Aaron sat on the edge of his bed that Thursday night with the phone pressed so hard to his ear his told him "your ear gone fall off."
6:30 came and he dialed like he been waiting on it all day because he had been.
"Hello?"
"What took you so long to call?" Shantell said, laughing before he could even get a word out.
"Man, my dad was on the phone talking to his woman I guess."
"Mmhm. Sure."
That was the start of it. Two hours turned into four.
Four turned into Aaron's dad knocking on his door telling him that he has school in the morning and let him know when he’s off the phone because he needs to make a call.
They talked about everything even the school small lunch trays, which teacher was the strictest, what they wanted to do after graduation.
Shantell had been in two of his classes since tenth grade and he never noticed her smile until that Thursday.
She told him she noticed him a long time ago.
"So why you ain't say nothing?" he asked.
"I don’t know you never turned around," she said. "So what made you turn around?"
Aaron didn't have an answer for that.
Some things you can't explain, you just know they happened for a reason.
---
The next few weeks moved fast.
Testing days, half days, teachers that wasn’t testing had already checked out mentally before the last day of school.
Aaron and Shantell was getting closer together, after-school phone calls. Shantell drove to school and would give Aaron ride home since she was going home in the same direction.
Word got around school that they started talking to each other.
Somebody's cousin saw them together at the gas station. Somebody's friend said Shantell had been asking about him since October.
Aaron didn't care about the talk. He cared about the way they talked to each other and how she laughed at everything he said.
They didn’t hold nothing back from each other.
Three weeks until graduation, Aaron worked up the nerve.
"You going to prom?"
"Depends who's asking."
"I'm asking."
Shantell smiled that same smile from fourth hour.
"Then I guess I'm going."
To be continued...