Free Being True by Jacob Z. Flores Page A

this school thinks they have it rough.”
    “We all have it rough. It’s just a different kind of rough for everyone.”
    Claudia stared at me in silence. For probably the first time in her life, someone had made her speechless. That didn’t last long. “I’ve never met anyone like you, Truman Cobbler.”
    “Likewise,” I said with a click of my tongue.
    She wrinkled her nose. “Don’t make that noise,” she said. “It’s weird.”
    I almost burst out laughing. She clearly didn’t realize she did the same thing.
    I was just about to let Claudia in on the joke, when her confused expression changed to complete shock. If her mouth had hung any lower, she’d be a character in Family Guy .
    “What’s going on?” I asked.
    “Holy fuck!” she practically screamed.
    I tried to shush her into silence, but she continued cursing and staring over my shoulder. I rushed to the door of the computer lab, where we were working by ourselves, to listen for Mr. Avila’s footsteps. If he’d heard her cursing, she’d be in trouble.
    “I should have known,” she said. “It makes sense. No wonder I liked him so much.”
    “What are you talking about?” I asked after sticking my head through the doorway. Mr. Avila was not stomping toward us. He sat in his office listening to music while the rest of the staff worked to meet their deadlines.
    “I’m such a big dumbass, but I can see it so clearly now.”
    “Will you tell me what’s going on?” I asked as I made my way back to where she was having a meltdown.
    “Just look at the pictures,” she said gesturing to the images I’d taken that morning.
    They were pretty good shots for selfies. In each one, Javi’s arm hung around my neck, and seeing the photos brought me back to earlier that morning. I still remembered the warm weight of Javi’s arm, and the tingling sensations the contact had caused across my body. It had been as if hundreds of feathers were stroking my skin at exactly the same time. I hadn’t wanted the moment to end.
    My smile was still all teeth, and I did look like a horse. That would probably never change, but from the angle I’d taken the shots, my nose and ears looked almost normal.
    “Do you see it?” she asked, obviously greatly concerned.
    “See what?” I looked from one photo to the next. The only thing different was Javi’s expression. A shy, hopeful smile had replaced his trademark grin in one of the five.
    “So he’s not grinning like he does all the time,” I answered. “So what?”
    “Oh, my God!” she said. She practically pulled her purple-tinged hair out by the roots. “He’s not looking at the camera. He’s looking at you.”
    “Take a chill pill, why don’t you. It’s not like we don’t have others.” I pointed to the other photos on the screen. In them, Javi looked squarely at the camera with his standard mischievous grin. “We can use one of those. Unless you want to do a reshoot without me in the shot. I can certainly understand that. I didn’t want to be in the picture, but Javi insisted.”
    Claudia took several deep breaths to calm down. Apparently, I wasn’t seeing what she was.
    “Men are oblivious.”
    “So what am I missing?”
    “Javi likes you.”
    What was so shocking about that? Of course he liked me. Why else would he have said hi to me yesterday or done any of the others things he’d done? “And you find this so shocking you practically turn into a foul-mouthed sailor?”
    “You don’t understand,” she said. “Look at the picture. Really look at the picture.”
    So I did, and I saw everything I did before. Except this time I noticed Javi’s eyes. The ones that had locked onto my soul the first time our gazes connected. He looked down upon me with a tender affection I’d only seen once before. In a picture of my parents where my father was looking at my mother.
    Suddenly the meaning of the word “like” took on a whole different meaning. But it couldn’t be true. Claudia had read