Being Inside the Friendzone is a Positive Thing, Right?

"That is a really nice bird," I couldn't keep my eyes off Ryder's chest.

Ryder chuckled amusedly, and then, to my horror, edged closer to my direction.

"Whoa, man. Back off her," right before Ryder's elbow brushed against mine, Andrew yanked him on the shoulder. He jerked his hand immediately after he touched Ryder's shoulder. "Yuck. Have you ever heard of a shower?"

"Have you ever heard of a real fist-to-fist fight?" Ryder shot back.

"And put on a shirt, goddamn it. You're making April uncomfortable."

I was actually pretty okay with it, since Ryder's tattoos kept me busy from freaking out over the fact that I was less than one meter away from a shirtless guy. But then again, I had this theory that Andrew would combust if I told him the truth.

"In case you're going blind, idiot, my shirt was gone when I was fighting." Ryder answered, his sides moved, giving an illusion that the steampunk gear tattoos inked on his skin was moving, too.

I stared, transfixed. Maybe if I begged hard enough, my mother would let me have a gear inked on my ribs, too.

"Eyes up here, Kitten," Ryder told me, his fingers pointed at his eyes and I bowed my head so low because I couldn't handle looking straight to his eyes at such close proximity. "So tell me again, how did you two end up in that place?"

Andrew's grip on the steer tightened as his face blushed red. It really was unfortunate to have Andrew's coloring because he blushed easily and his naturally pale skin allowed people to see how embarrassed he was at times, which embarrassed him even more.

"We got lost," he said in a small voice.

"Were you two on a date or something?"

"No, we were just from school."

Ryder snorted a laugh, and after a while, he didn't bother suppressing the explosions of laughter at our blunder. "What the hell? Seriously?"

"Fuck you, Ryder!" Andrew started swearing again, another sure sign of his exasperation. "It's the first time I drive, okay? You don't need to be such a douche about it."

"How come you didn't know your way home?" Ryder asked me, but not before giving Andrew his middle finger.

"I have zero sense of direction," I answered truthfully. "And my phone died."

"How about you?" Andrew finally spoke without an ominous tone towards Ryder. "How did you end up in that place?"

"I thought word had come out that I'm an underground fighter."

"Show off bastard," Andrew muttered.

Maybe Andrew thought that being a fighter made Ryder 'hotter' than he actually was, but it did nothing to me. I didn't like violence at all. I was never a fan. I inched away from Ryder as once again I was reminded by his nakedness and the amount of bruises that his body sustained. There were more ink and bruises than skin on his torso, and although I knew a lot of girls dig this kind of look, I just felt weird about it.

"It must hurt a lot," I observed the particularly huge bruise on his shoulder blade.

Ryder shrugged. "Not really."

"Okay, enough trying to look cool, Ryder," Andrew took a long exhale, before then he started lifting up his shirt. It took him a few tries because he was doing it in amidst of driving and for a moment there I thought that we were going to die because he took his eyes off the road for 2,89 second. I started stuffing fingers inside my mouth as Andrew's shirt was completely taken off.

So now I was stuck in a truck with a broken air-conditioner. With two shirtless guys who made it clear that they didn't like each other.

Peachy? Not really. More like confusing.

And awkward. Really awkward. I certainly didn't want to complete the holy trinity and took my shirt off, too.

Ryder didn't say any word about this, but one look at his expression and any casual observer would have noticed the great amount of disdain that he held. Andrew, on the other hand, tipped his chin as high as he could as if he had just won the olympics.

I tried to chew on my fingers as inaudibly as possible, but Ryder caught on to this.

"Would you rather him put his shirt back on?" he asked me bluntly.

Before I could start nodding a yes, Andrew elbowed Ryder on the jaw. Hard.

And that, my friends, was all it took to make Andrew and Ryder start another fight of their own.

-

-

-

When Andrew put me and Ryder both down in front of our houses, we left with a lot of war-scars. Ryder, in particular, would probably contract the skin disease that Andrew had. They fought inside the car all the way home, and there were lots of elbowing ribs, pushing faces, palming noses and sometimes even a kick or two. I wonder how we managed to not get hit by another car, considering that Andrew's driving skills were less than unsatisfactory and Ryder had been distracting him a lot by not keeping his hands off him.

"You will let me drive you home again, right?" Andrew looked at me expectantly. I tried to look elsewhere instead of his eyes. Andrew might be big, but sometimes he looked too much like a puppy with his big blue eyes and tendency to pout his mouth.

It was not intentional in his part, by the way.

