"Wake up."

Clive struggled with consciousness. Lights danced in the corners of his vision, taunting him. Quinn sat at the edge of his bed with her right leg resting comfortably atop his duvet. Her left leg hung off the edge, swinging.

"Your dad let me in. I caught him as he was on his way out, actually. He mentioned you've been sleeping in a lot longer than usual. I take it that's a good thing?" She asks.

Clive adjusted himself as he blinked from the strain in his eyes.

"No idea know what it means," Clive responds as he tries to settle into his new position.

"So! I've made a list," Quinn quickly interjects. She radiates with joy as she bounces from excitement in her oversized sky-blue sweater.

"A list?" Clive asks.

"Yes, a perfect list. Every movie I deem worthy of a spectacularly scary movie marathon. All you have to do is pick."

Quinn leans back and contorts her body into a twist. She tries to reach for the floor below her while maintaining as much of her original position as possible. Quinn lets out a small groan and then swings her arm up in victory, holding a small journal. The book lands on his lap. Quinn fought with a giant smirk as she waited for his decision.

Clive was no longer there. His mind had wandered back to his encounter with his mysterious neighbor, Margo. He played every moment over, dissected every detail. Every flourish, every word. Trying to understand as much as he could about her in that short interaction. The thought, however, could not escape him. Maybe it was all a dream. Another side of the coin flipped, first the nightmare and now the fantasy. How much of it was just his wishful thinking? Quinn catches one of his gazes as he stares blankly around the room.

Clive resisted at first, fighting his urge to speak on it, knowing that maybe it would be better to figure it out himself. Her expression hardened and persisted. Words no longer needed to be said.

Clive relents, "She came up to my window last night."

"Who?" Quinn asks as her guard begins to form.

"The new girl across the street, Margo," Clive responds.

There is no change in her expression. Clive jumps up without baiting and recounts the entire thing on his feet. He paints every detail, using his body even to copy her swaying. The whole thing had evolved into a monologue. His one-man show. Her expression remained unchanged. When he finished, he could see it in her eyes. She looked sad, annoyed even. Her lips pursed. He could even hear a little sigh just before she spoke.

"This seems familiar to you?" Quinn asked as Clive stood in the middle of his room. The breeze from his bedroom window caught him in a funny way. He realized that he was only in his underwear. Pine green boxers embellished with little tawny otters running all around them.

"What do you mean?" Clive asked as he tried to shift away from the breeze, unsuccessfully.

"You don't think this is just repeating a cycle? Do you remember what happened with Alice?" Quinn asks.

"Of course, I remember what happened with Alice."

"You sure? Cause what I remember is you pined after her for years. She was always the girl across the street, and you were the guy who only watched her from the window. Anyone else would have written you off. Because without proper context, without understanding your situation, it is creepy. Somehow, even through all that, within the last year, she decides finally to try to get to know you. Years watching the girl across the street, and finally, Alice is your friend. And you guys got close, like really close. Then you just shut her out. No reason, no explanation. Then you go back to pining after her from afar, to how things started. Except you could have had a real relationship, a real friendship, Clive. You would rather have nothing with her than have anything. Why? I don't understand you, but you do it every time. The moment anyone gets too close to you, you self-destruct, sabotage, and then push them away."

Her eyes pierce, and Clive retracts his gaze, trying to avoid the pointed stare.

Clive wraps himself in his arms, hugging himself. His hands touching his bare skin, arms wrapped around the front of his belly.

"I can change," Clive says, gripping himself tighter as he tries to compensate for no shirt.

"I know you will, eventually. What if you can't right now? I can't watch you blow yourself up again. I don't know if I can keep helping you pick up the pieces after," Quinn drops her head as she says it.

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"No one asked you to."

"You are my best friend, Clive. I jus- say I am wrong. You somehow fail to blow this up. And somehow end up in a relationship. Do you think it would work out? Never able to go out with her, always stuck in this house? Deep down, you know that, for it to work, you would have to be better. You would have to be cured. I don't want to be the one to say this, Clive, but what if you can't be?"

As the words left her lips, she heard Clive in his immediate reaction.

"Fuck you," Clive yells. "What kind of friend says that."

They sit in it for a while. Clive does his best to use his arms as cover for his torso. He lacks it in him to make it onto the bed, too angry to sit beside her. He felt exposed. Quinn looked up. Her eyes watered at its edges, and the anger bubbled to the surface. She lunges angrily off the bed and grabs her bag from the floor. She takes one final look at Clive before exiting the room.

"So much for not pushing people away."

