Something Bad

Chapter Eleven: I Love Ignoring the Problem

      “No way, man!”

      “I swear!”

      “That’s epic, dude!”

      “I know, right?”

      “She’s so hot!”

      “Yeah, I know.”

      “You’re so lucky!”

      “Totally!”

      “Hey, Liv?” Preston nudged me, thankfully being able to draw my ears away from the relentless dialogue to which they were being exposed.

      Most of the time, I could drain everything out around me pretty well. It was one of my few talents. That being said, in those times I usually had my notebook in hand as a means to distract me. Currently, due to the environment in which I was in, I was denied access to my beloved book by my best friend, whose reasoning for taking it away from me was that I needed to be “more social and loosen up.” He was obviously forgetting that I didn’t do the whole “social” thing.

      Piper had been whisked away by one of her many other friends, and had asked me if I wanted to sit with them during lunch, but I declined, remembering back to my most recent encounter with her group of friends. They didn’t like me. Obviously.

      Now, Piper was one of the nicest people I had ever met, and she had a capability that truly boggled my mind: she didn’t judge people. Sure, when she had first heard about a certain boy named Luke Daniels interacting with me, she had instantly become overly alarmed, but there were always exceptions. For the most part, she did her best to not judge and accept everyone for who they were—which was one of the main staples of our friendship, and why she hadn’t broken ties with me when we were eight and she discovered that I didn’t like things that most little girls attending private school did. Piper didn’t judge.

      Her friends, on the other hand, were the complete opposites. They were merciless and picked apart even the tiniest of flaws in people. I didn’t know them by name, but rather by face and fashion sensibility. Glossed lips, shiny hair, smooth skin, and not an ounce of care. There were quite a few of them, and I tried to avoid mixing with them at all costs for three rational reasons: 1) They were them. 2) They were people. 3) I didn’t like people. When we were younger, these were the type of girls who ridiculed me for no valid reason other than I was “weird.”

      A few months ago, the same situation had surfaced. One of Piper’s friends had asked her to sit with them during lunch, and Piper—not having the ability to say no to people—accepted. She dragged me along, and I experienced the singlehandedly worst lunch incident of my life. That was coming from a girl who had once spilt all her apple juice on her pants in third grade, and whose parents were too busy working to come and drop off a new change of clothes, so she was stuck in the stained pants all day. The limit of times a single question or joke could be made in the span of an hour was tested after that fateful lunch, as every kid in my class came up to me and asked, “Did you wet your pants?” Suffice to say it was a very traumatic day for me. Alas, this particular lunch that occurred in my junior year of high school was much, much worse than the apple juice.

      When I arrived at the lunch table that was inhabited by the type of girls whose life forces relied on gossip and shopping to sustain all basic forms of existence, I immediately felt out of place. They were all looking me up and down, as if to see whether or not I was “worthy” of sitting with them. After noticing my apprehension, Piper assured me that they were “nice” and a really “great” group of girls.