Just a Thing

By David Gearing

Kieran may be too smart for his own good. Introspective and pretty sure he knows what he wants, he spends his time with Elle, the one girl in school that everyone loves. Together they drink too much coffee and share gossip.

All of this, Kieran hopes, will help him get over visions of Bryan dancing in his head.

That is until a recent outbreak shuts down the school and his mom spends nearly every day in the hospitals caring for infected people, leaving Kieran alone with Bryan.

There's no better time than the figurative end of the world to confess your feelings to your crush, right? Heart-breakingly honest, this coming-of-age tale proves that not all crushes are JUST A THING.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Gearing
• Release date: Jul 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005576660

David Gearing

David Gearing is a recent transplant from the harsh Arizona deserts to the green forests of the Pacific Northwest. He plots, he games, he pretends to be his own living room rockstar when no one is looking. His other books range from various genres from thrillers to gothic horror and beyond. You can find him at his webpage DavidGearingBooks.com or at his publisher's website AkusaiPublishing.com

Book preview

One

Ihad a dream once where I stood in the middle of the hallway at school. Upstairs, everything painted beige, but brightly lit up so I wasn’t reminded of dried out cheese. The hallways were cleared out, teachers locked the doors except for the classroom where I stood in the doorframe.

The classroom was empty, lights off. Everything smelled like dust and dirt even though I know the hallways don’t really smell like that, that was in my dream. And while everyone to my right was panicking and trying to pack themselves into Mr. Anderson’s, Mrs. Propp’s, and Ms. Sheeran’s classrooms, to my right was simply Bryan. Standing with a girl next while leaning against the blue lockers and laughing. He smiles at the girl, putting his hand through his hair and looks off at me for only a brief second, then his attention returns to the girl.

She looks at me, too, and I swear to Dog that she rolls her eyes

He was laughing, his mouth open wide and he looks like he’s having the time of his life while the world crumbled around everyone to my right.

And I was there in the middle, looking left and right and left and right.

Panicking boys and girls and teachers to my right.

Bryan and her to my left.

And of course it doesn’t make any sense—and leave to my dream to be the weirdest ones of all—but the principal, Mr. Black, he comes scrambling up the hallways. His feet slip out from underneath him he’s running so hard. Black shoes fly out behind him and to his side. But not a strand of white hair out of place, like his hair was 3D printed and glued onto his skull. He winces and brings himself to his feet.

And the running commences after that.

He makes it to the classroom where I’m standing, room 212. His knees bend and he leans over to rest his hands on them. He pants, heavily pushing his chest in and out, his shoulders up and down. Then he looks at me with gray eyes and bags underneath his eyes and a pointed chin. He looks at me with these features and then hands me a button.

You have to protect this, he says. He pants again, seems to collect himself, and turns to my right. The school’s hallway rocks up and down. Students are thrown to their feet.

Mr. Black throws himself next to me to grab hold of the door frame. He chances a quick peek out into the hallway. The floor rolls up and then down like a wave at the beach. Rolling out into the hallways until glass shatters and explodes out and onto the emerald green grass you’d see on a realty magazine.

Protect that button, he says. He points to a black box about the size of a deck of cards. A giant red button in the middle of it, round and about as thick as my thumb. It seems to shine like a mirror—a red mirror—right back into my eyes. It’s beautiful and looks smooth as silk.

I want to touch it.

And Mr. Black must have seen my hands moving toward the button because he reaches out and pulls my elbow back. His grip is warm and he looks at me with angry eyes and a sad mouth. What are you doing, Rogers? he says. I thought I said don’t touch.

But you gave it to me, I say. You literally made me touch it.

Leave that part alone, Mr. Black says. He points at the red button, leaving about a football field’s distance between his finger and the surface of the button.

It looks so smooth, that button. But I don’t touch it.

I put it down by my left, hiding it from Mr. Black. Fine. I won’t touch it. I hold two fingers to my heart. Cross my heart.

Mr. Black seems happy with that, and he pushes himself out into the hallway.

Another rippling wave of tiled floors rise and lower. And because you never seem to blink in dreams, I can watch every detail as Mr. Black jogs out into the waves and somehow rides the crest all the way to the now shattered glass wall. The sun shines outside and the trees wave in a slight breeze.

Then he disappears. I know he’s gone. I can see he’s gone, but I never got to actually see him leave. Like a YouTube video skipping because of your parents’ pathetic connection. He goes from here to not there with no explanation.

And because dreams never work out with any kind of logic, I somehow know what the button is all about. If I push it, everything gets blown to Hell in a hand basket. Like, the whole school and everyone in it just goes kaboom.

That’s it. The fat lady singing in a loud explosive finale.

That’s all she wrote.

Or something like that.

And the button looks tempting. It really does. So smooth, like I want to see if it’s as soft as the surface of a still pool of water.

The floor rumbles again and this time the waves rise higher, almost up to the ceiling. Anyone still standing on them goes through the ceiling then scraped back down and left unconscious on the floor. Lights flicker and electrical sparks because, I guess, that’s a thing now.