I really wanted to say no. I was afraid that his proficient skills on getting lost and his lack of GPS would take us to somewhere far stranger than the first adventure. I was afraid that we would really be lost. But then my brother had told me to be nice to Andrew. Plus, I remembered how he always insisted to sit next to me at recess, and the feeling of being not alone was nicer than anything else.

"Maybe later?" I said. "After my trauma subsides?"

"Thank God," he sounded relieved, before then he started the car again. "This won't happen again, April. I swear."

I forced myself to grin. Andrew really was nice. Nobody had ever sworn something to me before.

"Anyway, um, April?" Andrew called out again.

"Yeah?"

"Can I sit next to you at lunch tomorrow?"

I thought about it. As much as I liked Andrew and his Carebear persona, I was concerned about Marcy and Corinne. They always went into a near-permanent state of speechlessness whenever he was around. They said that Andrew was too tall and too goodlooking and too popular to not getting overworked with. "Maybe Quentin wants to sit with you, too? You never sit with him again in the last couple of weeks."

"Well, then you can sit with me and Quentin, then? You can bring your mute friends, too."

I didn't even need to imagine what kind of damage it would do to my friends. Surrounded by the jocks and their potent testoterones, Marcy and Corinne would probably go straight to the ICU. "No-no. That wouldn't be good for my friends' health. It's okay, Andrew, I'll always be your buddy as long as you're my brother's buddy, even though we don't eat together at lunch." And to further my point, I grinned as big as my mouth allowed me.

Andrew had this despondent look on his face, but he complied anyway. He then averted his gaze at Ryder and I had this anxious feeling that they would start another fight.

But it turned out that Andrew just wanted Ryder to give him the directions to his house.

Ryder smirked the whole way he described the road, and I only hoped that he didn't give Andrew the wrong direction. Right after the blonde drove away, I asked Ryder about it.

"What are you talking about?" he sounded legit offended. "I'm sending him home. Poor boy was enough tortured for today and he doesn't need to get lost again on his way home."

"Well, yeah," I said as I tried to back away one step at a time from him. "You really seem to torture him when you started palming his face."

Ryder chuckled. "I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about you. You crushed him, you know that?" he peered over me as I tried my best to look like I knew what he was talking about. But then Ryder busted my front by shaking his head. "You really don't know, do you?"

"Am I saying bad things to Andrew?" I couldn't help panicking. Andrew was my first guy friend and I wasn't sure if being friends with guys worked differently than being friends with girls. "Am I offending him by nodding when you asked me if I want him to put back his shirt? Oh my stars, have I commented on his blonde hair unknowingly? Andrew hates the color of his hair so much. What did I do?! What did I do?"

"You put him on the friend-zone," Ryder said.

"Friend-zone?"

"It's the kind of thing that girls do when they only want to keep a guy around as a friend and nothing else."

"But Andrew is always my friend."

Ryder flicked my nose again, amusement was all over his face. "Exactly. You friendzoned him, hard."

I whimpered as his finger touched my skin and once again, words started jumbled up in reverse. "Touch me you don't, please."

"How come you're talking normal when you're with him and you go all batshit crazy when you're with me?" Ryder asked. "I mean, it's amusing to see how affected you are by me, but after a while it gets worrying. Like I get this feeling that you think I'm going to eat you if you're talking to me long enough."

I only bowed my head as his speculation was dead on.

Taking notice of this, Ryder slapped his forehead. "You really need to start spending more time with me."

"Or we can go back being neighbors who never talk to each other?" I offered.

Ryder was silent for a while, but he smiled afterwards. "After I get to know interesting you are? No chance, Kitten. I want to know how crazy you can be."

"I like it better when you call me Weirdo," I said, backing away.

"I know." The right corner of Ryder's lips turned up. "Kitten."

With every step that I took to back away from him, Ryder took a step to balance the distance between us. Plus, he had longer legs so we ended up one foot closer than our original distance. I could finally begin to take notice of his (oh gasp) still topless torso, and since I'd done my thorough observation of his tattoos, I'd run out of more ink to stare at.

Oh my God, I could feel the blackness coming back to me.

"Relax," he finally smiled at me and stopped coming towards me. "I'm just playing with you. Your reactions are just so unusual."

"You're not, uh, you're not going home?"

He shook his head once. "Nah. There's this party. My friends are coming to pick me up."

"You have friends?" I was surprised to hear about this. I never saw Ryder associating with any of our school's students. Aside from occasional girls feeling him up or boys getting into fights with him, Ryder was almost as unsociable as I was.

"That's harsh, coming from someone like you," Ryder said, but he didn't look offended at all. "I do have friends. They're not from our school, though. You want to meet them?"

"No, thanks."

"There's free beer."

I shook my head even harder. "Even more reason to say no. I've never gotten drunk before, but seeing the effects that it has to my brother, it's safe to say that I'm going to be an annoying drunk."

