4. Tripped

Jack returned to the room via the clock. His backpack was on the table, with a bit of orange juice on it. He grabbed it and a paper towel, and ran out of the apartment.

For those of you who were wondering, the way aforementioned physician of sorts was also a giant. Thus, his nickname, King Kong, wasn't entirely undeserved. His width wasn't appalling, but his height would shake most criminals into at least temporary lawfulness. This was usually a blessing, as he was rather a kind type of person. While Jack and he weren't exactly intimate, they helped each other out more than frequently. As for a real name...I'm not sure I'll give it, just for the pleasure of turning red every time I have to mention him.

Jack saluted King Kong, and they passed each other. Nothing particular happened, in those few seconds. In the next ten, though, a lot happened.

First, Jack tripped. In all seriousness, if you knew Jack, you'd be clutching this book with a death grip, ogling it with eyes the size of a couple of epic-sized bouncy balls. Really. To explain this, let's go back in Jack's life, say, twelve years. Jack was roughly four then. By that time he'd learned how to walk flawlessly. By flawlessly, I mean as flawlessly as a toddler usually manages...except he did exactly that all the time. All of a sudden, he tripped. It was the first and only time he had ever tripped in his life. He managed twelve whole years of flawless walking, jogging, running, ambling, and sprinting. The cause of his second trip was quite simple. A girl. In all seriousness, it's probably happened to a million boys. Still, Jack was fairly unique in having tripped only twice in his entire life.

Obviously, Jack thought this girl was, at the bare minimum, pretty. Human endeavors to find the end of any boy's descriptions of a girl at the maximum have failed. Miserably. Jack merely saw her for a second, and a short, confused, and trip-inducing one, at that.

In way too many cliches are included both the trip and the fall. I don't know the likelihood that the last will succeed the first, but the likelihood that the first will succeed the last is flyspit short of nil. Jack's talent in "catching himself" was beyond Olympic, so, in this case, he did not fall. Instead, he "fell" into an also Olympic pose: that of a runner right before the starting line. King Kong's next step marked what would usually be marked by a shot, and Jack raced off. King Kong glanced at the cloud of dust behind him, and shook his head.

Emma was a short, black-haired girl of thirteen at the time. Her favorite subject in school was history, she hated math, and the idea that some people factor triple-digit numbers in their spare time because they think it's fun...well, I'll merely say that made her turn up the volume of whatever music she was listening to, even though her surroundings were near perfectly quiet. The idea of a boy ever telling her she was pretty, much less beautiful, fell mildly short of disgusting her, not because she thought boys shouldn't go around doing that, but because it was so obviously untrue.

Jack really had no idea what he was doing. The fact that this had actually never happened to him before stuns even me, but, it was true. Having read Pride and Prejudice twelve times over seemed no aid in real life, he thought wildly. It was right about when he stopped thinking that that he realized he was running, and ground to a halt. The girl was nearly out of sight. Jack pondered the situation. Really, if he'd been confronted with twenty men whose muscle mass was a task for even them to carry around, he'd have a hundred times more idea what to do. He personally avoided taking pictures of people in general, and girls in particular, unless they knew, and, preferably, didn't object. As this was his policy, he didn't even reach into his backpack.

When he saw her, honestly, he couldn't accurately guess what age she was. If she happened to be any significant age greater than his, he'd lose interest in a second. As he couldn't tell, he obviously didn't give up.

He followed her at a fairly large distance, his sole goal being to find some detail about her. The most easy and unobtrusive detail he could get, it seemed, was her current residence. It was a mere block, and she was home. The girl, upon the threshold, looked around. Their eyes met, but Jack, for some reason, did not turn his eyes away. He couldn't see any advantage in that, after all.

She went inside. Jack couldn't tell whether he'd disgusted her, worried her, or what. Jack looked at the address, and instantly remembered it. It bothered him that he couldn't do this with the quadratic formula.


!Noah!