2.15: PENGUIN

When I was 16, I totally thought that I would have bought a house by the time I was 23.

23 looked like the defining moment, you know.

23 seemed old, although not that old. Young, but not 'Bursting-with-Effervescence' kind of young. Old, but not 'I've-Done-Everything' kind of old.

It was the perfect age to buy a house and then make everyone around me proud.

Now, I was one year away from 23, and a house still seemed like a long way to go.

What actually surprised me that most of the pros and cons of being 22 were actually the same.

-Pro: You can buy an alcohol without getting carded.

-Con: You can buy an alcohol without getting carded!

-Pro: Your parents don't hover around your life much anymore.

-Con: Your parents don't hover around your life much anymore...?

-Pro: You eventually get a glimpse on what it's like to forget about That Guy that broke up with you 4 years ago.

-Con: You eventually get a glimpse on what it's like.... Oh, wait. The glimpse is gone.

Back to being sad.

After a while, I started to give the 'State of Missing That Guy' a name: Penguin. I chose the name Penguin because it sounded simple but hard to achieve, just like how Benedict Cumberbatch always failed to pronounce it (AN: IT'S TRUE! LOOK IT UP ON YOUTUBE AND LAUGH WHILE FALL IN LOVE WITH HIM). Forgetting That Guy seemed like a simple enough task to do: Forget the guy who broke my heart. Do not think about the guy who made me cry to sleep for months. Do not love the guy who didn't love you enough to stay.

You know, the standard Ted-talk speeches.

In reality, it was far harder than to do just that.

Sometimes I wished my brain could disconnect itself from my chest sometimes, because when Penguin struck me, I always felt unimaginable pain coming from my chest. The pain travelled to the whole body, with its core on my chest and the worst pain on my head.

The memories.

And I tried. I tried not to blush whenever I remembered his words. I wanted to not have any reaction whenever I was reminded that there was no longer That Guy in my life. It was hard, and sometimes very inconvenient. I couldn't text anyone whenever I had nightmares. Plus, I always bought too many Teddy Bears and nobody to gift them to.

"April, you did this part wrong!" Audra's voice shocked me out from the Penguin.

Audra showed up in her full red-headed glory, pouting cutely towards me and then flicked her hair over her shoulder. "You edited the sequence wrong! I specifically told you that I wanted the scene when I posed after the finished make-up look to be longer. You focused too much on the make up application!"

"It's a make-up tutorial, it's supposed to focus on the tutorial part of the make-up," I mused.

"Ugghh!" Audra's face reddened and for a moment I had a premonition that she would explode. But then, she suddenly inhaled and then closed her eyes as one of her legs shot up in a popular yoga pose. "April. You're Quentin's sister so I don't really want to have a silly fight with you. So, please... just do what I say and make the posing scene longer, would you?"

"Sure," I said. It was a job, anyway. And even though Audra didn't pay me well, she was Quentin's beloved girlfriend and it was my duty to make him happy by making her happy. I knew what she was capable of whenever she got mad, and it was like seeing hell being brought into your face.

But Audra's version of hell was better than being trapped inside my own brain, which was filled mostly by Penguin.

Ugh. Penguin.

Penguin is the bane of my life.

And then, as if to save me from Penguin, Audra called out to me again. "Oh, and April, I'm very thirsty so can you buy me a pumpkin latte from Starbucks? I'll pay you back later."

She never actually did pay me back the last 33 times she said she would, but then buying a pumpkin latte with soy milk and no sugar gave me a little bit sense of purpose.

And so I went.

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The guy who was serving me in Starbucks was called Patrick, and he gaped at me as I recited my line to him.

"Pumpkin spiced latte, with soy milk, no sugar unless it's artificial, use only one pump of the syrup, brew it at 80 degrees and pour over in a v60 before stirring the milk gently."

He opened his mouth. Not to speak, but just suck in air wordlessly.

"Should I repeat?" I tried to help him.

Patrick neither refused nor accepted.

The guy behind him shoved him away and took my orders. The guy behind was called Timothy and most of the time since I started working for Audra, he was the one who took my orders.

"That youtuber made you go down here again, didn't she?" Timothy knew my predicament.

I flashed my teeth towards him.

Timothy made the order, and then he gave me two cups. "It's on the house," he smiled.

I scurried away from the cafe, only to feel a familiar aura coming onto me.

