When the girl next door, the girl you’ve had a crush on for years, comes to you for help, you know things have changed and just maybe you might have a dream come true. But sometimes dreams just aren’t what they are built up to be. A mystery short story by bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith.
Clicking Sticks
Dean Wesley Smith
Copyright 2010 by Dean Wesley Smith
Published by WMG Publishing
Discover other titles by this author on Smashwords.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Clicking Sticks
Dean Wesley Smith
Annie.
Five simple letters that strike fear into me like I am an American Flag and Betsy Ross is a serial killer coming at me with scissors. Annie. That simple, traditional name brings images to my mind of slightly too large breasts, narrow hips, and a smile as cold as a hooker’s zipper.
Annie, the cheerleader, the president of my senior class, the smart girl who is destined to become “something” or “someone” if she can keep those tight little red cheerleader panties up long enough to not let her loser boyfriend get her pregnant.
Annie, the girl I’ve been in love with since the first grade when she and her parents moved in next door. The actual girl next door, the same one that used to join our baseball games and who helped us build a brick fort in the masonry plant lot one summer.
Annie, the first girl I ever kissed because her sister told her she had to when we both stood under mistletoe. For the first three, maybe four years that she lived next door, she was just Annie. A good friend, someone fun to be with.
Then she changed.
She became a “girl.”
Now Annie scared the fuck out of me every time she smiled when we met in the hall, every time she said, “Hi, Brad,” in that bet-you-want-to-see-my-tits voice.
Sure, I wanted to see them. No straight boy in the school didn’t. I’d wanted to see them since they started becoming an issue in the 4th grade, when she started to wear that first bra a year before most other girls had to. That first year I had even asked her to see them, and she might have let me if her damn sister hadn’t been home early that day.
Annie lived next door to me and her bedroom window faced mine over what seemed like six miles of grass and a chain link fence. A couple of times I had caught glimpses of her in her underwear and bra through her bedroom window when the summer night was hot and she had left her blinds open. And I want to say right now that there is no truth to the rumor I used to spend nights camped under that window. I only went over that fence once. Maybe twice.
Too damn scary. And I never saw anything but bra.
I suppose I sound like a pansy-ass wimp-boy, talking about being so afraid of a simple cheerleader. Usually, I don’t show fear. I ride motocross and can catch some pretty good air at times. And I’ve had other girlfriends, even gone out with Annie’s best friend a few times. Girls don’t worry me that much, and neither does getting hurt or even getting killed. Actually, not much in the world really scares me.
Except Annie.
And I might have gone all the way through the last year of high school and kept being afraid of her if not for her stupid-ass jock boyfriend. Rees.
Rees Trager, cliché. I figured he should have a shirt with that on it. Star of the football team, point guard for the Oregon State high school basketball champions, rich parents, not many brains, and not a single social skill to be found. Add that mixture in to an ego the size of his Hummer and a love of too much vodka and I figured Annie was doomed unless she ran like hell. But I sure wasn’t going to be the one to mention that fact to her. I figured she was smart and would eventually see the light, or should I say, lack of light in old Rees’s eyes.
I just didn’t expect her to come running to me, dear old neighbor Brad, when she saw that light. But that was exactly what happened.
Two in the morning, Thursday night, Friday morning. I’d finishing cramming for a physics test and had just nodded off when someone knocked. Actually, tapped. Lightly. On my window.