Post 1

“Are you Peter Valgard?” she asked.

Peter almost didn’t hear her over the din of the high school cafeteria. He looked up from his lunch to see his classmate Laura Sinclair standing next to him. For a moment, he could only gaze directly into her gorgeous, blue eyes. She stood, holding her books to her chest, looking at him expectantly. She dipped her head down and opened her eyes a little wider, prompting him to answer.

“Y-yeah, I’m Peter. You’re Laura Sinclair, right?” he asked. Laura nodded. Peter stood up and said, “What can I do with you?” Peter had seen Laura on several occasions, but always from a distance. He always noticed her when she was around. He thought that she was the most beautiful girl at school. Her golden blonde hair reached just past her shoulders and was always wavy enough to bounce when she walked. But as far as he knew, she never noticed him the same way.

Peter didn’t catch his Freudian slip, and if Laura noticed it, she gave no indication in her reply. “My dad heard that you cut people’s lawns and he wanted to know if you could do his, too.”

“Oh! Yeah, I do that. I mean, I can do that. Yeah.” Peter stumbled on his words but got his point across. Laura smiled and set her books down on the cafeteria table. She tore off a piece of paper out of one of her notebooks and wrote down her phone number and address.

“Give him a call. He’d like you to stop by on Sunday,” she said as she handed the slip of paper to him.

“Okay,” answered Peter as he took it. Laura gathered her books back up to her chest, smiled a radiant, sincere smile, turned and walked away, out of the cafeteria.

Peter stared at the paper in his hand for a moment before he felt a slap on his shoulder. “All right Pete!” his friend Corey exclaimed. “Way to go, man!”

“It’s not what you think,” answered Peter. “Her dad wants me to mow her grass.” Peter put up with his friend’s risqué but good-natured comments about trimming bushes and getting busy in the grass as he returned to his half-eaten chili-mac. Suddenly, his food didn’t have quite the appeal it did when he first sat down at the table.