Perfectly Stalkable In Every Way (Brea!)

[Elliot Morrow]

On a Sunday afternoon, one would normally think that a University student would be taking some time to relax, away from school and anything remotely academic. Especially with the Thanksgiving holiday coming up.

Then again, most University students weren’t Elliot Morrow.

He had taken up residence in the library for a few reasons. The first being that his roommate had his girlfriend over, and they were not studying. ... Nothing academic, anyway. Despite having headphones on, the mere notion of what they were doing was distracting enough. He was trying to wrap up a few projects prior to Thanksgiving break, so there wasn’t as much work to do upon returning to classes. Finals week would be just around the corner, and though he wasn’t worried about many of them, the few that he was concerned about were weighing on his mind.

His fingers flew over his keyboard, working on programming before trying to tackle anything for English. He had a poem he was supposed to be analyzing, but that could wait for now. It wasn’t due until after Thanksgiving, and he was very okay with that. Programming was actually rather relaxing, the lines of code almost comforting. Even if they gave most other people a headache.

As usual, he looked half put together. His sleeves were pushed up around his elbows, his hair was sticking up yet again from twisting his hands in it. He’d been told he could pull off ‘artfully disheveled’ rather well. He still didn’t know what that actually meant.

He’d brought along his headphones, so he could listen to music and type at the same time, his fingers often hitting keys in time with the thumping of Dubstep. At least he had it quiet, so as not to bother anyone else. Not that he was expecting to. The library was quite dead, and he was okay with that. Less distractions that way.

... Maybe he’d have to work on that English assignment after all. Darn.

[Brea White]

Brea had come to do homework. She did that a lot lately. It was easy to do homework here. It was quiet and, now that she was fourteen, she was allowed to leave Hammel on her own. Not that she’d had to. It hadn’t been that difficult to manage to ask her parents to give her a ride to the library, or to ride her bike there. And then she could sit in the perfect quiet, finish her algebra homework for Ms. Rivera and her history for Mr. Tonaya, and that way she could have a good rest of the week and not worry about the issues. She could torment her brothers in peace and have a wonderful weekend.

At least, that had been the goal until Mr. Tall (well, tall to a fourteen-year-old), dark, handsome and intelligent had come in through the door. And at that point Brea knew that she was beginning to experience puberty. While boys before had seemed disgusting and gross, some were becoming surprisingly…attractive. And that was creepy. But this boy was one of them. The more that she kept working on her homework the more she kept noticing how beautiful he was, typing away on the computer like an extremely industrious engineer. Or something. She wondered what he did. She wondered what he was doing. She wondered if he had a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend. Or was that weird to think?

Clearly not.

Eventually, she gave up on her homework and came over to plop down next to him, looking at him with a worryingly intense look.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Brea. Whatcha doing?”

(I'm soooo sorry this took so long!>>)

[Elliot Morrow]

Elliot hadn’t been expecting any kind of company. Then again, the last time he’d found himself with company at the library, he’d nearly gotten a concussion out of it. But Kiara had been his own age, and nice to spend time with. The public library had a nicer atmosphere than the university library. People of all ages could be found here, instead of just university students.

... No, he did not use younger students looking for research help as an excuse not to do his own work. Never.

Except maybe with English was involved.

He wasn’t actively looking for a distraction. It was only a matter of time before he was finished programming, even if he dawdled, and then he’d have to start poking through the poem for English to find some sort of theme and write a small essay on it.

And as if by some small miracle, a distraction appeared.

... A small, teenage distraction, but a distraction nonetheless. Elliot slipped his earbuds out of his ears to address her with a little smile. She reminded him a bit of his cousins. A little younger than Nikki, but a bit older than Angela, if he was guessing right.

“Hello Brea. I’m Elliot.” As for what he was doing... it would probably make her head hurt, but he moved his laptop so she could see the lines and lines of code he’d been writing. “I’m doing homework. What about you?” He was used to his cousins crawling all over him, so he didn’t mind entertaining Brea for a few minutes.

[Brea White]

He was smiling at her. He had a very nice smile. That was a good thing, right? A nice, friendly smile? She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t used to thinking of boys as anyone to care about. Boys were icky and disgusting and to be used or pranked. They weren’t supposed to be…good looking and intelligent and actually desired as company. That didn’t make any sense. Yet she did find him attractive. She couldn’t help herself. It was weird. So she just stared at him with wide eyes for a moment before she finally realized she could speak. She was half-tempted to make herself grow bigger so she could look older, but she figured he’d notice that.

