had at least a solid foot on him, Chris couldn’t believe that she was in third grade.  Her hair flowed like a river all the way down to her waist. Chris was pretty sure that if you measured the length of her hair it would be longer than he was.

Chris looked up and down at the girl and took a look at her face. A large black headband dominated her forehead, while her wide, blue eyes dominated her face. Her sky blue coat complemented them very nicely.

The girl read the awe on Chris’s face, “Is anything wrong?” she said.

Almost instinctually, Chris immediately stopped looking at her face and looked right at the ground. He dug his hands deep into his pockets and locked his arms in a stiff, immovable position, “No, nothing’s wrong,” he said. Chris trudged forward towards his house, staring at his shuffling feet.

“Why are you always looking at the ground?” the girl said. Chris didn’t respond or look up. She smiled and said, “Can’t handle my beautiful face?”

Chris looked up, but not at the girl. He looked forward towards his house in the distance, hoping that his little walk home wouldn’t last much longer.

“Aren’t you supposed to be riding a bus?” Chris said.

“Nope, my house is just up the street from the school. Look, you can see it from here!” the girl said as she pointed in front of her.

Chris stopped and squinted into the distance, “I can’t see it.”

“Sure you can! It’s that old, one-story house right there!” the girl said.

Chris’s eyes went from a squint to wide in horror.

“So that means… no, oh please no…” Chris thought.

“Hey, is your house the one right there?” the girl asked, raising her arm a little to point at the house behind hers.

“No,” Chris said immediately, “My house is a little further up the street; you can’t see it from here.”

“You should tell me your address, considering we’re best friends and all,” she said.

Chris started to walk forward again, “Yeah… um… if we’re gonna be ‘best friends’ I should probably know your name. You never told me it.”

“Nope,” the girl said.

Chris looked at her in confusion, “What?”

“My name’s top secret information, ninjas can’t be telling everyone their names! I mean, what if my enemies found out?”

“What enemies could you possibly have? You’ve been here a day!” Chris said.

“Maybe some of them followed me here. You can never be too sure,” she said.

Chris closed his eyes and continued to walk forward, praying that when he opened them he’d be in front of his house.

“So now that we’re best friends, can you tell me what you write in that notebook?” the girl said.

“You came from New York City, right?” Chris said, dodging the question.

“Yes sir,” she said.

“What was it like there?” Chris asked.

“Oh man! It was great! There were like, SO many people everywhere and the apartment I lived in was pretty close to Central Park, which was awesome. My mom used to take me there all the time when I was little, and I’d always be so amazed that there was actually grass there. Oh! I remember one time when my dad took me to see the Statue of Liberty and…”

Chris let the girl babble on and took a deep breath. He was glad he got her attention away from him and his notebook for at least a little bit. Her spiel about New York gave him a little bit of time to collect his thoughts. He didn’t want to put up with her and her incessant bugging about what he was writing in his notebook every day. The girl was clearly out of her mind, as shown by how she actually thought that she was some sort of ninja-superhero. Chris had half a mind to tell her to go away, but he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

“How do you even live here?” the girl said.

Chris shook his head and snapped himself back in the moment, he turned around and did his best to look the girl in the eye, “What do you mean?”

“Like, there aren’t any people here or anything! No stores or cars or nothing like that! Where are you supposed to get ice cream around here?”

“There’s a cool little ice cream shop my dad takes me to in town,” Chris said.

“Well, how far away is town?” she asked.

Chris turned and pointed behind him, “It’s about a twenty minute drive past the school,” he said.

“Twenty minutes? It took me like five minutes to walk to one in New York!” she said.

“Well, there’s a bigger town forty minutes that way…” Chris said, pointing forward towards their houses.

“Well a lot of good that does me!” the girl folded her arms and pouted, “Is there anything to do around here?”

Chris didn’t know how to answer that question. He noticed that their driveways were only a few yards away now.

“So this is my house coming up, you should give me your phone number so I can call you later,” the girl said.

A feeling of dread came over Chris; he had no idea what kind of excuse he could possibly make up. He really just wished that she would leave him alone.

