Abel and I have been friends for about twelve months.
He said it wouldn’t be easy and they would make it hard for us. They have, in a way. I can’t talk to him where people can see us. Like, at school. I see him outside his building at lunch, but I can’t go say hi to him.
He’s easily the tallest guy in both schools combined. He always sticks out and more often than not, he’s alone. There are a few people who talk to him and sometimes they hang out together over lunch, but mostly, he’s by himself. Usually, the meanies talk about him but never to him. Some of the popular gangs pass him by, giving him glances, being rude, and I want to jump across the fence and punch them. I never realized I was as bloodthirsty as Sky until I met Abel.
Abel doesn’t care though. His eyes are always on me. It doesn’t matter where we are, at church or in school or on the street. If I’m close, he’s looking at me. The weird phenomenon that happens when we’re around each other has only grown. It’s like our senses are fused.
Well, even without the weird phenomenon, it’d be hard to look away from him. It seems like every day he grows a few inches taller and a few inches broader. His eyes get richer and more maple-syrupy, and his lopsided smiles have only managed to make the butterflies in my stomach crazier. Lately, I’ve found myself studying the shape of his lips. How they stretch when he smiles and how they circle and curl around words. It’s actually embarrassing, the way I’m fascinated with his mouth. I’m a certified weirdo.
I should not be staring at my friend’s lips like that, right? You don’t constantly think about your friend like I do. I definitely don’t think about Sky that much.
But something makes Abel Adams different. Maybe it’s the way he keeps staring at me from across the distance. No one exists for him but me.
“Did you see Josh Anderson? God, I hate him so much. He was so rude to you. Like, hello? You bump into someone, you stop and you say sorry. Where are the manners?” I huff one day, referring to one of the meanies.
“Who the fuck is Josh Anderson?”
“The guy who deliberately pushed you. Today? This morning? At school.” When Abel still gives me a confused look, I swat his bicep. “You don’t remember, do you?”
Smirking, he shakes his head.
“How can you not remember?”
“Because I was looking at you.” He says it so simply, like it wouldn’t make me hyperventilate or blush.
I clear my throat. “Then maybe you shouldn’t be looking at me, but paying more attention to the world.”
“Yeah. I don’t think that’s happening.”
“Why not?”
“You just have that kind of a face.”
“What kind of a face is that?”
“The kind that’s hard to look away from.”
Right. Cue hyperventilation.
So yeah, Abel isn’t anything like Sky. He’s in a whole ‘nother category.
Even though my mom picks me up every day from school and she has spies all over, we’ve found ways to be creative. Mostly we sit far apart at lunch, me on my side of the fence, with Sky and a bunch of other girls, and him on his side, leaning against a tree, biting into his favorite fruit, an apple. Still, we pretend to be eating together. Or I make it a point to wait for him to arrive at school, at the start of the day. We stare at each other from across the dirt path and sometimes luck’s on our side and there are only a few people around, and I give him a little wave and a smile. His answering lopsided smile makes my heart race. I even made him an apple pie for his fifteenth birthday. Got the recipe from my mom and everything, saying that I wanted to learn how to bake. Mom was super happy.
Abel and Evie for the win!
We can’t see each other much during the day, but after school, I see him almost every afternoon up at my treehouse. Thank God, Mom hates going into the woods so my treehouse is a safe area. In fact, we do our homework together. Well, I do mine; Abel draws.
One day I find out that almost every drawing in his sketchpad is of me.
For an entire minute, I don’t move. I can feel my heart beating and those darn butterflies kicking up a racket inside my body. I can feel the rush of my own blood as it raises goosebumps, running along my veins.
“This is me,” I whisper stupidly after a while.
“I told you, you just have one of those faces.”
Our heads are bent over his sketchpad, and together we see every little drawing he made of me. Me. Evie Hart. I mean, no one has ever paid me much attention. Of course, I’m not neglected but I’m also no one’s muse. I wish I could think up synonyms for that, but my brain is mush.
God, he’s so talented. An artist.
In most of the pictures, my hair flows in the wind, my dresses have pretty flowers on them, my calves are streaked with mud and I’m barefoot. In some, I’m surrounded by corn fields and in others, I’m at school bent over a book, or inside the treehouse, writing in my journal.
Abel tells me that the one in the cornfields is inspired by the first time he saw me. I was out in the fields, all wild and pixie-like with flying yellow hair.
“Your skin was red like apples,” he says and then, he goes ahead and takes a bite of the apple in his hands, sucking up all the air and leaving me to choke on my butterflies.
For my thirteenth birthday, he gives me a sketch of myself. But his real love isn’t sketching, no. Abel Adams’s real love is photography. He has hundreds of photos on his phone. He always carries his camera with him wherever he goes. He has shots of the fields, the school grounds, the church and so many other places that I’ve never even visited, even though I’ve lived here forever.
I tell him that he’s the most amazing photographer and he’s destined to be the greatest artist ever. But all he does is laugh, sadly.
“I guess, it makes me feel invisible. Being behind the lens. It makes me feel that no one can see me. No one can know where I came from, how I came to be. Who my parents were and what they were to each other.” He shakes his head, his eyes almost on the verge of leaking but somehow, hold the water in. “It’s stupid.”
I hug him. Tightly. So I can absorb all his pain. So I can make him see what I see. An artist and a strong boy.
“But Abel, you stop time.”
“What?”
The other day we got a ton of rain. The mud path leading up to the woods looked like a running stream of dirt. I’ve never been a fan of rain; I like the sun better. When it was over though, the world was so much brighter. The green, the brown, the blue. I wished it stayed that way forever – without the rain, of course. And it did. Because Abel captured it all through his camera.
“You do. Look…” I pull him forward so he can see what I see. “You stop time. I don’t think you can ever be invisible. You’re too talented for that. It’s like you froze the world in this moment and it’s going to stay like this forever and ever and ever.”
I feel him smirk, his cheek extremely close to mine. “Ever and ever, huh?”
I nod enthusiastically, looking at the photo, even though I want to look at him. I want to study those darn lips again.
Why do I keep thinking about them?
But he’s so close. I don’t know if I can handle looking at him.
“Maybe I’ll stop time now,” he whispers, his warm breath blowing across my skin and waking up goosebumps.
“Why now?” I whisper back, like we’re in church and aren’t allowed to talk any louder than this, which is stupid because we’re at the treehouse.
“So you never leave me.”
I don’t say much after that because I’m fidgety and blushing. Though, I do realize something. Something pretty epic.
Abel Adams is a god.
Because only gods can stop time and freeze moments, if they want to. Only gods can do what he does with a camera.