Story of a Girl

or Ten Things (Casey Can't Stop Doing)

by: amoenavi

A/N: NOT DEAD YET, I SWEAR. I was having issues with the end of senior year and getting into college and all that fun stuff. This is short, I'm sorry, but I AM ALIVE. In a sense.

-x-x-

One: Casey usually forgets to take the earbuds out or unplug them from the laptop when she stands up to get the door so she's yanked back (headfirst) into the chair and/or desk and/or bed with a surprising amount of force (Derek thinks it's hilarious and sometimes knocks just so he can see her do it).

-x-x-

There was something about reading a book that made Casey want to write.

Derek didn't understand it; when he watched a kickass hockey game, did he want to go play hockey? No. After hearing an awesome song, did he want to strum some chords? Hell to the no.

Casey however, after reading one of the Twilight books (no, he didn't know which one), was so moved by this strange compulsion, she rushed up to her room to write the Great Canadian Novel. Which, judging from her poems, was not quite within her reach. Like, at all. ("Whenever we're together, we're two halves that make a whole"? Please.)

Still, he was bored and she never ceased to be entertaining; he followed her silently up the stairs and stood outside her door, looking in on the scene. She sat on her wheely chair Indian style, iPod earbuds in, typing furiously while hunched over the keyboard, fingers flying over the keys faster than he would have expected given her usual ineptitude for all things technological (she still had a Walkman), pounding out words and deleting them just as fast. After about ten minutes straight of tapping, she paused, scanning the room quickly for intruders before turning back to the screen.

"I had never met anyone like him before," she read aloud to herself, "He was both the epitome of everything I hated and everything I had ever wanted."

Huh. That sounded… surprisingly normal for a literary reaction to Twilight. He was actually kind of impressed by the –

She continued, "Even if he was a supernatural being with a penchant for killing innocent human girls, I knew I would belong, emotionally and physically, to Edmund forever."

– there we go.

Derek snorted derisively from his position on the doorframe.

She frowned, apparently not hearing him. "That isn't quite right…" she said, words punctuated by the tap of her BACKSPACE key. She contemplated how to make it better, biting her lip. "Maybe if I added something about the color of his eyes?" Pause. "And something about his body…"

She nodded, satisfied with this solution, and the tapping began again.

This time, he knocked on her opened door before laughing.

She shot out of her chair in the direction of the door so quickly that Derek would have been impressed… had she not still been attached to the laptop. Her neck snapped back as the computer moved closer to the edge of the desk.

"Ow, ow, ow, ow," came the whimper from the floor.

Although he winced, he stayed put by the door. This was not the first, and definitely not the last, time that she would forget physics.

"What can I say? Klutzes in motion stay in motion." She whimpered again. "Oh, I'm sorry, do you need a hand?"

He took her answering kick as a yes.

00

For her seventeenth birthday, he got her a large squishy body pillow.

He didn't give it to her, oh God no, he just bought it, ripped the tags off it, and threw it onto the floor in back of her computer. He didn't notice that she hid it in the back of her closet underneath her favorite abandoned sweatpants.

And he definitely didn't notice that whenever she used her computer, she put the pillow back in that same spot on her floor, just in case.

-x-x-