Here's something stupid from English:

The lunchroom shrieked and giggled in my ears, and the pungent scents of fried cheese and hot pizza spurred me on so that I flew from the door to the stairwell. I was rushed; I was panting; I was moving half a mile per hour because this school is like a can of live sardines. Faces swarmed past, too many to process, so many that my eyes swept over them carelessly and did not notice one until, right in front of me, a big smile in a black-curled frame seized my attention, and I smiled impulsively.

From the stage I could stare down to the end of the corridor, but the hall was empty. “This guy just smiled at me on the stairs.”
Claire only glanced at me. “Well, was he hot?”
“Yeah… I guess he was handsome…. But who was he? And why did he smile at me?”
“Just being friendly, probably.” And she went back to her grey chicken strips.
But the next day I was slower to leave class, more watchful of the faces around me. My chest felt compressed and I worried the first ten seconds that I wouldn’t see him again at all. But there he was, and, with a flash of white teeth, gone again. Well, this was insufferable! Every day, the same: this strange person would stroll past and SMILE at me!
My perplexity was such that would not remain silent. “Who ARE you?” I cried at last.
Well, he jumped about a foot in the air. “I’m Jay,” he managed to utter after a moment’s recovery. I was shocked at how high-strung he was.
With a laugh, I said, “And I’m Sarah. Hug?” My arms spread expectantly.
He looked at me suspiciously. “Okay….” Then, stiffly, a quick embrace with another smile, embarrassed, now; and shy goodbyes. I walked away laughing.
The next few days were much as before; we didn’t talk, only grinned and maybe said hello once or twice. That was until he turned around one day and he said to me in a voice far too interested: “So, what do you usually eat for lunch?”
This was obviously an insane way to start a conversation, yet I was keen to continue.
“What grade are you?”
“Junior,” he said; not senior, I smiled. Then he sighed and murmured (which he seemed to do frequently), “I wish I was a sophomore.”
“And what grade do you think I’m in?” I asked teasingly.
He cast his eyes up to the ceiling and said, in a much clearer voice, “Um, you’re a sophomore, right?”
“No, I’m a freshman.”
“Oh. You seem older.” Apparently I seem older.
So I was standing at the door a week or two later, bouncing on my toes with an eye turned to the corner. Suddenly a light came into my eyes and I called out a greeting.
He smiled back and said warmly, “Are you going to the party?”
To such an introduction I could only reply: “There’s a party?”
“Yeah. For the anime club. It’s going to be at my house.”
“Well, when’s it gonna be?”
The schedule was sometime after exams, to be clarified in a club-wide email to be sent by Friday. Only Friday came along, and there was no message. Then passed by Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. A whole, lovely week of furious impatience.
After the rise and fall of a dozen empires, the president saw fit to tell her club what the hell was going on and sent a brief message detailing the time and location. The former, turned out, was three days away.
That was okay. Probably most of the members checked their mail every couple of days, right? Then the president decided to send a second email one day early, this one explaining that the party was cancelled due to lack of response.
This was not okay. On the line, Jay was telling me this was done completely without his knowledge and very much against his will. He still wanted to do it, but nobody was going to come, no one except for two boys I didn’t know, Daniel, who had never paid his dues, and Meg, who could only stay an hour or two. Apparently that would have to do, because EVERYONE else was completely confused and had no idea what was when. And I had to give Dani a ride.
My mother took the directions. She studied them. She questioned them thoroughly and then eventually turned off the road in a shortcut so severe that I was shouting at her for the next six seconds until we found ourselves on the road outside the subdivision. A moment was spent puzzling over the gate mechanism before the calling system was sorted out and Daniel was saying, “Why hello thar, Jay.”
The activities were few and catered to the hobbies of everyone who wasn’t me. They consisted of these: taking turns playing Guitar Hero and watching other people take turns playing Guitar Hero. I was low on the floor, staring at the screen, at hairy boy feet, and at boy game-zombie faces. The buttons fired on the screen as they slid forward, Jay hardly ever missing a note until the end of his song. As he settled on the floor and I adjusted the strap across my shoulder I had to change the setting from “Expert” to “Easy”, and I felt embarrassed in front of these people whose free time was dedicated to the analog button.
The song started up, and I massacred the first few notes while I remembered how to move my fingers. A pair of bluish eyes stared up at me. “Oh nice strategy, Jay,” I said. “Stare at me until I’m distracted and mess up.” My index finger twitched at the wrong note. Still I managed to button-smash my way to a decent score, but I handed off almost immediately to Nathan, one of the two friends whom Jay was able to draft, a guy who, frankly, scared me. So I nestled alongside Jay and started talking. Random things, mostly. But something surfaced in my head, and I turned to him and said, “Why did you say you wanted to be a sophomore?”