And to my left, Bryan leaning against the lockers. His hands are by his side, and he smiles his great big smile and his blond hair pushed off to the side. Dark brown eyes, wide as the holes in the floor to my right, blink and look like heaven to stare into.

He looks to his left to see her and she flips her hair.

I bring the button out to my view. The deck of cards-sized box, it fits perfectly in the palm of my hand. It wouldn’t take much to just push the button. My shoulder gets twitchy, like I just need to push the button.

And then it’s the time for Bryan to push himself off the lockers. He stands up tall, looks at me but not really seeing me. Or maybe he does, because I swear he slides in close to her out of spite. Until he’s next to her and his hand reaches out to her.

Watching the world burn doesn’t sound like such a bad idea anymore. It was a good run, if you ask me, while it lasted.

And she reaches for his hand.

Because of course she does.

They almost touch.

My hand glides over the button. I can feel its heat like a static charge between my palm and the smooth red button surface.

Bryan takes a step closer again. His body facing toward me. Broad shoulders from swimming, thin legs poking out of these black shorts that hang loose around his knees. He looks like how I wanted to feel.

Their fingertips touch each others’ and then there’s heartbreak. It’s never a pain in your chest the way those breakup songs say it is. It’s more like drowning, but from the inside out. Like watching something sit on your chest, pushing your heart against your ribcage until every part of your body shakes with each pulse.

I can’t turn away, even to look down.

And when it looks like fingertip touches fingertip and they both smile while the hallway rattles away the last of the other students, I lower my hand down onto the button.

And it was exactly how I thought. Smooth as the still surface of water.

No one else seems to see that the button moves quickly into the black deck of cards box in my palm. Goes quickly down into it until it disappears.

Then there’s nothing. No rattling, no flashing lights. No rumbles.

What a crock of bull, I say when the my feet feel like they’re on fire.

And then that’s it. All gone.

Two

Stop me if you’ve seen this before, but my social studies teacher has this meme of a spider next to the In case of a fire drill poster. The meme is framed in a cheap black wooden frame, but it’s a spider all nestled up inside a fire alarm. Like, just underneath the white thing you pull out to set off the alarm. Just underneath it, it says in those famous white meme letters: Some people just want to watch the world burn.

We all laughed when we saw it.

But today when I sit down before the bell in Mr. Prichard’s geography class, I can totally imagine that same spider there, but with my face. My round face but strong cheek bones (thanks, Mom) and wide eyes. Looking back and smiling as innocent as a newborn baby. And even in my imaginations, I need a damn haircut. Like last week.

Prichard stands at the front of the room with his hands firmly wrapped around a yard stick. He brandishes it in his big meaty fists. Thick shoulders somehow packed into a baby blue button down that should have never seen the light of day.

In a sense, it makes sense that Prichard would wear it.

He snorts his big honkin’ nose and blinks twice. It’s his signature move.

Class, he says. He pauses, looks around the room and smiles at us. First of all, good morning.

The class offers up a half-assed good morning back to him. It’s noncommittal at its best.

So we have a quiz today.

Enter the groans of disappointment and disapproval.

But, he says, before we get into that, let’s have a little bit of a practice run. He walks to his laptop in short, duck-like steps. Ready?

We nod. Laptops come out and we’re all waiting for Microsoft Windows to load up completely. All of our faces glow with blue light and it gets oddly quiet in there.

And of course, the door opens and we all turn to face it like gophers popping up out of our holes.

My fingers start to itch—and I didn’t even know they could do that.

Bryan comes into the room. He smiles in that way he does, his two front teeth all front and center of his face. His eyes are still dark, but light brown enough to see that his pupils are dilated pretty big. He waves some lost bangs of blond hair off his forehead. Uh, hi, he says. Awkward smile and those eyes and that hair walk into the room. A pastel blue pass means he’s come from the office, but he’s got his stuff all packed up in his red backpack. As he walks past me, I can’t help but notice that he walks mostly on the balls of his feet. Like he’s bouncing off his toes.

Not sure if that’s a swimmer thing or if he pretends like he’s running everywhere he goes.

He hands over a pass, then unfolds a white piece of paper. Prichard takes it from him, checks it over, eyes Bryan, then looks out into the crowd of wondering students, eager to get our game on.

You’re just in time, Prichard says. We have a test. But first, he says. A long dramatic pause, we play games. You can sit pretty much anywhere. Any empty seat. He pushes something on a remote and the projector goes from a black screen to a website screen. The screen changes colors from something to something else to something else. But none of that matters because students are racing to put in their usernames and passwords before the timer counts down.

Bryan walks past me and I notice that he’s wearing those shorts and his legs are as smooth and tanned. Firm and perfect, I’m sure.

He takes a seat behind me—about two seats back. His backpack thumps on the floor and the ground shakes a little. Or maybe that’s just my nerves and my shaky leg. Or maybe it’s my heart about to flutter out of my chest. Could be any and all of them.

The first few questions come up and the class pushes buttons on their screen with the corresponding answers. Red for true. Blue for false. Prichard tries to psych us all out by switching up some of the buttons so we get used to hitting true on the left, then moving it to right.

