All Things Nice » Band of Brothers

12: Buddies

Posey knew she was being watched. She could feel the pressure of eyes on her, searing through her clothes and into her skin. Every time she turned she found all eyes averted but she knew who the gaze belonged to. Johnny Martin, of course. No one else had a gaze powerful enough.

Ever since he'd discovered her secret, Johnny had seemed to make it his personal duty to keep a watchful eye on her. She wondered whether things made a lot more sense now that he knew - why she was so much smaller than everyone else, why she struggled with the upper body strength aspect of PT, why her accent was so strange - or whether he was looking at her with new eyes now that he knew. Whatever she'd assumed upon the initial revelation, however - that he'd be supportive and a close friend or whatever naïve thing she'd assumed - had been wrong. Johnny seemed to keep his distance now more than ever. In a way, it quite stung.

She felt his eyes on her so steadily one morning at breakfast she brazenly turned in her seat to level him with a stare of her own. She didn't say anything, simply stared, until he eventually snarled out a, "What?"

"Do I have something on my face?" she wondered aloud. "Is that why you're staring at me?"

"I ain't staring at you."

"You were." Posey smiled smugly as she turned to face the front again when he didn't seem to have a response.

After that, the weight of those piercing eyes was significantly less, though it was still there. At mealtimes, during free time, whilst they were running Currahee or at the rifle range. Really, his eyes seemed to be seeking her out constantly. Testing her, perhaps. Waiting for her to fail. Or maybe he was simply trying to work out how she managed to keep her secret so tightly under wraps that none of the others seemed to suspect a thing. She thought the whole secret must have seemed incredibly obvious to him now.

She wasn't sure whether it was simply paranoia, but every time she left the barracks in the middle of the night to head to the showers, she felt eyes following her every move. She glanced back over her shoulder multiple times to check she wasn't being followed, determined to have some forewarning this time, though he never followed her again. None of them did. Each time she returned to the barracks and managed to get back in bed undetected she breathed a silent sigh of relief. The whole ordeal was more exhausting than she ever could have imagined, both physically and emotionally.

She always woke up in the morning feeling like she'd slept mere minutes as opposed to hours. Her head seemed to constantly ache, her eyes burn, and her muscles to scream at her to stop moving. Every wake up call was as much a shock to her system as the last, an unfortunate result of only being able to shower in the middle of the night.

As the entirety of Second Platoon lay in their bunks in silence one Sunday morning, Posey reluctantly blinked the bleariness out of her eyes and gazed at the small amount of light soaking the floor by the window. It must still have been early - much too early to be awake on a Sunday, in any case - though she found the quiet of the barracks and the gentle beauty of the early morning light to be calming. She felt settled as she laid there, eyes hazy but gazing at the small pool of light on the wood of the floor, not as reluctant to be awake as she usually tended to be.

"Hey, don't designations come out tomorrow?" were the first words out of one George Luz's mouth, forcing them all to drag themselves to consciousness. It was a weekend pass-less weekend, though the rest of the platoon all seemed to still manage to wake up feeling like they'd been hit over the head with a shovel.

"Yeah. I think so," replied Malarkey, his voice thick with sleep and muffled by the blanket his face was still buried into.

"What d'ya think you'll get?"