I’ve only read scenes like this in novels and comic books, the boy, freshly wounded by cupid’s arrow, falls for the girl who goes unnoticed. He follows her around, teases her and she plays hard to get, a cliché romance I couldn’t dislike more if I tried. Here I am though, chasing after a girl and stumbling around like a lost, weirdly love-struck puppy.

For a moment I think my face is on fire and she’s somehow managed to grab my heart and squeeze it from wherever she is right now. For the sake of originality instead of confessing my feelings in the rain with a bouquet of roses, I’ll do it at the park with a cool rock I’ll find… soon enough.

I upturn and dig up any candidate and compare and judge all the chips and patterns dotted over their rough surfaces. I’ve been crouched for at least thirty minutes, but I can’t give up, if I don’t tell her today, I might not ever tell her which may not be the worst outcome, it beats the stress of rejection.

I stuff my hands in my pocket and drag my feet along the coarse soil in the woods that overlooked the school.

When is it going to end? All of this, right now I’m freefalling for a girl who speaks her mind and moves to the beat of her own drums. I attend a school and complain about class with my peers while waiting in the lunch line, and every day I go home to parents who are more excited about what I did that day than I am, and a sister who thinks I’m the coolest older brother to exist.

When do I finally hit the earth and snap into reality, pulled out of this blissful life, drugged up, naked, and shivering in the corner of a pitch-black sterile room?

There you are. I pick up the flat rock and turn it over in my hand, it’s half the size of my palm, round and smooth with the shape of a centipede inside of it. Well damn, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

The silver bangle on my wrist illuminates, blinking erratically, the light dulls before a bright surge of light comes from it, so bright I shield my eyes. How much magic energy does it need to make a call?

I exert a small pulse of magic energy into the bangle to answer the call before her voice enters my head. “Aspen, help me!”

Her voice is high-pitched and coarse like she’s been screaming her lungs out for hours. “Rae, where are you?”

“She’s dead!” She screams. “She’s fucking dead- I don’t know, I don’t know where I am, help me, please they’re everywhere!”

I run.

Rationality and logic leave when in the face of fear, our legs start moving, fists form, or we lay down and play dead.

Fear is all reflexes and happens in a series of random while the brain simultaneously analyses and solves the situation to guarantee its survival unharmed.

Desperation is different, it’s when you know you’ve lost before you’ve lost, the priority isn’t not getting hurt so everything becomes extreme, rash, and hopeless, you’ll do anything to get out of the situation even if it means cutting an arm off or taking a life.

I was feeling a mix of the two.

Facing forward, I sprinted further. Our bracelets are connected if she keeps it on her I can follow the pull. Don’t get hurt Raelynn, please, please, please.