“Elliot’s a nice name,” she said, then berated herself on her stupidity. Elliot’s a nice name? She REALLY had to work on that. She was an intelligent, capable woman. She wanted to rule the world one day. She’d have to learn to talk to pretty boys.

“Me too,” she said. “English. That’s programming, right?” She leaned over to look at it. “Does it normally get that complicated or are you just pretty smart?”

[Elliot Morrow]

If Elliot had known what was going on in Brea’s mind, he would have been amused. It was so opposite to what he was used to. Both of his cousins were female, and close in age to her. Yet since they were little they’d always been diehard romantics. They’d gone so far as to try to set him up on dates with some of their friends’ older sisters, until they’d learned that he wasn’t exactly into girls. Instead of freaking out, they’d just squealed with delight and sought to find him a boyfriend instead. Neither had seemed to go through the ‘boys are gross’ stage of life, skipping right from dreaming of princes and princesses to being insistent that they would find a boyfriend before Elliot would. He seemed to be the only male on the planet they tended to deem ‘gross.’

“Thank you,” he replied with a little smile. “So is Brea.” What? He could be nice and entertain the teenage girl for a bit. ... Hopefully without looking like a creepy predator.

“I hope you do better in English than I do.” Hopefully she didn’t chalk that up to his accent. When he’d first attended school in America, he’d had a few students ask how he’d learned English so fast. Granted, his accent had been a lot thicker back then. It had been a little awkward to explain that people in Ireland did, in fact, speak English. As for her recognizing his work as programming, he was impressed. “It is programming, yes. You’re the first one I’ve had figure that out on their own.” He’d even had people ask if his computer had crashed, because that was the only time they’d seen that amount of code on a screen. “It gets more complicated than this. It was a lot more simple in my first year of classes. So... it’s sort of in the middle?” He tried to ignore the comment about him being smart, because it generally made him a little uncomfortable. He just had a knack for computers. It wasn’t necessarily him being smart, right?

“What are you working on for English?” Right, because changing the subject fixed everything.

[Brea White]

It was no surprise to Brea that she’d gone through a boys-are-gross phase. It just astonished her that other people hadn’t. As she viewed it, anyone with brothers or male cousins automatically knew that boys were gross. All it took was sharing a bathroom with them, listening to them snore as they slept, watching them scratch at places that shouldn’t be scratched, and pick up their razors in the bathroom. No, it was all really, really gross, and that was why Brea had always believed that she would stay single, or maybe marry for convenience a guy who wasn’t gross. That way, they wouldn’t have to share a bathroom ever.

But even though she had so many perfectly logical reasons for thinking boys were disgusting, she couldn’t help but beam as he said that she had a nice name. This was really horrifying. What had happened to all of her pride and independence? But all she said in a frighteningly chipper and sincere voice was, “Thanks!”

Ew.

“I like English,” she said. Unlike her classmates and other peers, she’d already known that Ireland spoke English. That was a total duh moment. Plus, future rulers of the free world had to know these things. It was practically a requirement. “Are you from Ireland? I like your accent.” Now she was fawning over him. Ewwwww what was WRONG with her?! Even though part of her was mentally squeeing at the idea of him thinking she was smart, another part was horrified at her behavior and so just encouraged a casual shrug. “I read a lot,” she said as her only explanation. “But it gets harder than that? Yuck.” She leaned in closer, then shook her head and leaned back. Nope. Computer programmer and master hacker was definitely off her list.

“Analyzing Of Mice and Men and understanding the themes and context behind it,” was her prompt reply to his question. “I like Grapes of Wrath better, though. What does this program do?”

[Elliot Morrow]

Elliot has surprisingly never really gone through a ‘girls are gross, ew’ stage. He’d been brought up by just his mother, and had learned to respect girls fairly early on in life. When most boys his age had been chasing girls with worms on sticks, delighting in their screams, he’d been staying out of the way. And around the same time boys his age had started noticing that girls were in fact, pretty to look at and very nice, he’d been doing the same thing with other guys. Needless to say, it was confusing. As for being gross himself, his cousins simply considered him gross because they were related, and they loved to tease him. Apart from being a somewhat lazy University student when it came to things like clothes and haircuts, he tried to keep clean and neat. Okay, so he hadn’t shaved in about two days, but he’d been busy. Sue him.

He grinned at her reply. She reminded him a lot of Angela. Sweet, and not as devious as her older sister could be. “You’re welcome.” Hey, he had manners. He would use them.

