Back to You

Familiar Faces

"Faith Harper?!" I heard a cheerful and familiar female voice call out to me from behind.

Oh no. Maybe I could run and hide. Better yet, maybe I could pretend I wasn't me and just a clone. Or even a hologram. Time travel had already worked. Who's to say that wasn't possible too?

But I couldn't even think of anything else plausible to get away from the one person I always terribly remembered in my adolescence like the back of my hand.

Closing my locker as Ryder's rather obvious rejection kept playing over and over in my thoughts—feeling like a knife had just lunged into my heart way more than our moment outside his wedding, I slowly turned around finally facing the only people to make it worse coming toward me in their sweatpants ensembles.

"Olivia!" I gritted my teeth through my unenthusiastic disposition.

What could I really say about Olivia James? To simply put it, if I thought Ryder's attitude was bad... she was much worse. She controlled pretty much everything and everyone.

She had it all and loved to profess to anyone in ears length. Money, style, connections, and looks. That's all she truly cared about too according to her own yearbook message freshman year.

Everyone adored her, but they also feared her due to her bark and fake sweet personality. But that wasn't even the part where I came into her perfect little world. I could care less about who she was or why as much as she wanted to choke down my throat on how I should. The exact reason she passionately wished I was dead. Literally.

Approaching with her best friend Andrea by her side, holding her bedazzled flip phone that was covered in celebrity stickers from various teen magazines in hand, I wanted to still run now.

But at this point with the whole McKenna situation, whatever she was about to say couldn't be that much awful.

"Look at that Andy! The girl does know how to communicate with people more important than she'll ever be. Good for her!" She spitefully spoke with strong happiness.

"Ohh, how fascinating." Andrea added on with the same tone.

I continued to stare bitterly, ignoring their comments with a sarcastic demeanor. "Good to see you guys too. How are ya?"

"I'd be better if you weren't still alive." Olivia shrugged.

See what I mean? I didn't care though. I wasn't going to feed into anything either. I was way too grown and not in the mindset for this level of pettiness.

"Noted! I'll keep that in mind while I start counting down the glorious awaiting seconds, until you finally get away from me. Can I request for that to be sooner?" I raised a thought.

Olivia glared, eying me down. "Well, that all depends if your caveman brain can explain something to me first. See, I don't know who you think you are or what you think you're doing."

Unsure what she was even getting at here, I simply nodded anyway. "Well you see I was going out of my way to avoid your presence. But of course you had to appear and just ruin all of that. So..."

"Cut the bull, Harper! I'm onto you. And I know exactly what you've been up to! Rumor has it that for some unknown reason, you believe it's okay to talk to and hit on taken guys who don't belong to you nor ever would want to." She scowled.

Okay, I was completely baffled now. I wasn't doing any of that. My hands were already full.

"Excuse me?"