4
Pictures of You
Monday, January 9th
· Patrick ·
When I got home I finally gave myself permission to freak out. I spent a good solid hour staring at my ceiling in shock. I had actually gotten up the courage to ask Nualla Galathea out and even more shocking she had actually said yes. I had spent so long wishing that this would happen I hadn’t given much thought to what I would do if it actually did. If there was a higher power out there, they were probably laughing their ass off at me.
And then the panic set in, and the self-doubt.
What if it wasn’t real? What if I had hallucinated the whole thing? What if some part of my brain had just snapped? I mean, I had been feeling really ill as I walked toward them in the hall. What if I were actually in a hospital somewhere in a coma?
Even if it was all real, there were so many ways this could go wrong it wasn’t even funny. It wasn’t as if I had dated a whole lot of girls and would know what I was supposed to do. Knowing my luck I was going to probably manage to fuck things up in the first five minutes of our date.
I tried to calm myself. Just play it cool Patrick, it’s not like you’re dating her or anything. You’re just going to one dance.
But what if we were dating now? Should I change my Facebook status? No use jumping the gun, best to wait until she did. But what if she’s waiting for me to change mine first?
I jumped up and all but ran to my computer. It would probably be a good idea to at least add her as a friend. I looked at my page and there was already a friend request from her. I don’t think I had ever clicked a confirm button so fast in my life. But then I just sat there staring at the screen. What was I supposed to do now?
I decided to just roll with the punches; I mean what was the worst that could happen?
· Nualla ·
A few hours of online investigation had turned up quite a lot about Patrick Connolly; the boy practically lived his life online. Forum posts, videos, pictures and social media up the wazoo. He seemed to take pictures of everything around him and I’ll have to admit I was a little envious of how freely he could share his life with others. I, on the other hand, had to keep most of the things about myself private, hidden, secret. Like a CIA agent or a superhero, but without the awesome costume or badge.
The pictures told me what he liked to do, who he liked to hang out with and how unbelievably geeky he truly was. But the pictures also told me more about him than he probably ever intended.
One; he was most likely an only child with parents who worked too much. Even though he had a crap ton of pictures, his family was strangely absent from all of them. Other than his friends that sat with him at lunch he didn’t seem to be close to anyone else. Sure, there were other people in the pictures he took, but they all seemed to be just random strangers in even stranger costumes at some kind of event.
Two; I was pretty sure he had never left the Bay Area in his life. As far as I could tell every single picture was of somewhere in the greater Bay Area, which to me seemed a bit odd and only reinforced my previous deduction that he had busy parents who probably didn’t like to go on ‘family trips’.
Three; he was an incredibly good artist. What he couldn’t take pictures of, he seemed to draw or paint instead. I found hundreds of images of everything from the mundane to the fantastic. Precisely captured or quickly expressed, but all of them beautiful.
The more I learned about him, the more I wondered how in hell he didn’t already have girls lined up around the block to date him. Their loss I guess.
It was when I was watching the same videos of him for the third time in a row that I had to admit I was entering creepy stalker territory. I finally made myself step away from the computer and go to bed. But that didn’t help me stop thinking about him as I drifted off to sleep. I didn’t know why he had just suddenly appeared in my life but I was extremely glad he had.