“Oh, do you? That’s good. I don’t.” Just a few more weeks, he reminded himself. English and Economics were the bane of his existence this semester. At least she moved on. “I am,” he admitted. “I was born in Dublin, and my mother and I moved here when I was five.” The American school system hadn’t completely killed off his accent, though it was harder to place now. “But thank you.” Cale seemed to like it, too. ... Most people did, come to think of it. Mostly girls. “It does, but this is easy to me now.” It helped that a lot of it seemed to come naturally. Codes and math made sense to him. Poetry did not.

He glanced at her and smiled at her enthusiasm. If only he could muster that much for English, his professor might be less inclined to flunk him. “Sounds... fun?” Right. Like going to the dentist was fun. That kind of fun. “I’m supposed to be analyzing some poem once I’m finished with that. I might be procrastinating.” He wasn’t trying to teach her bad habits, but at least he was honest. “When it’s done, it will be a very simple game. It has to do with hitting targets.” It was technically a bit more complicated than he’d been instructed, but once he’d started, he hadn’t been able to rein himself in. “Sort of like the carnival games, but this one isn’t rigged.” Of course, right now it looked like a million lines of code, but when it had it running? It was going to be great.

[Brea White]

It was weird, but Brea actually liked the stubble on the other man. She’d never thought of beards as being…cool! Or cute. Or attractive in any way. She’d always thought of beards as things that itched when someone tried to kiss you. But since she’d only ever been kissed on the cheek by her dad or her brothers, she’d always assumed it was gross. Now she was realizing that boys could look good when they hadn’t shaved. Boys didn’t have to shave to be attractive. It was not the best revelation she’d had in her life.

So this was what hormones felt like. She really wished she could’ve avoided the whole experience. It was just embarrassing.

“And you still have an accent?” she asked, blinking. “Wow. I didn’t think you kept it for that long! But from Ireland, huh? Cool. Do you miss it? Why’d you move? Do you want to move back?” It’d be hard to be ruler of the world from Ireland, but she thought she could manage it. If she had to. If he wanted to. But that was the hormones again, right?

“Good.” She nodded firmly. “But it doesn’t surprise me. You seem really smart.” Really smart? Had that just come out of her mouth? She could’ve at least managed to slip in an insult there too, but it seemed her brain was a million miles away and just her mouth was running. And her body, apparently, because she automatically scooted closer to him and stared up at him with a winning smile.

“What poem?” she asked, then stuck out her hand. “Give it to me. I’m good with English. If I don’t become President, then I want to write. Dunno what, yet, but it’ll be awesome.” She said it with all the assurance of a fourteen-year-old who has known her mind since she was born. “And will I get to play the game? Are you gonna sell it? You should. I bet it would sell really, really well.”

EW she was turning into her peers!

[Elliot Morrow]

If only Elliot knew what was going on in Brea’s mind. He might have had a few things to say about it. He’d had to deal with his cousins’ friends fawning over him from time to time when he was younger. Before they knew enough to chase them off with not-so-subtle yells of ‘He doesn’t LIKE girls!’ Much to his dismay. Then again, Nikki had no idea how to be subtle. Ever. It made him dread her ever meeting a potential boyfriend. There would be personal questions, lots of touching, and interrogations.

... Yeah, he was glad they were an ocean away at times.

“I do. It used to be stronger, and it tends to if I’m talking to my mother, or Skyping with my cousins.” She was asking questions rapid fire now, and he tried to keep up. “I do miss it. My aunt and uncle still live there, and my two cousins. My mother was transferred here for her work when I was little, so over we came. I don’t know if I’d move back, but we do go and visit every two years or so.” There, had he covered everything? He was pretty sure he had.

Again with talking about him being smart. He shrugged a little and rubbed at his neck in the typical awkward pose. “Well, thank you?” He never knew what the appropriate response to that was. One day he’d figure it out.

He glanced at her as she scooted closer, but her little smile disarmed anything he might have said about it. Why were kids so cute? It was like Nikki and Angie. They could get away with damn near anything just by smiling like the sweet kids they so often weren’t. Seemed like Brea knew how to work the charm too.

Hey, she might actually be helpful. Sad as the thought of her ‘getting’ the poem better than he did was, he didn’t particularly care. He needed to nudge up his English grades, and rather than stooping to asking his professor for guidance...

