Excerpt: My Slightly Obsessive Fascination with Caleb Martin

He was sitting by himself—nothing new there. He was sitting at a large round table, his back to the rest of the noisy busy cafeteria, his shoulders hunched over in protective stance. He was tall, above average tall. His long legs were sprawled out beneath the table taking up the space. Slowly, he ate on some sort of sandwich—peanut butter and jelly?—and drank from a can of coke and seemed unaware of the chaos behind him.

The cafeteria was busier than usual this year since they had taken away off campus lunch after several unfortunate incidents with miniature riots at the neighborhood restaurants the year before. Most of us brown bagged it since they had taken away our off campus lunch but didn’t feel the need to improve the cafeteria food.

After surveying the chaos that was Robinson High cafeteria, I found my eyes wondering back to him; he stared out the window, but it didn’t look like he was seeing anything. The day was overcast and cold which meant that most of us didn’t really mind being stuck in the cafeteria. The thing about off campus lunch was that you felt you had to go off campus to eat every day no matter the weather. The seniors took the rule change the worst seeing as most of them were driving and probably had been looking forward to driving away at lunch to some far away destination since before they were freshmen.

My foot was kicked and I turned to face Demetrious.

“You’re being obvious,” she whispered.

I looked down at my half eaten grilled chicken salad and schooled my features. We were sitting at a table with Alana and her friends, Shantal Brown and Marissa Lowe, and they couldn’t know, could never find out about my ‘no idea’ with the guy across the cafeteria. Not that I care that much about my image, but you didn’t ‘no idea’ Caleb Martin and that was that.