𝔽₳𝜯Ǝ

New Friends

True to her word, Chloe did not stop talking to me when the school year started. In fact, she talked to me every day.

After a couple of days, I even started talking back. Truth be told, we were better friends at school than we had been over the summer. After a week, I started sitting with her and her friends at lunch.

Chloe was very popular and had a lot of people she called her friends. Most of the cheer squad, pretty much every athletic jock at school, and she'd hug all of her friends when she met them in the halls or for lunch. (Me included. I never got tired of that. Especially the first time she did it in front of my friends, but that's a different story for the moment.) But there were really only three girls that Chloe really thought of as her friends. Two of them were cheerleaders; the other was a girl, Chloe had been friends with since kindergarten. They were all mind-bogglingly hot too. Maybe not, to my secret comparison, as hot as Chloe, but still plenty hot enough for fantasies at seventeen.

Becky was another cheerleader. Blonde in every sense of the word; she was not the smartest of the group, but she wasn't stupid. She was taller than Chloe, taller than all of us really. She had a slim figure that made her a little too skinny, but she had a gorgeous face and lips and loved to make these pouty little faces with them. Really, I can't think of any guy that wouldn't have dreamed about those lips wrapped around his thing...

Jenna was the other cheerleader, and she was the jock of the group. She was also in soccer and track, and she had the longest legs ever. She was pretty smart and didn't struggle too much to keep her high C average. She could easily have been an A student, but as I said earlier, the attitude was as important as smarts when it came to school, and Jenna just didn't have an academic attitude. She was also easily the most outgoing of any of them. She would cheer loudly for the least things. She also liked to party and was usually the source of most party invitations.

Then there was Alison. She was the least outgoing of the four of them, which is to say she was ten times more outgoing than I but compared to the three cheerleaders, she was practically shy. Her parents were also like super lawyers or something, and she always had money to burn. With auburn hair that she'd keep just above her shoulders, she also was the most practical and down-to-earth of the girls. Not that she wasn't a little spoiled by her seemingly unending wealth, but she didn't flaunt it too much. At least around us.

Us.

Yeah, I was included. Most of Chloe's other friends ignored me. Certainly all of her male friends and most of the other cheerleaders. But those three accepted my presence almost without question. They talked to me at lunch, laughed at my jokes, and took my friendship with Chloe at face value. They all also needed tutoring or at least asked for it. I was all too happy to oblige.

And this is where we came in, with me figuring out it was easier to get girls to talk to you if you help them with their homework.

That year was a pretty good one. I was part of a group. A popular one which somehow, I guess, began to include me. I was friends with four of the hottest girls in school; they gave me hugs every day, asked my advice about boys and their outfits, laughed with me, invited me to parties with them, and just - included me. That in and of itself was a miracle. I even got better at dressing myself with a lot of help and advice from the girls, of course. I bought some nicer clothes with the money they gave me for tutoring. Even after I insisted it wasn't necessary anymore, once they learned I was spending it on clothes, they started taking me shopping with them. I guess I wasn't completely a nerd anymore, but they were all still way out of my league for anything but friends.

We were a clique. There were problems of course. I mean my presence in their group caused a lot of their boyfriends to become jealous, and I'm pretty sure everyone else in the school thought I was their mascot, but I didn't care. They were my friends, and they weren't afraid or ashamed to call me theirs. Sure, I did their homework for them sometimes, but I just as often helped them figure it out on their own. Their grades improved; my social status improved. It was a win-win. I never felt used or taken advantage of.

It did of course create tensions with my other friends.

The first time Chloe came up to me in the halls, I was standing around with a bunch of my buddies from the Chess club (look, I already admitted I was a nerd okay?). Chloe, the sexy avatar of all that was appealing in the world, came up and wrapped her arms around my neck in a sudden hug. She even lifted one leg. She was wearing her cheer outfit and had her hair back in a ponytail.

"Hey Jake!" she said in her everyday bubbly charm voice.

I smiled and hugged her back briefly. I thought the guys around me were going to lose their eyeballs. Chloe pulled back and smiled at the other guys, "Hey guys, I need to steal Jake a sec, okay?"

Her hands fell into mine and she pulled me a few steps away.

"What's up?" I asked, trying to force the casual. Yeah, guys, beautiful girls come up to me all the time. This is no big deal. Watch and learn from the master.

"Can you do a favor and give this to Jenna for me after next period?" She handed me a bunch of notes. I recognized them; they were the notes I had given her for her open-book test yesterday. (This was before I'd started tutoring all of the girls, but after I'd started eating lunch and hanging out with them.)

"Sure, she's got, who, Ms. D'Cruz right now?"

"You got it!" Chloe smiled brightly.

I smiled back. It was infectious.

"Thanks, babe!" she said and blew me a kiss as she spun on one foot and trotted off, her ponytail bouncing back and forth in her wake. Blowing kisses was something she did a lot, to lots of people.