Charlie didn't know what to expect when Monday came. He spent most of Sunday in his room, listening to music, distracted by thoughts of Michelle and the Saturday night they'd spent together. How would things be different for them at school? Would they start eating lunch together? Would she come by his locker to talk to him? Should he ask her to go somewhere after school? Or maybe wait for Friday, take her to a movie, a real date?
Several times, he thought about calling her. But he realized he didn't have her number, and no one he could ask for it.
He didn't have a class with Michelle. He wasn't even sure of her schedule. When Monday came, he walked through the halls with his head turning constantly to the left and right, scanning each cluster of teenagers to see if Michelle was among them. Every time he saw long dark hair, his heart pounded, but each time it turned out to be someone else.
It wasn't until after third period that he saw her. She came out of a classroom with two other girls, smiling and talking with them, just as Charlie was walking by. She glanced over at Charlie. Abruptly, the smile dropped from her face, and she looked away.
"Hi, Michelle!" he said.
She looked at him. "Oh... hi..." Her voice was barely audible, and she immediately looked away again. She didn't stop. She passed right by.
Charlie felt so hurt and confused that he stopped in the middle of the hallway and turned to watch her walk away. What had just happened?
Reality, he told himself coldly. Saturday night hadn't changed anything. She was still Michelle the beautiful, he was still Charlie the loner, and they didn't really know each other.
Charlie shook his head, as if he could dislodge that cruel voice. He walked to his next class, but the teacher might as well have been speaking Russian for as much as Charlie heard her. All he could think about was Michelle, and the way her smile had disappeared when she saw him.
Despite that first meeting, he still dared to hope for a warmer reception the next time he walked past her, later in the day. This time she was alone, and perhaps that would be the difference. But Michelle carefully avoided looking at him as she passed, staring fixedly at the wall, and Charlie's greeting died on his lips. He felt the coldness settle into him as he swallowed the bitter truth.
She didn't care about him. Saturday night hadn't meant anything to her. The holding hands, the sex, none of it had meant a thing. She'd just been indulging a weird fetish, and he'd benefited because he'd been there. That was it.
Nevertheless, he continued to think about her constantly, even as he accepted walking by her in silence. Sometimes, he even imagined that her gaze followed him as he passed But he kept his head locked forward like a robot, pretending he didn't see her, didn't know her.
A few days into the week, he looked across the cafeteria to where Michelle normally ate lunch, and caught her looking back at him. She looked away instantly, turning back to her circle of friends. He watched her for a minute, desperately wishing she would look his way again. Why had she been looking at him? Had she been thinking of Saturday? Or regretting it?
He was eating with sometimes-lunch-companions Andy Meadows and Greg Arden, and they were joined by Michael and Dinesh from the AV crew. Charlie struggled for a way to express his turmoil without mentioning anything specific.
"Let me ask you guys a question," he said. "Imagine a Victoria's Secret model comes up to you and says she wants to have sex. But the catch is, both of you have to pretend that it never happened afterwards. What would you do?" Even as he spoke, Charlie knew what a ridiculous question it was, and the resulting smirks from the table of boys gave him his answer before they even spoke.
"Are you serious?" Greg replied. "I'd say, hell yes. Who would turn down that deal?"
Charlie tried again, knowing it was useless. "But I'm saying she would act like it never happened. She would act like she didn't even know you afterwards. And it would never happen again."
"I see. So you're saying you don't get to brag about it." Greg shrugged. "So what? You get to have sex with a Victoria's Secret model. Who cares if anyone knows?"
The other boys chimed in their agreement. Charlie leaned over his plate and shoved a spoonful of bland mashed potatoes into his mouth. He didn't know how to explain the mix of emotions that churned within him. In a way, what Greg said made absolute sense. Charlie had gone in that Saturday to edit a basketball video. Instead, he'd escorted a beautiful naked girl around the school, finally making love to her in the lab classroom. How could that be considered anything but a win? Didn't the experience stand on its own, regardless of how she treated him afterwards?
Get over it, he told himself, and ate another bite of mashed potatoes.
And he did get over it. Or at least he tried to. But as the weekend approached, a thought began to smolder in his mind. What would happen when Saturday came? Would Michelle come back to the school? Daryl was back, so they couldn't repeat the adventures of the previous weekend. But Michelle possessed keys to the school, and permission to be there. Maybe she would just show up, and find him in the AV room. Maybe she would keep him company while he worked.
