Day 300 – Writing Exercise

…

Harry stood on his back veranda, clutching a fistful of crumpled self-help printouts and staring up at the indifferent night sky.  He didn’t notice the fact that it had started to snow, or that he was wearing his pyjamas and had forgotten to put on slippers.

Perhaps his original intention was for the earth to swallow him up.  Then he looked up at the dark, grey sky, and felt a snowflake land in his eye, stinging.

“Give me something,” he pleaded to the universe, his voice cracking slightly. “Please. Anything.”

Doing the conventional thing had caused him nothing but trouble up to now. He had tried the movie-standard grand gestures: the boombox outside the window (which had resulted in the police being called for a noise complaint and Chloe throwing a heavy textbook at his head).

He had tried the literary approach: leaving anonymous, poetic notes in her locker (which she had handed to the school counsellor out of genuine concern for the author’s mental stability).

He had tried the internet forums, the sitcom tropes, and the well-meaning advice of his friends, all of which culminated in a restraining-order-adjacent reputation as “that weird, intense guy.”

Chloe was brilliant, chaotic, sarcastic, and possessed a laugh that could jump-start a dying car battery. And every standard piece of advice had made it abundantly clear: she was not interested in being wooed in any traditional form.

It was time to get unconventional, if his brain could get past the conventional definition.

Of course, he sighed inwardly; that was the one fatal flaw in this grand plan. His imagination was like an empty beige-painted, uncarpeted room. His idea of rebellion was crossing the street when the pedestrian light was flashing red. When he tried to picture “out of the box,” he just pictured a slightly larger box.

And inspiration was just an eleven-letter word.

Desperate, he closed his eyes, spun around three times—because desperation makes people do stupid things—and fell.  Lying there, a thought came to mind, something he had read before: perhaps he should lie there until the snow covered him over, and Chloe might just want to find out what happened to him.

Or not.  She didn’t know he existed.  Or worse, that he was a crazy guy that she would cross the road to avoid.

How did it get to this?

Why did he have to like the one girl in the school that had eyes for everyone else but him?

He dragged himself off the ground when the snow started to melt, and the damp caused him to shiver.  No point getting pneumonia, though that might invoke a moment of sympathy.

Or not.  He stumbled blindly back into his house, tripping over the welcome mat, landing on the floor with a thud.

Marilyn, his older sister, the meanest person he knew, was well aware of the crush he had on Chloe, and was determined to make his life as miserable as she could.  She had just come downstairs to raid the pantry and saw him lying flat out on the floor.  She had heard his lament, and for a moment felt sorry for him.  He had no idea.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to see the kitchen from a different point of view.”  The last thing he wanted was to verbally spar with the bitch from hell.

“You know you’re just an idiot, don’t you, and I had to draw the short straw and get you as the embarrassing little brother.”

“What does that make you?”

She regarded the love-sick mess under her feet.  She could help him, or not.  Chloe had asked her what her brother’s problem was, and when she told her, she laughed.  Not in a mean way, like Marilyn had thought she would.  That he would care had surprised her.

“Your older sister, for better or worse, and today, it’s for worse.  Give it up.  All you’re doing is making my life hell.”

“Thanks for nothing.”

She held out her hand and then dragged him off the floor. 

A minute later, after observing the miserable expression of a boy who had run out of ideas, she sighed.  “Be yourself.  God help the world.  Stop trying to be something you’re not.”

“You told me yourself that I have all the personality of a bookend.  How’s that going to help me?”

‘The world needs bookends, Harry.  Just like they need egotistical assholes and brainless quarterbacks.  You just need to figure out how to make a bookend become the thing everyone wants.”

“If I could do that, I would become a billionaire.”

“Exactly.  Now go and get some sleep, or study back issues of the Wall Street Journal.  I don’t care, but I want to be alone, so I don’t ave to justify my food choices to you.”

He shrugged.  Like always, Marilyn just spoke in riddles.  Perhaps her brain had been addled from writing those strange text messages of hers, well, everyone, in fact.  He didn’t get it.  Why didn’t people actually speak to each other? 

Just like Chloe, in fact, just about everyone he knew.  When they were not speaking a language he could not decipher.  Who started sentences with ‘like’ or ‘but’ and never even finished one? 

He shrugged.  “Try cornflakes and banana with strawberry-flavoured milk.”

She made a face that said she would rather die first.  “Go away, gnat.”

He stomped up the stairs to his room, mumbling to himself, “Be yourself- what the hell does that mean, exactly?”  What was ‘himself’?  A nerd, a bookworm, a study monster. What?  Just like Marilyn, to speak in riddles.