"That's going to be interesting to see."

"I prefer to not be annoying," I said. "Even sober, I'm already annoying enough to a lot of people."

I was just stating a cold hard fact, but Ryder's eyebrows went taut as he heard it. There were a defensive note when he spoke. "You're not annoying. A little weird, and probably fucked up in the head, but you're not annoying."

I was in the middle of processing his words when Ryder's ride arrived. It was in the form of two big motorcycles, and on top of them were two of equally big guys with bushy mustache and tattooed sleeves. Both of them wore black shades even though it was already dark, and both of them looked like they were just out from the jail.

They didn't even talk, they just stayed there and waited.

I felt like they could produce a knife at any moment, but Ryder only waved at them like they were old friends.

"Damn, dude. Tonight's prison break was bad. I almost got knifed." One of the big guys said.

Oh my God. They just went out from the jail.

Ryder laughed. "He's talking about his wife, Kitten. Don't worry."

"New girlfriend?" the big guy was smiling, but I could barely see it beneath all those facial hair.

"No."

"Humpingfriend, then?" the other guy offered.

Ryder snorted, annoyed. "No. I'm lucky if I can touch her without making her faint."

Both guys roared with laughter, and I was left wondering if this were the kind of people that Ryder ended up being friends with. People twice his age. People who wore sunglasses at night. People who looked like criminals.

Then again, Ryder was a criminal himself. I heard a rumor that he once had been sent to a jail because he bit a guy's ear off.

"This little guy over here," the big guy with red mustache was talking to me. "He thinks that just because he has great jawline and a few tats, he's the shit. But no, he's just as whiny and as awkward as every other high-schooler. He just has better taste in friends."

"You just proved that my taste in friends is also shit, Keegan," Ryder laughed as he punched Keegan's arm lightly. It wobbled. "And I'm getting to know her so don't feed her bad things about me. She's heard enough at school."

The one with black beard whistled. "Someone from your school? You actually can be friends with anyone from the so-called 'shithole'?"

Ryder spared a glance to me. "Yeah, turns out that there's one cool person there."

"I'm not cool," I said, more to myself than to the guys. "I watch Star Wars the original version so much that I start having imaginary friends and I prefer to interact with fictional characters than real people because being in social setting makes me sweat like a pig. Plus, I never partied or get drunk or kiss a boy before, which is the basic definition of cool in teenage's world."

"She's cool," Keegan nodded. "I thought all teenage girls nowadays dig anorexic models more than anything else and consider sleeping with guys an accomplishment rather than something special. This one's a rare commodity."

Ryder looked awfully proud. "Yeah."

"Tell me, Geek Girl," the black beard directed his sunglasses towards me. "Does this little guy makes you wet?"

"Goddamn it, Billy! Do you want me to rearrange your face? Don't ask her that kind of questions!" Ryder somehow was so angry at Billy's question towards me.

"Yes," I answered anyway.

All three guys were staring at me with their jaws hung.

With three pairs of eyes watching my every move, I found it hard to explain it. "Um, I mean. Sometimes I feel like I sweat a lot when I'm around him so my clothes are always wet because of it. Other times, he scares me so much I feel like crying. Stare at me don't, you guys!"

"Oh right, that's her Yoda talk. Apparently, she does that when she feels nervous," Ryder said in a forced calmness as the older guys started laughing like they were going to explode. When neither of them responded to Ryder and kept laughing, he sighed loudly. "Guys. Come on, you're 35, be a little mature, please."

It took them approximately 2 minutes and 8 seconds to completely stop laughing, and even then, they were still chuckling when they talked. "You keep her around, man."

"Whatever," Ryder rolled his eyes. For once, he did look like a normal teenager. Someone like Quentin and not the bad boy the school made him out to be.

"You sure you don't wanna come?" Ryder asked one more time.

It only took me a glance to the motorcycle and the person riding it to experience the worst chills I'd ever had in my whole life. If this went on longer than four minutes, I'd be traumatized forever. "No, thank you."

Ryder's eyes never left me. "I'm still taking you to another party soon. Maybe something from our school."

"But I've never gone to a party before."

"Uh-huh, and I never take a weirdo out before," Ryder said as he went into one of the guy's motorcycle and positioned himself behind him. The guy shrugged off his leather jacket and gave it to him, and half a minute later Ryder was drown inside the huge clothing. He winked at me before they took off with suicidal speed.

"I want to get wasted!" I could hear him scream just before the bike disappeared in the darkness.

Six hours later, that brash statement of his would get back and bite him in the ass when his father refused to open the door to let his very drunk, very shirtless son in.