The Wallflower of Parkview High

Chapter Thirty

"Hey Noah, what are you doing?"

I looked up from where I was busy flipping through this book of hers that Charlotte had given me (Confident: How to Face Your Fears and Stand Up to Bullies) after I had told her what happened yesterday. Right when I looked up and was met with a pair of blue eyes, I swore right then and there that I wanted to sink into the ground.

"What do you want from me, Zander?" I asked, slightly shifting the cover of the book out of view so that Zander wouldn't see what I was reading and tease me for it.

"I want to tell you something about Damien." Zander said, sitting down next to me. As soon as those words escaped his mouth, I felt as if my insides had frozen up. Did he really want to talk to me about Damien when he saw what happened yesterday?

"What about him?" I asked slowly. Zander sighed and averted his eyes from me for about a second.

"You know what I said about how you can't determine whether someone is telling the truth or not through a few texts they sent you?"

"Yes...?"

"Well I would like to tell you that I stand by that. What Damien is saying about me laughing about your non-existent crush is all bullshit."

"But he said he was there and saw you laughing!" I shot back, not knowing why the hell I was defending Damien at this point.

"Just because someone is there when something presumably happened doesn't mean that what they say is true." Zander told me, looking at me with a fixed stare. ¨People could always twist the events around to make it seem like they're innocent of whatever happened and make the person in question seem like the bad guy.¨

"But what if he's telling the truth and didn't twist the events around?"

"Noah," Zander sighed, and I was pretty sure that he was internally facepalming at me, " If you think I'm wrong, then think of it this way. If I laughed about your non-existent crush, then it would probably be the talk of the school at this point. A person having a crush on someone is a big deal at this school and people usually try to bombard said person with questions about their crush and spend days observing tons of people to see if any of them act differently than normal around said person. I don't see people freaking out and bombarding you with questions like they usually do."

"Maybe it's because they don't care that I'm the one who has the crush?" I suggested hopefully. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I'm pretty sure I was invisible to almost all of the people here so why would they care if I had a crush on someone?

"It's not because you're the one that has the crush. They would try and find out regardless of who the person is and how shy and seemingly...unimportant they are." Zander said, and then winced. "Sorry if that sounds mean," he added.

"B-But-" I started to say.

"It's so obvious that Damien is lying. Why can't you see it with your very own eyes, Noah?" Zander hissed. I just blinked and averted my eyes to the ground.

"I just ... I wasn't even there to see if you laughed or not so I don't know who's lying."

"Do you think I would lie to you if I laughed about your non - existent crush?" Zander scoffed and I winced slightly at the tone he was using.

"I mean - Maybe - I don't-'' I stuttered, trying to formulate an answer. Looking back to the things he had done to me in the past - how he had laughed at me, teased me in PE and didn't listen to me when I implied that he shouldn't throw things around my line of sight - I would think that he would go as far as to lie to me. However, there was a little part of me that said that he was telling the truth and that he didn't laugh at me. But then again, how would I know that he laughed at me if I wasn't even there?