I kept my head facing forward but my eyes shifted to the side so I could examine the girl who spoke to me. After first hour, no one had spoken directly to me for which I was entirely grateful.
She was a very pretty blonde girl with huge boobs. I hate to say I noticed them, but there was no way I could have not noticed them, they were that huge. Sweet, sky blue eyes hid behind thick, black rimmed glasses. With her hair tucked back behind her ears I noticed rather large plugs in both ear lobes. She was outside of the norm, like me. Her jeans were torn at the knees and her black t-shirt professed her love for some indie band I’d heard of but never actually listened to.
She was very pretty but didn’t have the look of one of the Pretty Princesses in expensive designer clothes. Still, she was probably another would be tormentor. In my eyes, they all were.
It was safe to say I had had a rough first day. It was also safe to say this might have been one of the worst days of my whole freaking life. Okay, so maybe not the worst, but it was definitely in the top five and quite possibly the most humiliating.
Thankfully, nobody had sought to physically harm me after the dimpled jock tripped me in first period. Oh no, they’d tried to verbally nail me instead, only not directly to my face. The beautiful, blue eyed, blonde haired, football player had nicknamed me freak show and it made its rounds. Fast. It was whispered behind hands as I walked down the hallways. Some kids pointed at me and laughed when I was in the cafeteria getting lunch, but they hadn’t approached me. I grabbed an apple and a pop, paid for it and quickly got the heck out of there. I found empty picnic tables outside and I ate my apple there in silence. Mercifully I was left alone. People did more staring and whispering after lunch, but thankfully that was all they did.
I’d had two more classes with that Tyson person. Both of which I had taken the empty seat either to the side of him or directly in front of him. And like first hour I felt his eyes boring into me the entire time. He didn’t say word one to me but I didn’t take offense because he didn’t speak to anyone else either. He was beyond weird, but then again, so was everyone else. At least he hadn’t been mean after the first encounter.
I ignored the girl sitting next to me. She didn’t seem to care because she kept talking to me like she couldn’t feel the unfriendly vibes rolling off me that I sent her way. “It’s not just because you’re new. Mr. Cole is well liked in the community here and people think your mom is a gold digging whore,” she informed me on a whisper.
My mother was a gold digging whore. That was part of her crazy-assed scheme. Hook up with some lonely, rich old dude and have him pay our way in the world (mostly her way, but mine until I legally became an adult, then she could wash her hands of me). To be fair to my mother, she met Mr. Cole on the internet and if she hadn’t sunk her sharp, greedy claws into him, someone else would have.
His profile on the online dating site had said he was looking for a companion to spend the rest of his days with, and that said companion would be highly compensated and would be expected to perform minimal duties outside of pleasing him. Seriously, she’d shown me his profile and it had indeed said those things. He had four full grown children and his wife had died of a heart attack several years ago. He never stood a chance against my mother, but at the same time he’d kind of been asking for it.
My mother was only good at doing a few things. Like, day time drinking (she seriously rocked day time drinking!), sucking men dry (sometimes literally, yikes), looking pretty, stripping (how we got by the majority of my life), and shoplifting (something I only knew she was good at because she’d boasted about how good at it she was). That was about it, though. She didn’t do manual labor, or any kind of labor. Unless sex counted as labor. Did sex count as labor? I didn’t know. She did men, and she did them well. Until they got sick of her, that is. Then they’d move on to the next easy piece and she’d do the same.
My mother had seduced Mr. Cole over the phone, and then we were here. It hadn’t hurt that she’d sent him a ton of selfies where she wore the least of amount of clothing she could before it became indecent. It had taken her all of a week. During that week, she had me pack up our belongings because she’d been that confident in her skills and her good looks. He didn’t even mind that I was a part of her package. He got exactly what he wanted and gave my mother what she wanted in return. A win/win for the both of them.
Still, I got why they were calling her a money grubbing whore because she was one. His kids had come over for a meet and greet and they had hated my mother right off the bat. Heck, they were probably the people who spread it around about my mother and me. Although, they hadn’t really seemed to take issue with me, just my mother.
I didn’t deserve to have my mother’s behavior taken out on me in any way, and I hated where this conversation had turned to, not that I had even participated in the conversation thus far.
My table mate leaned in closer to me and whispered, “It’s more than that, though.”
More? There was more?
And why in the heck did we have tables instead of desks? This was creative writing, not chemistry. I wanted a damn desk all to myself.
I turned my head towards her and asked, “What else?” I couldn’t help myself. I should have stopped myself and held onto my silence.
She eagerly shared, “You live next to Tyson.”
Tyson? That wasn’t his last name? And… “No I don’t,” I told her. “The house next to ours is empty. Has been since we moved here.”
“It’s been empty because Tyson’s been gone all summer. He moved here two years ago. Everybody wanted to be his friend and all the girls wanted to date him because he’s so stinkin’ hot. But in all this time he’s never dated anyone and he has zero friends to speak of. He doesn’t seem to want friends. He’s mean to people, like, really, really mean. He’d never stop in the hallway to pick up a paper someone else dropped after he ran into them. Heck, he’s so mean he’d probably spit on the person as they bent over to pick it up.” She shook her head with wide eyes. “He treated you different.”
“Okay. But, who cares if he’s my neighbor? Or that he didn’t spit on me?” I asked her. Thank goodness he hadn’t spit on me. How utterly disgusting.
“The girls are going to hate you,” she gushed, sounding like she found this to be a good thing. “Most of them already do. There are rumors flying around about you. Some say you’re just like your mom and you’re going to try to nail Tyson because he’s rich. Some say you already nailed him this summer and you guys have, like, a secret relationship going on or something. It’s all so exciting. Normally, this place is real boring. You’re not boring.”
Her face was flushed, her eyes bright and animated. She looked like she did indeed find this all to be very exciting. I wanted to smack her upside the head.
“Why are you talking to me?” I rudely asked her.
She pursed her lips and shrugged. “Everybody needs a friend,” she told me.
She was wrong. Not everybody needed a friend. I’d always been fine on my own.
“Don’t you already have friends?”
She looked away from me and bit her bottom lip.
“Are you one of those girls who’s in love with him? You think you can get close to him through me because he and I are neighbors? Look, I don’t know him. We aren’t having a secret relationship. I’ve never even seen him before today and he most certainly wasn’t nice to me in the hallway.”
She released her lip from between her teeth and looked back at me. “I don’t have friends,” she quietly informed me.