She thinks you broke in, he reminded himself. She won't expect you to be there again, if Daryl is back.
But maybe she would come to the school anyway, for something cheerleader-related, and maybe she would see Charlie's car at the back of the building. Maybe she would pop in and visit.
Maybe she would come in to explain why she wasn't talking to him.
Charlie came in earlier than usual that Saturday. He told himself that he still had the basketball game to edit, since he hadn't worked on it barely at all the previous Saturday. Daryl was already there when he arrived, and Charlie barely sat down before the security guard dropped by to say hello. Charlie chatted with the guard for a while and looked at Daryl's pictures from Miami.
Daryl was a tall, thin man in his mid 40s. His family had come to the United States from the Dominican Republic when Daryl was just a kid. He had worked as the security guard for the school for fifteen years, and intended to work there until he retired.
"I don't need much," he told Charlie once. "All I need is a roof to sleep under and a TV to watch when I'm not working." Daryl was divorced, and seldom talked about his ex-wife. Charlie gathered he hadn't heard from her in years. Daryl never seemed particularly intimidating. He had a wide smile and an easy gait, as if he never needed to hurry anywhere. Pine Hills had a low crime rate, and Daryl's biggest problem most nights seemed to be boredom.
Daryl chatted with Charlie for more than half an hour. They talked about Miami mostly, although Charlie itched to ask the security guard if he'd ever seen Michelle Santos around the school on the weekends. He couldn't find a way to casually slip the question in, and finally Daryl excused himself to return to his patrols.
Charlie tried to return to editing the basketball game, but he was distracted by his thoughts, and before long he found himself hunting for his video from the homecoming pep rally. He imported it into a project, and watched it for a while. Head Cheerleader Vanessa Watson was the focus of the shot, but Michelle was at the edge, and Charlie watched her as she jumped up and down, waving her pompoms and smiling.
Before long, he was combing through footage from the previous season's football games, searching for shots of the cheerleaders. Every time he saw Michelle, he cut out and imported that piece of footage into the project. What was he going to do with all of it? He didn't know. But suddenly those moments where the camera panned over her seemed like secret treasures to him, and he wanted to find as many of them as he could.
"I never knew," he thought, as he watched a clip where for some forgotten reason he had decided to film a close-up of Michelle as she danced to a song the marching band was playing. "I filmed her and I never even knew who she was."
Daryl popped in every now and then, when his hourly patrols took him through that part of the building. Charlie explained that he was editing some football clips together, and Daryl didn't question it. The football team did appear in most of the clips on the screen; they just weren't the part Charlie was interested in.
"You gotta go home, Charlie," Daryl finally told him, as the time clicked past midnight. "You been here all day."
All day, and no sign of Michelle. Charlie felt defeated as he walked out to the dark parking lot. Her words from the previous Saturday echoed in his mind. She'd told him it would never happen again, and she had meant it.
At school, Charlie continued to walk past Michelle in silence, pretending that he didn't know her secrets, pretending that he didn't know her at all. He watched her when he could, looking to see if she spent time with anyone, perhaps a boyfriend he was unaware of. Several times, he watched in jealousy, certain that a boy who was talking to her was her boyfriend. But his subtle inquiries towards her relationship status yielded no clear results. If she did have a boyfriend, it wasn't widely known among the student body.
He came to school for long hours on Saturdays, and now all his time was spent editing together footage of Michelle. He had no clear idea what he was making, and knew it served no purpose other than making himself look like an obsessed stalker of the pretty cheerleader. He told himself it would give him closure. He would put all his feelings into the video, and then save the video onto a thumb drive and throw it in a drawer. Or throw it in the trash. In that way, he would symbolically let her go, and move on.
Despite the pride and energy he put into the project, Charlie didn't want Daryl to catch him working on it. It wasn't hard to hide one of the smaller cameras by the window, and rig a wireless feed of the video to appear as a small box at the corner of his screen. He could keep an eye out for motion from the camera, and this gave him a few minutes warning if Daryl approached. Long enough to minimize the project he was working on and replace it with a generic football edit.
"You spending a lot of time in front of that computer lately," Daryl observed. "Don't your eyes get tired, staring at that screen?"
"I'm putting together an editing reel," Charlie said. "I want to have something good I can send to film school."
"Really?" Daryl was impressed. "Hey, let me see what you got."