He was going to solicit the offered help of a teenager. Right. He dug out his textbook from his bag and flipped to the page he’d marked with a dog eared page. “Here. Dream Within A Dream, by Edgar Allan Poe.” He had no idea what it meant, and they’d been told not to look online, either. It was some sort of test of what they’d learned during the semester. It wasn’t worth a huge amount towards his final grade, but still. He didn’t want to fail it. “I’m not going to sell the game, no. It’s just my final project for class. But once it’s done, I can send you the program if you really want. Or test it. It still has a few bugs.” Hey, if someone was willing to be a guinea pig, he’d let them play with it all day long. He needed to figure out all the bugs prior to handing it in.

[Brea White]

It was sad, but Brea wouldn’t have cared of Elliot wasn’t into girls. For one, she still thought sex was gross. So although she found herself very weirdly attracted to Elliot, she had no desire to get naked with him. At all. Ew. So it would’ve been the perfect solution for her, at least, in her mind. She could’ve married someone smart and good looking who would help her rule the world (or willing enough not to get in her way), and he could’ve gone and done the icky with somebody else (and NOT a female, which was perfect) while she just got pregnant artificially and had smart, good-looking children to carry on her world-ruling legacy.

All of this made perfect sense in Brea’s head.

Was she answering questions too quickly? Probably. She should slow down, nod, smile. Was she smiling? She wasn’t smiling. Why wasn’t she smiling? She wanted him to like her, right, so SMILE. This wasn’t an impossible task at all!

“Only two years?” she made a face. “I couldn’t be away from home that often.”

Of course Brea knew how to work the charm. She had two brothers. Although they were the reason she thought all boys were disgusting, she’d learned very early on how to wrap them around her little finger and had perfected it to an art.

“Oh!” She listened to him as he spoke, then nodded. “I’d like that! I’m good at telling people what they do wrong. Um.” That was a bad thing to say. But since it was true, she shrugged it off and turned her attention back to the book, frowning. “Seems like it’s about love,” was her prompt statement. “Maybe a guy holding on hope even though he knows it’s, um, a little silly?” Her cheeks felt hot, and she realized she was blushing. Blushing! She’d never blushed in her life. She passed it back. “But poetry is silly too,” she muttered under her breath.

[Elliot Morrow]

Elliot’s mind really didn’t connect Brea with an idea like a crush. Sure, his cousins constantly seemed to develop crushes on men far older than them. Didn’t all little girls? Still. Brea’s interest in him, in his mind, stemmed from no more than a desire to distract herself from homework, and perhaps just being friendly.

It was a really, really good thing he wasn’t telepathic. Otherwise he might have found an excuse to leave.

“This is more home to me now,” he assured her. “I might have been born there, but I’ve lived here for seventeen years. It’s not so bad being away.” It meant less time being hounded by female cousins, and being used as a human jungle gym for the sole purpose of entertaining them.

At least Brea was sitting in her seat, however close she seemed to inch now and again.

Her honesty made him laugh, albeit quietly. “Good. That’s exactly what I need.” He was well aware that it took time to mature and not say things like that, so she was fairly easily forgiven. Besides, technically, it was what he needed. As for the poem, he was surprised that she read into it so quickly. He’d read it over and over again and gotten... nothing but a sense of futility. Mostly his own. “Really? All that from a few lines?” Well, it sounded right, and more importantly, it was better than his own pitiful analysis. “Poetry’s ridiculous, but you’ve got to be clever to have gotten that so quickly. Thank you, Brea.” He took the book back and made a few quick typed notes in a word document. He’d pretty it up later. Now was the time for more distractions. “Do you have family here, or are you attending the school in the mountains?” Cale had told him a little when he’d admitted he was meta. Not that Elliot minded. He liked meta-humans. They were always interesting.

[Brea White]

Of course, this was the part that Elliot didn’t quite understand about Brea. Brea never tried to distract herself from her homework. She was devoted to her homework. She got extremely upset when she didn’t get a good grade and her homework was probably the one thing, other than her family, that mattered most to her.

She nodded. “I see. Well, that’s nice.” Nice? That was all she could think of to say. Nice? It figured. How obnoxious was that! She was really going to have to read up on normal conversation topics with guys. Definitely. “It’s really nice here,” she said. “If this is the place you had to be, then it could be worse! I’ve never lived anywhere else, but I really like it here.” And that, that just sounded stupid.

Brea blinked at him. He couldn’t get that? Well, maybe he was more of the technical sort than the poet sort. Couples were supposed to complement each other and make up for the other’s inabilities. And since she knew nothing about programming and wasn’t likely to, and he knew nothing about poetry, it was perfect. The best idea she’d had!

