The halls of Nexus Middle School were empty. That’s the way Roscoe wished they always were, minus the yellowed tile that couldn't have been cleaned in weeks. The sound of the soles beneath his immaculate new Jordan sneakers clicking the floor in rhythm to whatever what blasting through his headphones was subtle, but comforting. His friends called him a "sneakerhead" but he preferred the formal "shoe connoisseur". Those pulsating steps which marked his alone time on his path to the nurse’s office was what made his trips to the room of countless cleaners mixed with the aroma of teenage trepidation worth his time.
It was December or -- more importantly for the boy -- flu season. During the cold months, the affects of his asthma always heightened. Going to the nurse's office to get his blood sugar tested had become habitual, so the asthma check ups were just a bonus during these months. The boy tapped down the hallway to Katy Perry’s new album that a blonde named Eva in his history class told him to listen to. He looked down to his phone, refreshed his Twitter feed, then looked past his phone, stopped, licked his index finger and wiped a scuff off of the side of his shoe.
That girl doesn’t even talk to me, he thought. She didn’t even tell me to listen to this. She told me and 396 of her other followers that she liked one song. I don’t even think I like this. Not at all. I just want her to think I do so she will maybe engage in conversation with me.
He turned the corner, which meant he was in front of the nurse’s office. He didn’t see anyone in the hallway today, which he found a bit curious, since he hadn’t seen anyone on Tuesday or Wednesday either. He was trying to figure out some scientific formula for when he saw people in the halls on his way to the nurse’s office, but that operation was falling through the cracks. He was okay with that, although it constantly had him divvying up a new formula that was bound to fail. The last someone he saw in the hall was Alene, whom also, coincidentally, was the same girl that the boy had been texting for weeks on end.
I could have at least looked up and smiled or said something — anything, the boy thought to himself as he walked into a frigid wall of Lysol and Germ-X and pulled one of his earbuds out. It was the same thing he had thought for the past three days since a hall-encounter that was even more awkward than the others. He had replayed that diminutive — nearly nonexistent — social rendezvous hundreds of times and didn’t know what he would do differently. But he kept texting her anyways, and she kept texting him, too. Fundamentally, it’s all the same, he thought. It’s just communication. I could have a relationship over text, hypothetically.
As the nurse pricked his finger for the 146th time this year and ran through the rest of his routine that had become smooth as butter, he internally bounced around this idea of a relationship with Alene. He couldn’t determine if there was any relationship at all, which was bizarre, because they “talked” every day. He hadn’t interacted with her face-to-face, other than looking at the side of her freckled profile a few lunch tables away, which he couldn’t help himself from doing every now and again.
He didn’t think she ever noticed, but he did wonder if she ever glanced at him the way he did her. If she did, he never noticed, which disappointed him. In his head he analogized himself to a dial up internet connection that exerted everything it had to load a single meaningless video from WorldStarHipHop until the connection timed out. He was trying so hard, but nothing was showing up; coming up short., over and over again, day after day.
But he felt something when he saw her, which meant all of those feelings had been built up digitally over weeks of sending circumstantial jokes that she would “haha” or “lol” at, which felt silly. Until she would come back with something two or three times as weird as whatever he had spewed out before. She was odd sometimes, but also wise in a way that Roscoe could never be.
He loved that part of Alene. The type of love you feel for a slice of pizza or a colorful bird that lands on a frail winter branch and is bound to fly away any second for no particular reason. That kind of love is close to sincere love, but also nowhere near it.
Love is a broad word, he thought.
He seemed to believe that he had surmised the entirety of Alene’s personality digitally. Wirelessly, Roscoe didn’t see how the two could be any more compatible. But there was a disconnect when their digital lives ld them to their possible encounters real life. He liked to think it was because of him, but she seemed just as broken as he was. Their relationship — whatever it had come to — was stuck in some sort of a digital funk. He definitely liked her; oddly enough, he thought he more than liked her. But he didn’t know if she more than liked him, or even like him at all. She never said. So Roscoe didn’t say anything, either.
He thought a lot, and he wasn’t ashamed of his thoughts. He thought about what he should say, or send, whether she thought about him, whether he was being pretentious with this entire situation. He wondered if this was normal, he wondered if what he felt was real because it was online. He mostly wondered why he was built the way that he was. He wondered if whatever Alene saw through text messages and Twitter posts was really him.
Nevertheless, he was content to enjoy yet another asthma-stricken winter; this time with small digital victories in back-and-forth messages with someone that he could confide himself in. He wanted to think it was himself, and not himself as a playwright, writing his life’s script for an audience of one.
He put his dangling headphone back in and walked back to his class. “Roar” was his favorite song on the album, he decided after looking at his queue. That’s what he would tell Eva next class, or whenever the opportunity came. He wasn’t anywhere close to important to her, so opportunities would be scarce. But he also didn’t actually like any of it. Suddenly when he had found something that he would say to Eva, he knew why he was listening to this noise in the first place. He just needed to practice picking his head up and saying something — anything.
