Jacob always had a funny way of saying Jell-O. She never knew why, but every once in a while he would say it, randomly prompted by a question or by his own thoughts, and she'd think of being surrounded by orange gelatin; of how hard it would be to see the world if she was encased in orange. She knew not why. He was a good foot shorter than she was, even though he was in the same home room as she was. Indeed Jacob was the shortest boy in their grade. He always walked to school--his mom was a nurse or something--and he'd hold onto the straps of his comparatively over sized green back pack so that it dug into his back and so he could stand up straight like his parents were always telling him to whenever he slouched over his plate at dinner.
She didn't like to pay attention to Jacob. Something about his face distressed her. In the seventh grade she would reflect that she felt uncomfortable looking at him at this time because he was just starting to grow a uni-brow and looked like a normal hued Frankenstein. In the seventh grade he began coming to school with small bandages pressed between his eyes. He was much taller by that point and when other students asked what happened, he could tell them confidently without worrying that they'd think poorly of him.
But in the fifth grade, she did not like paying attention to Jacob. This was sometimes incredibly difficult. He sat next to her in math. He would fidget, but not in any organized fashion. He didn't bounce his knee, or rhythmically click the nice pen his mom had stolen from her office at work; he didn't rock back and forth.
He would hit the desk with his flat palm every so often, but she could never tell when it was coming. And every time he disrespectfully slapped the cheap white plastic table, she wanted to scream at his face. She wanted to grab his glasses and throw them at the math teacher she didn't much like because he was old and short and annoying and she hated his sweaters. She would hold her left finger in her left ear so that she couldn't hear the sound as clearly. By the end of math class her hand and her ear would be hot and sweaty and she would be very angry. She would try to count to ten like the counselor with the blonde hair and black tights had suggested when she was in fourth grade and her homeroom teacher had forced her to see someone at the school after she had pushed her best friend into a locker so hard that her best friend had cried.
They were still best friends, strangely enough. But she had started to learn how to control her temper. Sometimes if she couldn't make it to ten, she would rush into the girl's bathroom down the hall not too far, and make angry faces at herself in the mirror until she felt better or someone came in to use the restroom.
Then one day in math, Jacob didn't fidget. He was not obnoxious. He held his hands in his lap the entire class, leaning forward, slouching over the worksheet. Every so often he would reach for the pen he set out in front of himself and start writing, but when he saw her looking at him, he immediately stopped, his hands clasping back together.
She was surprised. But more so when she was putting her notebook back into her back pack and Jacob asked her if she would go out with him. She said, "Maybe," and ran out into the hallway before she had to look at his eyes for any amount of time. She found him incredibly unbearable. Later at lunch, she would tell her friends and they would ask her why she had said maybe. She would tell them that she had no idea. But she needed to think on it.
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