Andd she was getting silly again. It was time to stop. Now. But she couldn’t help herself from brightening as he called her bright. Yup. She was pathetic. “Poetry isn’t ridiculous,” she said. “It’s expressing yourself when just words won’t do it. It’s trying to be symbolic and stuff because people feel weird saying stuff that they feel sometimes.”

But at least this question she knew how to answer correctly. “Both,” she said promptly. “My parents are teachers and I go to the school in the mountains. Did you?”

[Elliot Morrow]

If he knew just how academically driven that Brea was, she was about eight years older, and he actually took an interest in females, Elliot might have just found his soul mate. Of course, he was setting a fine example, given that he’d admitted he was procrastinating. Apparently his programming was interesting enough to overrule that particular fact.

It was nice, going back every so often. Elliot didn’t find that obnoxious at all, so Brea really didn’t have to worry. “It is nice here.” In its’ own way. Ireland and Vermont were different, sure, but he liked both. “I like it here too. It’s smaller and quieter than Burlington.” Not by much, but still. It was nice.

A lot of things did not click with Elliot. Technical things he did well with. Math, physics. Things with more than one right answer? Not so much fun, nor did they make as much sense to him. At least Brea understood it. He’d hate for anyone else to go through school dreading classes as basic and common as English.

Her take on poetry was... well, exactly what his professor had tried to teach him. Still, the explanation made him smile a little. “Sometimes it’s better to be straightforward, though. Then no one gets mixed signals about what you might mean.” He couldn’t imagine trying to actually talk to someone like that. How would anyone ever know what anyone else meant?

Ah, another meta. He seemed to be on a roll, between Caleb, Reggie, and now Brea. “No, I didn’t.” He smiled sheepishly. “I’m what you might call... baseline?” He liked the word much better than ‘normal’ for referring to unpowered humans. “But I know people who have gone to that school too.” Like Caleb.

[Brea White]

Brea didn’t care about procrastination. Had it been her brothers, she would’ve bugged him needlessly about the whole thing. But since it was Elliot and she was more and more convinced that he was the perfect person to be her First Gentlemen. Or her husband in her quest to rule the world. She had yet to decide.

She nodded in understanding to his statement and smiled at him. She probably would’ve smiled at him even if he’d said he hated it there—well, maybe not then. Although Brea viewed Pilot Ridge as a necessary but boring stepping stone in her path to a better career, she did like the town and she would be proud to call it home once she was elected to a higher office. “Pilot Ridge is good at quiet,” she agreed. It wasn’t much good for anything else, but it did real good at quiet.

She frowned. “Yeah, but…romance is supposed to be fun.” Judging by her tone, she wasn’t sure she believed it to be the case. She viewed romance as pretty silly. Marriages were all about partnerships to her mind and producing kids. What was the point of getting all gooey about it? He viewed the same, it seemed! That was the good thing.

She nodded. She had to keep that term in mind. It was very politically correct and allowed all groups to feel adequate. Good for a future ruler of the world. “My brother is,” she said. “I think it bothers him, though. The rest of us are meta. But I like him like that. He doesn’t do weird things.” She was talking too much. “I have two brothers. Do you have any siblings?”

[Elliot Morrow]

It seemed like every time Elliot came to the public library for schoolwork, he seemed to get sidetracked far easily than if he’d just stayed in his dorm. Oh well. He liked socializing, and he wasn’t behind on his work. Brea was a sweet kid, and easy to talk to. It was just like hanging out with Angie, really.

Pilot Ridge really was good at quiet. Better than Burlington, and that was saying something. He really hadn’t minded moving into the dorms at the university and having it as his closest town. Sure, he still went back to Burlington for holidays and long weekends, but spending time near Pilot Ridge really was nice. Besides, he’d made friends in school, and he had Caleb now. ... Sort of. He still wasn’t sure on that front.

Aww, so Brea really was just like most other girls her age. Romance was all Disney-esque. Still. He found that an indirect approach was almost... well, not practical. How did someone know what you meant when all you did was talk in metaphors? ... Great, he was actually retaining things from English. “It is fun,” he assured. “Nothing says it can’t be fun without metaphors.” Of course, it was being indirect that was killing him with Caleb now. Sure, they’d gone out, and were planning on doing it again, but did that make them ‘official’? He still didn’t know. Being intellectual unfortunately didn’t help much with that.

But he still liked romance.

That must be odd for her brother. He somewhat sympathized. Half of his friends were meta, and if they were doing something with their powers, or talking about their school, it was a little difficult, yes. “I don’t, no. Just two cousins, who live in Ireland. They’re both younger than me.” After a pause, he smiled. “How old are your brothers?” That wasn’t a creepy question, right?