If he were to turn up at Chloe’s door dressed in his usual clothes- suit, crisp white shirt, bow tie, carefully combed hair, and polished glasses- all that would elicit was a scowl.  That was being ‘himself’.

He closed the door to his room behind him and glared at the posters of all the Sci-Fi shows he liked, Star Trek, Stargate, The X-Files, Firefly, and let his mind drift into outer space.  Out there all he would have to worry about was the aliens.

He opened the door to his closet and took in the array of clothes.  Then he saw what he wasn’t looking for: the two items that stood out like a sore thumb, a plain light blue T-shirt and jeans.  Below, sneakers.  All new, all bought by his sister and put there as a joke.

And part of a dare.  If he wore them, she would pay for a ticket to Comic-Con.

Even with that as an incentive, he couldn’t do it.  It was just not him.

Which…

He was desperate; he was out of ideas, oh God, this can’t be the way…

He looked at the transformation in the mirror and then felt sick, the sort of feeling that he had once before after eating some fast food his sister had dared him. 

A T-Shirt, tucked into the jeans, over sneakers.  Combed hair in the opposite direction, contact lenses rather than glasses.  The latter he hated because they hurt his eyes, and he couldn’t find the right balance for wearing them longer than an hour.  Even now they made his eyes twitchy.

This was all wrong.  This was a mistake.

This was going to ruin any chance he might have had just to talk to her.

He waited until his sister had come back upstairs and gone into her room, the door slamming shut, and an emphatic notice for no one to bother her.  It was girl talk time when they all hooked up on the phone.  He could never understand how they could talk for hours after seeing each other all day at school.

He shrugged, a last look adding weight to the heavy heart he already felt.

“This,” he told himself, “was going to be a monumental waste of time.”

Ten minutes later, Harry found himself standing on the sidewalk outside Chloe’s apartment building.

The walk from his place had taken about half an hour, and it had not elicited one stare, one comment, and no one had changed sides of the road to avoid him.  But, he hadn’t seen anyone he knew.  That might change very soon.

His heart hammered against his ribs. This was profoundly stupid. It was humiliating. It was guaranteed to fail.  Just changing his appearance didn’t change what was underneath, and it shouldn’t matter.

But he had the strangest feeling that it might, which meant it was working.

He didn’t knock on her door. He picked up a pebble and tossed it gently at her second-story window.

A moment later, the glass slid open. Chloe leaned out, looking annoyed, ready to yell at whichever neighbourhood cat or idiot was disturbing her study time. She looked down.

She froze.

Harry looked up at her, bathed in the amber glow of the streetlamp. He didn’t recite poetry. He didn’t hold up a stereo. Instead, with trembling hands, he slowly raised his hand and waved directly at her as a deadpan, agonisingly awkward salute.

For three excruciating seconds, the night was dead silent.

Then, Chloe clutched the windowsill, buried her face in her arms, and lost entirely.

Laughter bubbled up out of her—shaking, breathless, helpless laughter that echoed down the quiet street. She pushed herself away from the window, vanished for a second, and then the front building door buzzed open with a loud, welcoming buzz.

Minutes later, she was standing on her front porch, wrapped in an oversized cardigan, tears of mirth still sparkling in her eyes as she looked him up and down.

“Harry,” she wheezed, wiping her cheek. “What on earth are you wearing?”

“A disguise.  I thought if you saw someone else, it might…” The sentence petered out, his shyness finally getting the better of him, the absurdity of the situation finally making him crack a nervous smile.

Chloe looked at him—really looked at him—standing there in what she thought he would believe he was looking like a disaster movie extra. The corner of her mouth twitched, and that magnificent laugh broke out again, warm and bright.

“You did this for me, you would completely change who you are just because you thought I would prefer this,” she waved her hand in his direction, “disguise?”

“Nothing else worked?”

“Because I don’t want grand gestures.  Everyone thinks they have to impress me.  They don’t.  I want ordinary; I want someone who cares about me; I want someone to just turn up, talk in ordinary plain sentences that I don’t have to try and decipher the underlying meaning.  I thought, out of everyone in this hell hole of a town, you would get it?”

“I’m just a stupid boy who can’t find the words to tell a girl how much he loves her.”

“And yet, you just did.”  She smiled.

She took his hand.  “I like you, Harry.  But you must work on finding a balance between the sublime and the ridiculous.  But now that you’re here, I need help with Algebra.  I can spell the word; I just can’t make those strange letters and numbers mean anything.  Are you free?”

Harry gulped, closed his eyes, and felt a tear in one eye, then opened them to see the world, and Chloe, in a whole different way. 

“Of course.”

As he stepped past her, Harry finally stopped trying to figure out if it was good or if it was bad. It was just them, and somehow, that was working.

…

©  Charles Heath  2026