Before he even talked to me, I already knew who he was.

"Hey, Alex."

"You give that Starbucks guy your number, and he's going to be the happiest guy in the world."

For the last month, Alex had this weird hunch that Timothy was in love with me and the only thing that he wanted in the whole world was my number. But I was too stupid to notice and put him so far back to the barista-zone.

Barista-zone, according to Alex, was even worse than the friend-zone.

"But you'd kill him if you knew he has my number."

Alex smiled. His whole face lightened up. "True."

"Let me guess the reason this time," I said as channeled my inner Murphy's Law towards Timothy. Everything that could go wrong, will go wrong. "He comes from a family that kidnap and then kill little girls for fun."

"Creative. But unfortunately, I've done background check and he's fine. Peaceful family, honest hardworker, yadda-yadda. It's just his nose, this time." Alex laughed. "You've got a great nose. I can't imagine you impairing your offspring with his bulbously onion-like nose."

"You always find a reason," I said. "To convince me to not like the guys who like me."

Alex sped up a bit so that he was a little ahead of me. His back tensed a bit. "They're not good enough for you."

"Even Kevin?"

He snorted. "Especially Kevin."

Kevin was the guy who told me that he'd love to take me to dinner last week. He was a young entrepreneur of only 23 years old. He dropped out of high school and then proceeded to create an app for Apple that sold for millions of dollars. And as if that wasn't lucky enough, he didn't look like the typical IT people. He wore leather jacket and had a $2000 haircut. All in all, he was a Greek God with the mind of Mark Zuckeberg.

But Alex had insisted that Kevin was mostly just a liar with an expensive jacket and even more expensive haircuts. Plus, Kevin licked his ice-cream so painfully slow. That, according to Alex, suggested some kind of undetected psychopathy.

"Yeah," that was all I managed to say amidst balancing two venti cups and the weight of my tormented chest. "Hahaha." I added the extra small laugh just in case Alex felt alienated.

Alex caught up immediately. "Penguin?"

I nodded once. "Today the Penguin is particularly persistent."

"What day is it? It's not the half year anniversary, or even the yearly anniversary," he tipped his chin in wonder. "First date anniversarry?"

"That would be two weeks from now," I said. "Don't worry, I've already prepared myself for the blow of it. I'm downloading two seasons of the old Twilight Zone and I made sure that Audra would be giving me enough work so I wouldn't sleep for 36 hours."

Alex whistled. "That's not a healthy way to cope."

"That's the only way I know to cope. And today is the 'First Kiss on the Cheek' day."

"The amount of memorable days you have with him is annoying sometimes," Alex sighed, and then in a swift movement, he snatched both of the cups from me. Sometimes he did this, he would walk beside me and then surprise me by suddenly snatching the my things. "I'm stealing your coffee for a while."

I couldn't even protest properly because my chest still caused my whole body a lot of pain. "Time out. I'm still trying to recover and kick Penguin out of my mind."

Alex held out his hand up in the air, but 10,5 cm away before he touched me, he stopped himself. His eyes bore a lot of concern as he wordlessly asked for permission to touch me.

I shook my head, and I could see Alex's face significantly fell. As if my rejection sucked a little bit of life from his body. I sighed, mentally preparing myself for the thing I would be doing, and then touched his shoulder with my index finger.

"This," I said. "Is this enough?"

"It looks stupid." He said, but there was a slow smile spreading onto his lips. Alex rarely smiled like that, the kind of smile that reached the crinkle on his eyes. The kind of smile that wasn't calculated or designed to make someone fall in love. "You should know that there are a lot of girls who'd kill to be able to be touched by me."

"I know. I've seen you in action with my own eyes."

"But I'd kill if it means you'd let me comfort you from time to time."

I touched his shoulder five seconds longer than I had originally intended.

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Alex only walked me until I reached the front of Audra's apartment. He really wasn't fond of the self-proclaimed red-headed Goddess. Sure, being Alex Malifeci, he never showed any obvious signs of it. He wasn't the kind of person who'd shout and then scream and then display his true feelings to anyone.

But Alex would scheme. He would try his darnest best that Audra would get inconvenienced in the subtlest way. One time, Me, Quentin, Audra and Alex were watching movie in a cinema, and Alex somehow managed to orchestrate the seating plan so that Audra would end up sitting behind a new mom with her kicking baby.

