Read My Butterfly for Free Online

returning my eyes to hers.
    “If you only knew how many cheesy Valentine’s cards I wrote you that never reached you,” I said.
    She stopped and sent me a slightly puzzled look.
    “Yeah, I know it might seem like I’m head over heels for a girl I barely know, but I know more about you than you think,” I said.
    “Really?” she asked.
    She sat back in the booth and smiled, in a challenging kind of way.
    “Really,” I said.
    Her suspicious eyes locked onto mine.
    “You guys ready to order?” asked the boy, in a high-pitched, cracking voice.
    He had reappeared from out of nowhere.
    Julia looked up at him and smiled. He smiled back, held his stare a second too long, then quickly hurled his gaze in my direction.
    I knew I must have given him a puzzled look again because he quickly forced his eyes back to his notepad and started scribbling nonsense again.
    Eventually, my puzzled stare left the boy and caught Julia’s bright green eyes, and I smiled.
    “I’ll have the cheeseburger with fries,” she said, her eyes still locked in mine.
    I’ll have the same,” I said, only taking my eyes off of her long enough to make sure the shaggy-haired boy had gotten our order.
    He finished scribbling onto his pad and then quickly disappeared.
    “So, we played on tractors together when we were kids,” she said, now resting her elbows on the table, her hands under her chin. “That hardly counts as ‘knowing me.’”
    I chuckled and sat back in the booth.
    “Okay,” I said. “Fair enough. What about the basketball game in junior high when you broke your arm?”
    I watched her brows dart together and her eyes squint a little.
    “You were there?” she asked.
    “I was,” I said. “I had my mom drop me off. We almost got lost finding the place. Turns out, those little, rural schools are pretty well-hidden.”
    She slowly sat back in the booth again. She seemed to be thinking—back, maybe.
    “You didn’t cry,” I said.
    Her lips started to part into a half-smile.
    “I was the one who held the door for you when you left the gym to go to the emergency room,” I said. “You said ‘thank you,’ and I remember thinking, Why isn’t she crying? ”
    Her expression looked soft and thoughtful, as if she was playing back each moment in her mind.
    “And when we were nine,” I continued, “I was at the park, and I fell trying to skateboard and tore my knee to pieces. You stayed with me until my dad came and got me.”
    “That was you?” she asked.
    There was surprise—almost disbelief—in her voice.
    “And there was another time,” I went on, “when you were at the movies with your friends and Jeff was being Jeff, and he strolled right up to you and hit on you—like you would expect a seventh-grader to hit on a girl. I couldn’t hear what you said to him, and he never told me, but you whispered something into his ear. But as you were whispering, you were smiling at me.”
    I watched her cock her head a little. Her stare was now off somewhere in the distance.
    “I said, ‘I have a boyfriend,’” she eventually said, returning her eyes to mine. “But I didn’t have a boyfriend.”
    She shook her head, and a wide smile danced to life on her face.
    “I remember looking at him—you,” she said and then paused. “I remember looking at you and then coming up with that excuse.”
    Her stare faded away again before returning to me.
    “Wow, now I see it was you all along, but it’s like it wasn’t you—like…”
    “It was like you didn’t notice me,” I said.
    Her smile softened and then slowly, she shook her head.
    “It was like I didn’t notice you,” she confessed.
    “Well, as long as you notice me now,” I said, smiling what I was sure was a goofy grin and sliding deeper into the booth.
    Her lips broke open into a wide smile, and she softly laughed.
    “I notice you now,” she said.
    She was piercing my eyes with those beautiful, green weapons of hers. And I loved the hell out of it.
    “I notice