Jessica nodded and wiped her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve. “Yeah,” she said. “Mom likes you. She thinks you’re a good influence on me. So that’ll be okay. Thanks, Bianca. Can we watch Atonement again? Are you sick of it yet?”
Yes, I was getting very sick of the mushy romances Jessica swooned over, but I could get over it. I grinned at her. “I never get tired of James McAvoy. We can even watch Becoming Jane if you want. It’ll be a double feature.”
She laughed-finally-just as the teacher made her way to the front of the room and began obsessively straightening the pencils on her desk before calling roll. Jessica tossed a glance at the scrawny instructor. When she looked back at me, her dark brown eyes sparkled with a few fresh tears. “You know what the worst part is, Bianca?” she whispered. “I was gonna ask Harrison to go with me. Now I’ll have to wait until prom to ask him to a dance.”
Because of her sensitive state, I decided not to remind her that Harrison wouldn’t be interested because she had boobs-big ones. Instead I just said, “I know. I’m sorry, Jessica.”
Once that little crisis was behind us, Spanish went by smoothly. Jessica’s tears cleared up, and by the time the bell rang, she was laughing giddily while Angela, a friend of ours, told us about her new boyfriend. I found out that I’d made an A on my last prueba de vocabulario. Plus, I totally understood how to conjugate regular present subjunctive verbs. So I was in a pretty damn good mood when Jessica, Angela, and I walked out of the classroom.
“And he has a job on campus,” Angela rambled as we pushed our way into the crowded hall.
“Where does he go to school?” I asked.
“Oak Hill Community College.” She sounded a little embarrassed, and she quickly added, “But he’s just getting his associate’s degree there before he goes to a university. And OHCC isn’t a bad school or anything.”
“That’s where I’m going,” Jessica said. “I don’t want to go too far from home.”
Jessica and I were such polar opposites, it was sort of funny sometimes. You could always predict what one of us was going to want to do just by picking the reverse of the other. Personally, I wanted to get the hell out of Hamilton as soon as possible. Graduation couldn’t arrive soon enough, and then I’d be off to New York for college.
But the idea of being so far away from Jessica-not seeing her bounce by me every day or hearing her jabber about dances and gay boys-suddenly scared me. I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d handle it. She and Casey kind of balanced me out. I wasn’t sure anyone else would be willing to put up with my cynicism once I left town.
“We should get to chemistry, Jess,” Angela said as she shook her long black bangs from her eyes. “You know how Mr. Rollins gets when we show up late.”
They scampered off to the science department, and I started down the hallway heading toward AP government. My mind drifted to other places, to a future without my best friends to keep me sane. I’d never considered that before, and now that I was thinking about it, it made me really nervous. I knew they’d tease me for it, but I would have to find a way to keep in constant touch.
I guess my eyes lost contact with my brain, because the next thing I knew, I ran smack into Wesley Rush.
That was the end of my good mood.
I stumbled backward, and all of my textbooks slipped from my arms and crashed to the floor. Wesley grabbed me by both shoulders, his large hands catching me before I had the chance to trip over my own feet and slam into the tile.
“Whoa,” he said, steadying me.
We were standing way too close to each other. I felt like I had bugs crawling under my skin, spreading from the places where his hands touched me. I shivered with disgust, but he misread it.
“Wow, Duffy,” he said, looking down at me with a cocky grin. He was really tall-I’d forgotten that, sitting next to him at the Nest the other night. He was one of the only boys in our school who was taller than Casey-at least six two. An entire foot taller than me. “Do I make you weak in the knees?”
“As if.” I twisted out of his grasp, fully aware that I sounded like Alicia Silverstone in Clueless but just not caring. I knelt down and began to gather my books, and to my intense displeasure, Wesley joined me. He was playing the Good Samaritan role, of course. I bet he was hoping some hot cheerleader, like Casey, would walk by and think he was being a gentleman. What a pig. Always looking to score.
“Spanish, huh?” he said, glancing down at the scattered papers as he grabbed them. “Can you say anything interesting?”
“El tono de tu voz hace que quiera estrangularme.” I stood up and waited for him to hand over my papers.
“That sounds sexy,” he said, getting to his feet and handing me the stack of Spanish work he’d swept together. “What’s it mean?”
“The sound of your voice makes me want to strangle myself.”
“Kinky.”
Without another word, I jerked the papers from his hands, tucked them inside one of my books, and stomped off to class. I needed to put as much distance between myself and the womanizing bastard as possible. Duffy? Seriously? He knew my name! The egotistical jackass just couldn’t let me be. Not to mention my skin was still itching where he’d touched me.
Mr. Chaucer’s AP government class consisted of only nine students, and seven of them were already in the room by the time I walked through the door. Mr. Chaucer gave me a dirty look through his squinting eyes, impressing upon me that the bell would ring any second. To be late was a felony in Mr. Chaucer’s opinion, and to be almost late constituted a misdemeanor. I wasn’t the last one to show up, though. That helped a little.
I took my seat in the very back of the room and started to open my notebook, hoping to God that Mr. Chaucer wouldn’t call me out on my near tardiness. With my current mood, there was no guarantee I wouldn’t start cussing at him. He didn’t, and we were both saved the drama.
The last student entered just as the bell rang. “Sorry, Mr. Chaucer. I was putting up signs promoting next week’s inauguration ceremony. You didn’t start already, did you?”
My heart skipped a beat when I looked up at the boy who’d just come in.
Okay, so I’m not quiet about the fact that I hate teenagers who date in high school and constantly rant and rave about how much they “love” their boyfriend or girlfriend. I freely admit that I hate girls who say they love someone before they’ve dated them. I don’t hide the fact that, in my opinion, love takes years-five or ten at least-to develop, and high school relationships seem incredibly pointless to me. Everyone knew this about me… but nobody knew that I was almost a hypocrite.