Her face lit up, and she placed her hands on her hips. “You’re Simon’s friend?!”
“Yeah, we met at school and—”
“Who’s at the door?” an older guy said, walking into their foyer.
“This is Levi. Simon’s new friend.”
The guy’s face lit up, too. “Simon’s friend?”
“I know! Isn’t it wonderful?! Come in, Levi,” the woman said, grabbing my arm and pulling me inside. “I’m Keira and this is my husband, Paul. Si, come on out, you have a friend here. And it’s not Aria!”
It would’ve seemed very strange and a bit rude how dramatic his parents were acting about Simon having another friend, but really they were just…overjoyed.
Simon came running out of his room and groaned. “You don’t have to scare him off, guys. Hey, Levi, what’s up? You can come hang out in my room.”
“I’ll order pizza!” Keira shouted. “And I’ll make some brownies! Levi, do you like brownies?”
“Mommm, chill out. We’re just playing video games for a while.”
Keira turned around to Paul. “Did you hear that?! They are playing video games!”
“I love brownies,” I cut in. A wise person would never turn down the opportunity for homemade brownies.
Simon rolled his eyes as I laughed. He took me to the hallway leading to his bedroom. I noticed all of the family portraits on the walls, and couldn’t help but wonder about one thing that didn’t fit into the story of the person I was growing to know each day. When we stepped into his bedroom, he quickly shut his door behind us. “Can you tell that I don’t get many visitors?”
“No big deal.”
“No big deal? My parents just had a heart attack because someone came over to visit me. Anyway, I’m glad you’re here, because I need your input.”
I glanced around at his extremely clean room. Nothing was out of place. His clothes were organized by color in his closet. He had his video games organized on his shelf in alphabetical order. He had more cleaning supplies than I’d ever seen.
He walked into his closet. “So we can play games and all of that stuff, but I really called you over for O.G.A.A.”
“Oh, right, of course. I figured that’s what we were going to be doing anyway.” I nodded, sitting in one of his beanbag chairs. “By the way, what’s O.G.A.A.?”
He walked out of his closet with a bulletin board. He flipped it around, and I stared at a crayon drawing of a girl with four groups of four note cards.
“Operation Get Awkward Abigail.”
“That’s a drawing of Abigail?” I tilted my head and narrowed my eyes.
He fiddled with his hands. “I didn’t get her nose right.”
“Her body proportion is a little off. Not that Abigail’s fat, but she’s a little bigger than that.”
“Well, clearly she’s not really a stick person, Levi. Aria is the artist. I’m just the weird red-haired best friend.”
“Oh, well. All right. Sorry, but I thought last time we spoke on this subject you were anti-Abigail.”
“But then I ate her cookies.”
“And you liked her cookies,” I said with a wide grin.
“They melted in my mouth.” He sighed heavily, sitting on his bed. “I loved her cookies.”
“That explains why we are in O.G.A.A. What’s on the notecards?”
“Different scenarios of how I ask her out on a date.”
I walked over to examine the board. “Sky diving? Hiking? A sign on a blimp balloon? These are your ideas for asking her out?”
“Yes! Think about it. You’re jumping out of a plane, falling, falling, falling, minutes away from your death because your parachute is stuck, you look over at those blue eyes of hers and say, ‘Awkward Abigail, will you go out with me for a milkshake if we make it to the ground?’ And then she would say yes and we would obviously live happily ever after.”
“Unless you died from the, you know, impact of slamming into the ground.”
He smirked. “Well, yeah, there’s that.”
“Have you thought of, I don’t know, just asking her to go out with you?”
“Like, in person?”
“Yes.”
“Face to face?”
“Uh huh.”
He started laughing hysterically, turning redder and redder. Then he went deadpan. “You know what, that might work.” He dropped his board to the ground. “Video games?”
I laughed.
We started playing some game where we shot a bunch of things, then we switched to a game where we killed a bunch of things, and then we switched to a game where we shot and killed some more things.
Trying to be nonchalant, in the middle of some kind of battle field where Simon and I were blowing off the heads of zombies, I said, “I saw your family pictures in the hallway.”
He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Mom’s a picture addict.”