Love is Stupid and Great Ch. 01

One night, April decided to just go up and talk to him. And she found him asleep with various papers for his next game stacked up next to him and a picture of his sister on his chest that he was looking at. She left that night, knowing that Oliver was a sad, but driven person now.

When they went back to school, April would frequently come up to him and talk, and it wasn't for a few months did he finally actually start talking back. Oliver found that April, while a lot different, was still the girl he once knew and felt very torn by it. But their newfound friendship persisted to their junior year and they actually hung out quite a bit together. Meanwhile working on his next game to one day get published.

So he finally gave in and asked her to go to homecoming with him. She accepted. And, happy as can be, did everything possible to prepare for the event. He spent a lot of his own money to make this night special, but when he showed up to her house, all dressed up... he found her leaving with one of the football players. He was heartbroken and felt abandoned once again. When he confronted her about it a day later, she said she thought he was joking.

Once again, he fell back into his lonely patterns. He became more and more angry at things, big and small. He even snapped several times in class at students that pissed him off. This prompted one of these student's tough jock boyfriends to kick his ass after school. But the jock eventually left, because Oliver would just sneer at the constant punches being thrown at him.

During his senior year, he was labeled 'The Human Torch' for getting angry so much. People avoided him, but he would frequently find himself in fights because of that, coming home from school every other day with a bloody nose or a black eye. He would be picked on and bullied most days by the jocks that found him annoying. But he was getting a lot more unwanted attention now. After losing all the weight he gained originally and becoming more violent, people either found him somewhat attractive or were afraid of pissing him off, since that would just cause an ordeal. He was the problem child.

April left school one day to find Oliver crying behind the school, and immediately remembered the crybaby she knew when she was a kid. She tried to comfort him, but he ran off, not wanting to be seen like that.

But April started coming around again and they started talking. It wasn't until April sat him down did he actually start talking about what had been going on in his life since his sister's death. She tried to get back into his life after that, but he pushed her out once more. However, his streak of fighting and rage stopped and he wasn't as much of a problem anymore.

Then, a couple days before their graduation, it was April's birthday. And there was almost no one around, as her family was 'busy' and her friends weren't really her friends, honestly. But after someone knocking on her door, she found it was Oliver, who was surprised that there wasn't a big party going on.

The two talked and he found out quite a bit about her. When his sister died and they stopped hanging out, April felt abandoned by Oliver herself and she looked to go find other friends to replace him. But her loud, tomboyish personality wasn't winning a lot of hearts, so she started trying to act like other girls, and immediately she saw results. She became the most popular girl in school while Oliver retreated more into himself. Her family was always pretty well off, but they were now pretty rich, and would constantly go on vacations and spend their money on lavish things that they didn't really need. She became a typical glamor girl and enjoyed the attention she was getting from classmates, but didn't get it from her parents. She found on days that she needed family and friends most, she didn't, because all the attention she was getting was this fake façade they were keeping up.

After she finished talking, she bursted out crying, and she let him hold her. He promised her then that he would be there for her and that he would keep in touch with her even when he went off to college.

He didn't.

And now they were here on a dreary Friday night, not having spoken in two years, but it was all because Oliver really loved her from the bottom of his heart and he knew that he couldn't just be a friend with her. He'd fuck it up and they'd both get hurt. She needed a best friend then and he couldn't be that. So rather than explaining that to her or not and ending up hurting her, he stayed away.

But somewhere during all of that reminiscing, Oliver fell asleep. As he was too tired to think through how he was going to explain himself to her. And how they were going to move forward, now that she was living in his apartment.

To Be Continued...