Excerpt: Bombastic Love: A Love For All Seasons

I first met Autumn Ayres when he came to my first grade class to read to us. Apparently, from what I gathered at the time, he was some sort of reading genius. Whatever. I had a seventh grade reading level in the first grade. I didn’t think he would be any hot shot.
And I was right.
The first thing I noticed about Autumn was his red hair. Okay, okay, auburn. Whatever. But it was a weird colour.
And it was up in pigtails.
What kind of boy wears pigtails to school? In the third grade, no less!
Mrs. Carpenter, my old as dirt first grade teacher, welcomed him into the classroom with open, cobweb-filled arms. But I didn’t like him. Nope. Not one bit.
He wore fucking pigtails.
But, ugh, he was nice. To everyone. Yes, even me. And he had these cute little melted chocolate-coloured eyes that just sparkled as he took in our room. He clutched Stuart Little in his thin little arms. Mrs. Carpenter instructed him to take a seat at the head of our class.
Which meant he got to sit in a little plastic chair to read to a semi-circle of first grade brats while Mrs. Carpenter went out back to puff on her cigarette for thirty minutes.
Everyone won in this situation.
I was, of course, the last one up from my seat (I was writing my latest best seller about a little boy who grows up to be a badass doctor. Shut up. It sounds lame now, but it was amazing when I turned it in to the writing challenge we had that year. It won first place, bitch). As the circle of kids was forming, I saw Autumn’s curious brown eyes peering at me.
“What?” I growled, as threatening as a five year old could be.
Autumn looked at me for a few more moments, then smiled disarmingly, “You have pretty eyes.”
Excuse me?!, I wanted to scream. Boys weren’t supposed to tell other boys that they were “pretty.” That was a girl thing.
I was infuriated, to say the least. How dare this third grader tell me I was pretty. Bastard.
“Your pigtails are stupid and girly,” I fired back, placing my hands on my hips. The kids from my class gathered around Autumn and I, all curious eyes and thoughts filled with “fightfightfight!”
Autumn looked crushed. He held onto Stuart Little a little tighter. “That was mean of you.”
I stuck out my tongue like the mature five year old that I was. “So?”
I thought he was going to be a bitch back to me, but I soon learned that that wasn’t part of Autumn’s personality. “Well, you have nice clothes.”