Chasing Status: Talk Geeky To Me (Published on Amazon & Kindle!)

Chapter Two

I met her icy blue eyes with my brown ones. "Where did you get this?"

Naomi smirked. She looked like she escaped from a mental asylum from the look she was giving me. Her neck was low, accenting her eyes, and her voluminous curled sandy blonde hair was out of place in every direction as it always was. It looked frizzy, but she managed to make it look somewhat stylish. "Don't worry about it."

Whenever Naomi and I talked, or well, exchanged words—because we never really did talk—the world seemed to pause around us. The lack of care we felt for others when we were two footsteps apart had been fueled by our differences for each other. We didn't care who saw or heard us because our words normally took control of our minds. It was one strange way the universe had made us alike despite being polar opposites.

Back to the conversation at hand, I couldn't remember seeing anyone take the photo of me and Nelson, so I wondered how she had gotten her hands on it. That didn't bother me as much as knowing what she had done with the photo.

Naomi sensed my worry and her smirk widened. "I didn't know The Great Emma Steele had the hots for Nelson Montgomery," she said, her voice mocking. "Tell me, what line did he use on you to ask you out?"

I clenched my jaw from saying something that would land me in detention.

"Was it something like 'Hey, does your queen want to get with my king to make some pawns?'"

"Shut up," I spat. My hands had formed into fists and I felt my fingernails digging into my palms.

She laughed, but I heard the evil in it. She enjoyed this far too much. "You don't have to worry about me. I'm not going to put the moves on him. He's all yours. I made sure the whole school was aware of it."

I felt like something hard had rammed into my chest. Like a boulder. It was almost as if I had stopped breathing for a moment. She had done the one thing that I had feared the most. No one, anywhere in the world, needed to think there was something going on between myself and Nelson. It was bad enough that people thought I let Nelson on student council after doing "a favor" for me. For them to think there was something romantic or physical going on between us was beyond preposterous.

"I'm sure Nelson will be glad when the whole school finds out that you belong to him."

"Shut up!" I shouted, louder this time, but it was unlikely that anyone else had heard me. Students were shuffling the hallways on their way to their first class of the day. "There is nothing going on with Nelson. He is on student council and that's it. If he wasn't so nice and useful, I would kick him off myself!"

That was a lie, but Naomi didn't need to know that.

Naomi just looked at me before nodding over my shoulder. "Guess you can tell him yourself then."

Something—my gut maybe—clenched as I turned around and saw poor Nelson with a hurt look on his face. He stood there, staring at me like I was a stranger. As if all our jokes from yesterday's student council meeting meant nothing. I wasn't able to say anything, because nothing was going to make this situation right.

Nelson walked up to me. We were the same height, but in that moment, I felt like he had a good twelve inches on me. "You forgot this yesterday in the meeting," he said, placing my phone charger in my hand.

I had gone insane looking for that in my backpack last night before I went to bed and couldn't for the life of me remember where I had placed it.

Nelson shot me a hard stare that made me feel awful and as if I deserved to be buried alive six feet under before walking away. I shut my eyes and tried to ignore the twist I felt in my gut. It wasn't fair for Naomi to bring me down and it wasn't fair for Nelson to go down with me. It was wrong, but difficult to explain my perspective without being seen as shallow.