“Because I love… Klein Oak.” He’d started without thinking, but he hesitated at the key object. My heart stopped pounding, and instead started dashing itself madly against my ribcage. There was not a chance I was going to say a one of my very loud thoughts. I frowned.
“I can’t say I feel the same. I had Mr. Bickley for English.” Distracting myself with horror stories of how completely insane THAT teacher had been was effective (I hoped) in masking the frenzied thoughts I was really struggling with. Still, as hours went by and we watched the others make high scores, a great bubble of happiness was filling my chest, and I heard more from Jay than either of us had said for the entirety of our earlier acquaintance.
And then there was a ring at the gate. It was Daniel’s mother, come to pick us up at the appointed time. “Oh, no,” I said. “Oh no, I don’t want to go.” But I had to go.
Only Jay came downstairs to see us off. “I don’t want to go,” I informed him a second time.
“I’m sure we’ll do something later this summer.”
The car was two headlights glaring impatiently up at us. We climbed in, me staring out the window while Daniel and his mother argued incessantly. When I got home, Mom said, “So how was it?”
I could only manage an uninformative “you know” falling into bed.
Summer melted away like vanilla ice cream while I stared down the walls, thinking about nothing and worrying about everything. The phone was at my fingers; the phone was miles away. Glowering at it, I pondered my own meaningless existence and the meaningless existences of others. My mind turned around philosophy and questions no one had asked me. But I was always fixed on that phone!
I only knew Jay from the hallways. I had only seen him once outside of school. I didn’t have privileges to call and say, “I just want to talk.”
The phone begged to differ. Or rather, I begged to differ and simply blamed it on the phone. Eventually I differed so strongly that I took the phone into my hands and started dialing-- 2-8-1…! It rang once. It rang twice. And then…
“Hello?”
“Hi! Jay! Um.”
“Oh hi Sarah.”
“…Wait, you knew it was me?”
“I know your number.”
“Oh, uh, wow, well!”
“I’ve been waiting for you to call all summer.”
My brain turned to water. “No way.”
Apparently yes way. Apparently yes way until eleven thirty in the evening. Apparently yes past eleven every night for three weeks. I told him about being hit in the face with a soccer ball and getting a nosebleed twice; He told me about sitting in class all day with a broken arm because the nurse said nothing was wrong with him. We talked about reality, religion, and dealing with people. I told him what I’d been thinking about for the past month and a half. He listened and gave thoughtful responses. He told me that he was a Stoicist and talked about his views of honor and responsibility. If something bad happened in any of the memories I related, I was sure to get at least one supportive inarticulation before he stated his opinion.
“Jay,” I said, “you are full of sympathetic noises!”
On occasion I was given to sigh hopelessly, and he’d ask me what was the matter. “Mmm, nothing,” I’d have to say, and the conversation moved on. But one day he didn’t let me stop at “nothing”.
“What’s the matter, Sarah?”
“Nothing, really.”
“You sound unhappy.”
“Well, the thing is, I’m frustrated.”
“Well what’s frustrating you?”
“Ah, now that I can’t say.”
“Come on, just say it.”
I wouldn’t just say it.
“Does it have to do with a friend?”
“Mmmm.”
“Are you having trouble talking to someone?”
“Not exactly…”
“Is there something you want to tell someone?”
“…Yes….” My heart sped up a little bit.
“Can’t you tell me anything about it?”
“Well, that would spoil the fun!” I turned it into a guessing game, tried to make it easier for myself. That game took longer than a round of Monopoly. He nearly guessed the truth so many times that I had to say something misleading to veer him off the trail. I wanted to say it more than I wanted anything, but I couldn’t; I was so terrified of the outcome.
“Your breathing changed.” He said that again several times during the interrogation. “Sarah, your breathing changed.” And then he asked, “Does it have something to do with me?” I could only answer yes.
At last I gave up and started to say, “My situation… is such that one feels as though everybody knows, everyone except the object of… it.”
“Oh.”
There wasn’t any point to this game anymore. I knew he knew, or if he didn’t, he never would. But I could tell he wasn’t going to say it first; I had to be brave, do it myself. My heart was in my mouth as I admitted, painfully, hopefully, fearfully, “I love you.”
He exhaled slightly and said, shyly but absolutely, “I love you, too.”