“Well, you see, the thing is… we don’t really have a phone,” Chris said.

“What? Why don’t you have a phone?” the girl asked.

“I dunno… we don’t really need one I guess,” Chris said.

“Oh. That’s weird,” the girl said.

The girl stopped when she reached her driveway, “Hey, if you want, I’ll wait for you out here in the morning so we can walk to school together.”

“Thanks, but don’t wait for me. I go pretty slowly in the mornings,” Chris said as he kept walking.

“Me too! It’ll be perfect!” The girl said with a smile. She started to walk backwards and wave her hand in the air, “See you tomorrow Chris!” She turned around and ran towards her house as fast as she could. Chris sighed and didn’t look back. His mood quickly lightened up when he saw that his garage door was open and that his dad’s jeep was in the garage. He carefully looked over his shoulder to sure that the girl had gone inside her house before he sprinted towards his. Chris charged down the driveway and swung open the front door. Lucy jumped on Chris and nearly knocked him over.

“Hey Lucy!” Chris said as regained his balance. “Hey Dad! I’m home!” Chris said as he looked around to see where he was.  Chris saw his dad sitting on the couch laughing with some other man he had never seen before.

Disregarding the skin tone and hair color Chris inherited from his Korean mother, Chris actually looked very similar to his father. For one, they had nearly identical eyes. Both father and son possessed chocolate colored eyes. When looking at the Underwood’s, the most fitting word is thin, because everything about them was thin. They had thin lips, thin cheeks, thin bodies, and in the case of the father, thin hair.

Another man towered over Mr. Underwood on the couch. Unlike his son, Mr. Underwood was not a short man by any means; but he was dwarfed in comparison to the man he sat next to, who was at least 6’6. The man had short blonde hair and an athletic build to boot.

Mr. Underwood smiled at Chris when he walked in, “Hey buddy, how’re you doing?”

Chris didn’t return the smile or respond; he was too busy eying the enormous stranger that sat on the couch with his father.

“Chris, I’d like you to meet an old childhood friend of mine, his name is Mr. Hatfield. He just moved in with his family next door,” Mr. Underwood said.

Mr. Hatfield held out a hand, “Nice to meet you!”

Almost instinctually, Chris looked past Mr. Hatfield towards the kitchen, trying to avoid eye contact as he awkwardly inched over to him and shook his hand.

“Hello…” Chris said.

Mr. Hatfield firmly grasped Chris’s hand, nearly crushing it with his strength. He felt intimidated by the man’s sheer size. He pulled his hand away from the man’s as soon as he could.

“So Chris, what grade are you in?” Mr. Hatfield asked.

“Third,” Chris said.

“Really? My daughter Kelly’s in third grade. Is she in your class?” Mr. Hatfield said.

“I dunno, there was a new girl in school today…” Chris said.

 “Maybe I’ll bring her over here later to meet you,” Mr. Hatfield said.

“Maybe,” Chris said.

“So Chris, The Lion King has a 5:30 show. I figure if we left here around 4 o’clock we can get to town, go get some dinner and open your present before the movie starts. Sound good?” Mr. Underwood said.

“Yeah, that sounds great,” Chris said, relieved that he didn’t have to talk to Mr. Hatfield anymore.

“Why don’t you go do your homework now so you don’t have to worry about it tonight?” Mr. Underwood said.

“OK,” Chris said as he turned left and started to walk down the hallway to his room, with Lucy following right behind him. He shut the door behind him and dropped his bag on the ground. He bent down and started to dig through his books before pulling out his notebook. He took a pencil out of his pocket and lay down on his bed, where he was joined by Lucy. Chris didn’t feel like doing his homework, that girl had sucked up most of his writing time during lunch, and he didn’t want to fall behind.

He could hear his dad talking to Mr. Hatfield through the wall, “…he really is a sweet kid. He’s just shy, I’m sure he’ll grow out of it.”

Chris drowned out the noise of the conversation in the other room; it was of no interest to him. He had a lot of work to do.

Author's Note

A thing that has recently been called to my attention from the previous chapters is repetition. Tell me if this chapter is a little less repetitive.