Indian Winter

If it were fall, we'd call it Indian Summer, but since it falls in the middle of February, it's something like a psuedo-spring, a stretch of about a week where the temperature shot up to above freezing, then climbs slowly to 50—a monumental event in a place where the temperature hardly gets above zero let alone above freezing between December and March.

At work, a boy I know is teasing me, calling me nicknames I've told him I've hated and poking me in the side when he walks past. I stick my tongue out, but I make sure to walk past him often, and I wonder if my face turns red because I enjoy the attention, or I enjoy the feeling of my face turning red. It hasn't happened for a while. I didn't even realize I missed it.

There is another boy with which I'm trading pixelated pokes. It's juvenile, which is funny rather than annoying. He's two, maybe three years older than me, and we've only met once. Our longest conversation has happened on Facebook, and it was spawned by a joke comment by another friend on one of my pictures. Something about boobs, which turned into a half-joke/half-flirty conversation and subtle comments traded back and forth across the airwaves. My friend Sam laughs and tells me I'm cute. She wants to set us up, and I laugh too, though I wouldn't mind. No, I think as I click idly across his internet home. I wouldn't mind at all.

There is yet another boy. I've known him for years, and he's always paid me some attention. Nothing more, nothing less. I doubt his thoughts go farther than sexual attraction, but I've never really been close enough to him to find out. He is, like most people I find myself allied with, a little strange, a little on the fringe. He grinds people's gears, he gets on people's bad sides... He gets on my bad side sometimes, truth be told.

Somehow he decides to test something. Today at lunch, he ends up with his hand behind my knee. I lose my train of thought mid-sentence, and I can practically feel the grin on his face.

“Stop that,” I stammer, feeling the blush creep up my neck.

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Why?” he asks again, a smirk on his face.

“Just because,” I say.

“It's opening the floodgates,” another friend says. This comment could be innocuous—he's known for non sequiturs—but if it's meant randomly, the timing is a huge coincidence. He's not all that far from the truth.

Later that night, we're talking, and somehow we've progressed into unfamiliar territory—hints and ideas, molded around the clarification I spat out like a life preserver into choppy water.

“I'm not looking for a relationship,” I tell him.

“I'm not either,” he says. “If I was, trust me, you'd know.”

And so we swim on from here in the chill-warm air of an Indian Winter.