~

There is a knock on the bedroom door. Clive looks over and sees his father standing by the entrance. He slowly approaches the bed and sits beside him. They share in the silence.

"You good? Sounded like a nasty one," His father asks. Clive faced the bed, but he raised his eyes to meet him.

"I do- not really. How much did you hear?" Clive asks, trying to hide the pained expression on his face.

"Everything. Yeah, pretty much the whole thing."

His father gives a hearty chuckle, and Clive tries to smile through his frustration.

"Don't be too hard on them," he says softly. He places his hand on his son's shoulder.

"Quinn is probably just scared."

"Scared?" Clive abruptly turns his body to face his father with a puzzled expression.

"What is there to be scared of?" Clive asks, his frustration bubbling back up to the surface. "I just want to be normal."

His father pulls his hand from Clive's shoulder. He takes a breath and asks, "How long have you known Quinn?"

"Since I was like eight or nine or something," Clive responds.

"Right, and in those seven or eight years, your friendship has had to be on your terms. They know it's not your fault, but it is limiting. Your entire relationship with them is based on what you can or cannot do. So I don't know, maybe Quinn's scared of being left behind. It's natural to wonder whether or not you'd be as close as you are now if you didn't have this barrier."

"That's insane," Clive barks out.

"I never said that it wasn't selfish or irrational, but that doesn't make it any less real. It's natural to be afraid, to worry, especially of losing someone you love."

~

Clive looked over at his end table and picked up his sketchbook. He combed through the pages, reminiscing on some of the drawings. Those of Alice rushed through with soft lines and basic shading. His sketch of Margo and the smoke he drew coming from her cigarette. There was one he had forgotten. He used a reference photo of a caterpillar bursting out of its cocoon. His rendition was chaotic. He could hardly remember what it was just from looking at it. He spent a moment on a page he had filled with strange sketches of birds. A pair of them in each scene, in different styles and forms. He remembered laughing with Quinn as he showed her the version of them as mecha birds and the like.

She always knew how to get on his nerves, he thought to himself. She never did know how to take no for an answer.

The way she stood in the foyer as if someone had been expecting her, still irked him to this day. Clive had walked from his room to the top of the staircase. He had heard the door slam closed and thought he should greet his father on his return. Clive hardly left his room much those days and barely mustered the energy to go downstairs. The least he could do was summon himself to the top of the staircase and nod to his father silently in acknowledgment. He was unphased as she stood there leaking onto the floorboards. A little girl who had wandered into his house unattended. Going by his expression, nothing about it seemed particularly interesting. Not a curl of the eyebrow or even a more pronounced frown.

"Who are you? She brazenly asked, her clothes and hair dripping onto the floor.

"Who are you?!" Clive exclaimed at the strange girl in his house. She was petite with hair so long they reached her knees. Her shirt was too large for her body. The sleeves drooped and hung off her arms, soaked like the rest of her. She shook her head like a wet dog, then wrung her hair onto the floor.

"Quinn," She says after her entire presentation.

"Are you just gonna stand there, or are you gonna hand me a towel?"

"No," Clive yelps out.

"What do you mean, no?" She angrily responds.

"You're a stranger," Clive yelps. "Get out of my house."

"No, you're the stranger. Hand me a towel!" She barks, a step away from stomping her foot.

"No, you didn't even say please," He protests as he leans on the handrail.

"Please," Her voice softens, but only a touch. She spreads out her arms and swings them slowly. The sleeves have stretched out from the moisture. The puddles formed and spread further by the minute. Clive slowly walks down the stairs. He makes no effort to hide the anger in his face. Clive opens the closet door beside the staircase and stands on his toes, making little jumps to reach the towels on top. He stumbled and fell with the gray extra towel in his hand.

"Here," he says as he extends his arm out.

She swipes at the towel, no thank you, no nothing. She runs it through her head and her hair wildly.

"Do you do this a lot? Just enter random people's houses?" Clive asks as he watches her dry her hair.

"No. It was raining."

"So you just come in? You're not worried about entering a stranger's house?" Clive says as he sits on the bottom of the stairs.

"No, It was open. I was just trying to get out of the rain." She responds as she places the towel over her shoulders.

"What if you get kidnapped? You're not scared of disappearing?"

"No," She says, "I'd kick them."

Clive's father arrived home not too long after. He laughed at their bickering as he made the young girl soup. They waited together for the rain to stop and then took her home. Clive probably wouldn't remember it now. He was so young. At least not in any way that would matter, but his interaction with Quinn was the most he had spoken in months.