All Aboard the Remington Train

Chapter 3

A couple days past, and I was starting to settle into Blackburrow. The classes, I mean. As for the people… Well, I’d made one friend. She barely spoke and we just ended up sitting together because there was nobody else to sit with. Her name was Willa Keating, and she was the shortest girl I’d ever seen. Her glasses were thin and wiry, taking up a large portion of her face. She was nice, I guess. My roommate still had not come yet, and I’d been told she was arriving at the school two weeks in. Only one more day until she was expected. I was a bit gloomy at our prospects of being friends, considering all I had was Wilhelmina Keating.

            What I’m saying is that it wasn’t a huge comfort knowing that your only friend was the other outcast.

            I was focused on my studies, taking every free period to either read ahead in the curriculum or do homework. It was tough competition at this school. Everyone here was accepted for outstanding academic performance, and I was one of the unlucky ones who had to work especially hard to achieve this performance. Of course, less social time meant more studying. These habits didn’t help my status.

            I’d never had a vast amount of friends at school. I had three or four that stuck with me, but they’re long gone. What depressed me the most, though, was that Benjamin Walker acted as if we had never met. I could understand that the greeting was embarrassing, but I didn’t peg him for the boy who would be ashamed about it. It was like a stab to the heat when he saw me and then looked the other way.

            Because who wants to be friends with an outcast anyway? Ben was surrounded by a group of golden friends who laughed at his jokes. He didn’t need to go out of his way to befriend me. For some reason, I thought, he hated me. Once in a while, we would make eye contact and my mouth would start to turn up into a smile, but before it morphed fully, he looked away, leaving me wearing a sad half smile on my face that turned out to be yet another grimace. Once, we crossed each other in the hallway, and he had no choice but to see my grin and smile tightly back, as if it was painful.           

I stared at him and his friends while they ate their lunch. I was sitting and slowly eating soup, my history textbook open in front of me. They were laughing and Ben was blushing and smiling. I tilted my head in confusion, wanting to know why he was blushing, wanting to laugh with them, too. Suddenly, Willa made it a rare occasion by speaking up.

“Cynthia McCormack likes him. That’s why he’s red as a beet.”

I was startled. “Cyn—Cynthia McCormack?” I looked behind me over my shoulder to where Cynthia was sitting with her friends. She was the seventh grade golden girl, with ginger locks and a flawless smile. She was giggling and lightly smacking her friends as they sent pointed looks in Ben’s direction and then grinned.

The whole interaction sickened me a bit, but Willa continued: “Yeah, Cynthia McCormack told Annie Martin that she had a crush on Ben and Annie told the rest of Cynthia’s friends, including Rachel Bernstein who likes Tyler. Rachel told Tyler and made him swear not to tell Ben, but he then told all of Ben’s friends who then told Ben.”

I blinked at her. That was the most Willa had ever said. “How do you know all this?” I asked her.

She shrugged her tiny shoulders, and a private smile unwillingly formed on her face. “I listen. I watch.”

“I knew I liked you Willa.”

“I knew you liked me, too, Remy.”

I grinned at her. Then I leaned down to get closer to her. “What else do you know about those… two groups.”

“I know that Ben is ecstatic that Cynthia likes him because Cynthia is the prettiest girl in the grade.” Willa looked away as if she’d said something awful. “Sorry.”