And then, whenever they ate together, Alex would flirt a little bit with the waitress whenever Audra tried to order. The waitress then would mix up the orders and Audra would get a full-fat mayo salad instead of salad with dressing on the side.

You know, very minor and harmless things. Just mildly irritating.

With the amount of kale and kambucha and self-help books that Audra devoured, people would have thought that she had an elevated sense of soul.

What Audra had was just an elevated sense of sensitivity.

Or, in another words: it was really easy to trigger her.

This time, the trigger was the temperature of her coffee.

"It's room-temperature!" Audra scrunched up her nose, as if having a room-temperature drink was the worst offender in the world. "You know that room-temperature coffee is the worst offender in the world!"

Oh. So she really did think that.

And that was when I remembered it. When Alex had 'stolen' my cups before, he had left Audra's lid open so that the heat vapored to the autumn weather.

Sneaky, annoying Alex. I bet he was laughing his genuine, crinkled laugh on his way home.

"I took the long walk home, sorry, Audra," I said, and then tried to offer her my tea. "My tea is still hot, if you want."

"Tea doesn't provide the same amount of caffeine!" Audra's voice faltered at the end of her almost-screech.

"If you're pissed, you can raise one of your leg and do your yoga pose," I suggested to her. "Nice and slow. Nice and slow."

The flash on her eyes were unmistakably homicidal, but for some reason she was able to calm herself down and then flashed her teeth towards me.

This proved to be even more horrifying than the death-stare.

"It's okay. I'm fine. You're fine," Audra said in a chant, as if to convince herself to not combust. "Everybody makes mistakes and room-temperature coffee can't take away this really great deal that I just got."

"What great deal?"

There was one reason why Audra shot up from having 0 followers into 200.000 in just six months: she was relentless in collaborations. Sometimes she would pay and accommodate her 'guests' so that they could 'film and make vlogs' better.

"You know this ILA guy on instagram?"

"I don't think Ryla sounds like a guy's name."

"ILA. I-L-A. It's an abbreviation for I Left at April."

"That's an even weirder name for a guy," I mused, and then mentally searched within my brain to look for a historical male figure with the name April.

"It's this really great guy from Instagram. He makes this weird wood furnitures and carvings," Audra's voice started to get really high-pitched, which would mean that she was super-excited about some things. "What really sets him apart is he often has this... caption. Really heartfelt captions. Things that you want your boyfriend tells you. Plus, he looks hot. He never really shows his full face, but sometimes he shows his arms or a bit of his face and it's delicious."

Audra had a thing for the word 'delicious'. Quentin was often the victim of this misplaced word. Quentin wearing a suit? Delicious! Quentin showing up unexpectedly at night with skin-tight jeans? Delicious. Sometimes I wondered if Audra had a tendency towards cannibalism.

"Oh, a brooding, heartbroken artist," I nodded slowly. "Yeah, I guess there's a preference for that kind of guys."

"And rich," Audra added. "Super rich. His works can sell for thousands of dollars each! And he has just agreed to finally make a youtube channel and his first video will feature me!"

"So when will you meet him?"

"Next week," she drank her room-temperature coffee, scrunched up her nose a little bit, and then reverted back to being happy and glittery. "He strictly doesn't want to film in my apartment, so we'll have to book an entire cafe for that."

As Audra chirped about her plans with the ILA guy, I sat and sipped on my tea.

I hoped tomorrow the Penguin would be a little bit more merciful to me.

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AN:

Did you notice Audra in the last chapter? She's the girl that Quentin's mother didn't like.

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April's Mother: If only you didn't spend all of your money on that skanky girlfriend of yours...

Quentin: Mom, language, please. And Audra's not skanky. She's just got a unique sense of fashion!

April's Mother: Which involves a lot of belly button and cleavages more lower than what's allowed on cinemas.

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Soooooooooooo itt'ss heeerreee.

It's the first time I ever did timeskip in any of my stories. Haha. It feels weird, but in a way it feels natural. I think it's time that April and the gang grows a bit. She's definitely more melodramatic? I start to really like Alex, too and I hope it shows in the story. They have a really delicate relationship that's in between friendship and something a little bit more...

 I'm super excited for the next chapter! Half of it is done already. Please show me your support and love because I doooo need it and I read every comments <3 <3 

p.s: and you really should watch that video of Broberick Cucumber trying to say penguin.