Free Where the Staircase Ends by Stacy A. Stokes

something else, but Justin cut him off before he could start squawking.
    “Actually, I found your analysis to be pretty spot-on.” Justin laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back in his chair, like he was relaxing beside a pool rather than saving my ass from Brandon’s onslaught. “Technically I think she’s supposed to be physically dying in the poem, but I think it has more application like you said. I think it can pertain to any big event that happens in life—a break-up as well as a physical death. And I think you’re completely right about her juxtaposing an everyday housefly with a major event like death. It’s absurd really, that someone is on their death bed about to take their last breath and something as common as a housefly interrupts. It’s a pairing of the momentous and the mundane.” He paused and gave me a little wink, and if I wasn’t already completely in love with him then I totally fell in that moment, with that wink.
    For good measure, he added, “It’s like that John Lennon phrase, ‘life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. ’ She’s making plans to die—be it physically or emotionally—and life just happens. This fly just happens. Like you said, life goes on regardless of the big stuff that happens to us personally.”
    Like I said, he was smart smart. Not to mention a knight in shining armor. He articulated it way better than I did, and he saved me. Right there in front of douche-kabob Brandon, who hated being shown up in class. But of course the difference between people like Brandon and people like Justin was that the Brandons of the world had to work hard to outshine other people while Justin just did it. It’s like he couldn’t help it.
    Justin gave me another wink (and I said a silent prayer for the black shirt again because I was definitely sweating), and then he gave Brandon the best go-to-hell look I’ve ever seen. Man, I wished I had a picture of Brandon’s expression. His face was scrunched up so tightly it looked like he’d eaten a raw lemon, and his fingers gripped the desk with so much force that he would have cracked the plastic molding if it weren’t for the fact that he had the upper body strength of a six-year-old girl.
    Mrs. Johnson was pretty impressed with Justin’s delivery. She turned to me and said, “Great job, Taylor. Very thoughtful analysis.” I had to wonder if she would have felt the same way if Justin hadn’t stood up for me.
    I slid back into my desk, relief flooding over me now that my afternoon of public humiliation was finally over. My hands were still shaking, so I slid them under my desk before anyone could see and shot one tiny sideways glance in Justin’s direction.
    He was staring at me again.
    It was moments like those, when Justin’s eyes burned into me like he was searching for something, that I wished I could be more like Sunny. She would have held his gaze. She would have offered him one of her seductive smiles. She wouldn’t have looked away or blushed the way I did.
    But Sunny wasn’t the one he was staring at. I was.
    When the bell rang, I gathered my books slowly, trying to draw out my proximity to Justin as long as I could.
    “Hey,” he said, reaching down next to my desk to pick up a pen I’d dropped on the floor.
    “Hey,” I said, letting a small grin escape despite my best effort to hide it.
    “I hope you didn’t mind me chiming in on your analysis. I just didn’t want Brandon to rip into you.”
    He sat down on the desk next to mine and ran a hand through his hair, his mouth doing the half-smile thing it always did so I couldn’t tell if he was really smiling or just looking at me.
    “No, it was great. You saved me. Thank you.”
    “You didn’t really need saving,” he said, and this time I was sure he was smiling at me. “You were doing fine.”
    “How are you so good at this stuff?” I asked, wrinkling my nose at him. “Do you secretly study a lot, or do the answers just