He's rude

The rest of class passed rather quickly as Linda decided she liked Mr. Bell more and more. He was a young teacher who treated them like friends rather than students. Unlike her teachers in New York, she could tell Mr. Bell truly loved teaching, and it wasn’t just a job.

"Hey Luke," she asked when class ended and the students all dispersed. "What was that at the beginning of class? I thought you said you barely knew anything about those guys."

"I don’t, Linda. I don’t know anything but a mutual disgust. Can we just leave it at that?"

She nodded okay but it wasn’t sincere. Something had to have caused that much hatred. At first, linda thought maybe Diana and Luke used to date, but it seemed less like jealousy and more like something else, something intense that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully, and Linda didn’t see Luke again. After finishing her last class, she retreated to her car, totally spent.

On her way home, Linda stopped at the supermarket to pick up ingredients for her latest recipe, the one she had thought up during calculus instead of going over differential equations. All she had ever wanted to do was be a chef. And while other students her age were applying to college, she was practicing her knife and cooking skills whenever she got the opportunity, resulting in lots of good food for her family and lots of experience for future entrance examinations to culinary schools. During her gap year, Linda would hopefully be perfecting her skills in a real restaurant kitchen, but for now, she just practiced on her own. Tonight Linda was feeling homey, so she bought fresh tomatoes, spices, and flour to make some good old-fashioned spaghetti.

When she arrived home, the house was empty. Her father, she remembered, had job interviews all day with banks in Charleston’s city center. She assumed her mother was with her baby sister at the pool, since she was still too young for kindergarten.

As Linda dug her fingers into the tomatoes she had just sliced, she thought about her family. When linda was born, her parents had been twenty-three, which seemed just old enough to have a child. And when her sister was born, they had been thirty-six, which seemed just young enough. Even now, Linda never really grasped who the mistake was—her or her sister. She remembered about five years ago when she got the news. She had just begun boarding school and was thirteen, a rather inopportune age to realize your parents were still sexually active enough to have a child. Those scars were erased as soon as Linda held her little sister in her arms and looked into her bright green eyes, ones that lacked the yellow center but were filled with warmth. Even now, she couldn't wait for her mother to come home so she could play with Chloe, who always liked helping her in the kitchen (as much as a four-year-old could).

With the sauce finished, linda turned to the pasta, stirring the batter while she relived her first day. One of the amazing things about cooking was the therapy it provided. She could think about Luke, who at first glance she had figured to be the overly cocky yet oddly lovable boy. But there was something else there too. When he looked at her, it was almost like he saw something she didn't understand and maybe didn’t want to know. In a way, she was reminded of Cy, her ex-boyfriend in New York. They had only dated for a few months—it wasn’t love or anything, just fun for both of them. He had the same look as Luke, with bright blond hair that looked resolutely sun bleached. He had been overprotective of her, something that got old quickly. When she turned sixteen, he appeared out of nowhere and took over her life. While the constant calling to check in was cute at first, Linda had grown more and more frustrated. Moving home was the perfect excuse to dump him. Luke seemed more laid back, but there were traces of protection in his wannabe-knight manner. Could she see herself dating him?

Linda considered it, pondered the idea of a crush, but her mind slowly wandered from his familiar eyes to the icy blue ones belonging to Evans.

Her hands stopped mixing at the thought of him. He was too much of a distraction, even for cooking. His brooding eyes held pain and love, his dimples added a cute boyish factor, and his hair hung just low enough to make her want to run a hand through it. She could tell just by looking at him that he had put up barriers and was full of secrets—ones that linda would love to unmask. He was the kind of boy you wanted to comfort and to kiss, the kind you knew would break your heart yet hoped against all odds wouldn't. The bad boy with a soft heart, the sort of trap a girl knowingly jumped into.

Stop it, linda told herself and began kneading the dough to get out her frustration. They had barely said two words to each other, not nearly enough to begin crushing; especially when all she knew about him was that the one person she hoped to call a friend hated him.

"Linda, Linda!"

She was shocked out of her thoughts by the four-year-old now attached to her leg. Linda looked at the dough. She had kneaded it far more than necessary and more than enough to let her sister play with the now soft putty.

"Want to help me make dinner?" She asked, lifting Chloe onto the marble countertop next to the sink.

Her mother came in seconds later and kissed her on the cheek. "How was your first day?"

"Oh, fine."

Her mother sank a little—clearly, she wanted more details. "Any friends yet? Any guys? Now that you're home I’d hope to get some more information out of you."

"Well, there was this one guy," Kira began telling her mom about Luke and how he had saved her. She could tell her mother was enjoying the teenage gossip she had missed out on while linda had been up north, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak about Evans. For now, he would be her secret.

Damn you, she thought. If you’re causing me this much trouble now I can only imagine what will happen if we ever have an entire conversation.