Bryan does not do well. I think. I can’t happen to find his screenname anywhere. At least, I don’t think I can find it. Maybe he’s not playing this round. My attention span is—I don’t know where and it shows. My score starts caps out at twelve hundred and doesn’t go much higher. At two thousand points per question on a twenty question test, I start making excused already for what to tell Dad when I get home. I’m certain there’s something that would make sense.

I was distracted will only lead up to the next logical follow up: By what?

It’s a By whom kind of correction, but I would let that slide.

Why? Because it’s a rhetorical kind of thing. Like when someone asks you if you think they’re stupid, the answer is always stay quiet. Don’t say no. And dear Lord, whatever you do, don’t say yes.

Don’t ever, ever say yes. Trust.

The test is a blur of questions and answers done old school paper and pencil, though in my case it’s a pen. A lucky blue pen I’ve had since I was a freshman. Three years later and it somehow hasn’t escaped my grasp. Nor has it run out of ink. It’s the pen that keeps on giving, and for that, I keep it around for a little while. I don’t know what magic ink it runs on, but I’m grateful that I have the Giving Tree of pens.

At some point, I’m drawing along the sides of the paper because that’s what happens when the world tries to keep into my brain and it doesn’t know what to do. There’s this dinosaur game you can play when the internet goes out on some browsers. You press the space bar and off you go, jumping over rocks and trying to keep from being dino chow. This is what my brain does: except there’s no threat of dino chow. Just the ever-loving need to produce and produce and produce for someone else. That moment when all nouns and verbs cease to exist, when it’s easier to just stare and let my brain run around the yard while I’m off in the kitchen getting some coffee and trying to enjoy the peace and quiet for a little bit. That moment? That’s when I draw. The lines blur at first. I know I’m making lines and curves. They come together into shapes, still blurry. But those shapes turn into figures and things in the real world.

But distorted, because they’re blurry and sketchy the way you see rough pencils for old cartoons.

By the time I finally blink and it’s like a veil of self-awareness covers my head, I realize what the shape is supposed to be and a word comes to mind and I have an answer.

Just as I’m done drawing a box with a small button on it—this time a switch with an off side and an explosion side—the answer comes to me. I circle the correct answer, scribble in a few notes about why I know it, and flip the paper over.

Prichard looks at me with wide dark blue eyes and looks around me.

I’m the last one done. When I turn around to see the red lines flick from 9:39 to 9:40, the bell rings.

Prichard waves to us from the safety of his desk. Just leave your tests on your desk. Yup, just like that. It’s not like I haven’t taught you where to turn in assignments for the last four months.

Not having a class with Bryan before, I don’t know if he races out the door or likes to hang back to let the crowd go past. I want to say he races through the door. Once a competitive jock, always a competitive jock, amIright?

By the time I can swing my backpack over my left shoulder, I realize he’s gone. A quick glance at the door and I can see his tanned, smooth leg just disappear amongst the crowds.

How’d you do? Prichard asks. He’s already at the third row, collecting all of the papers left on the desks. Easy enough for you?

I shrug. I don’t know. You tell me, I guess.

Prichard nods. He looks like he wants to say something, but he fakes a smile anyway. He does this thing like he nods, agreeing with me, but says nothing.

I walk toward the doorframe and the spider stares at me underneath that little white pull tag. The glass of the picture frame is smudged all to heck from fingerprints and dirt. It’s not sanitary, and I don’t know how I managed to do it as quietly as I did, but I grab it and tuck it under my armpit. Like I’m somehow tempting fate, I don’t look back but instead shout out, Thanks, Mr. Prichard.

Three

It takes three magnets and a few pieces of tape for the picture to stay up in my locker.

The rest of the day is exactly what I expected it to be before the bell rings in that hollow electronic echo through the loud speakers. There’s a present waiting for me at my locker when I arrive. A present in the form of a young woman named Eleanor. Elle for short. She looks at me and then the pretend watch on her wrist before she looks back at me again.

It’s sort of her thing, this I’m just waiting for you kind of expression. And I totally love it. Your house? she says. She pulls out a bag of cheese crackers and pulls it open with a quick rip of her teeth. Perfect teeth thanks to two years of full-on braces. The dentist had no idea her grill was that messed up, but it paid off for Elle in the long run. Her brown curly hair bounces off her shoulders as she flips her head at the new piece of my collection. Okay, that’s creepy. She crunches on a cracker. Chip?

Are we British now?

She looks down at the bag, tossing it around to open up the choices for her next piece. What? No.

In Britain they call those chips.

And what do they call actual chips?

Crisps, I think?

Elle takes a shattered piece of cracker—or chip—and shoves it into her mouth. There are thick wet pieces of mushy cracker pressed against her teeth before she expertly pulls it off with a slow flex of her tongue. And she doesn’t know she does it, but she turns heads the way she stands there, eating and not caring. When you don’t care, you definitely stand out. Especially in a school like this. This was a stupid conversation, she said.

It was a quick factoid, I say. Just a tidbit of knowledge to brighten your day.

And you’re getting nerdier as we speak, she says. She smiles so I know she doesn’t really mean it. Which is fine, because I don’t