Heart Monitor

Valerie Laurence strut into the shimmering halls of her high school with her head held high. Looking at her you could never tell she had been injured in a crash at all, her skin unmarred and golden hair in immaculate condition. Her lips shimmered like diamonds as she grinned at her admirers.

News of her accident had spread quickly, especially inside a small town like Dust Hill. There wasn't a soul in the county that hadn't heard the most intimate details of the worst moment of Valerie's life. 'I heard it was a drunk driver' or 'I heard it was her mother' or, God forbid, both, were becoming so common to her ears she almost wished she could just remove them from her head. She didn't blame the driver that caused the accident, and she didn't blame her mother.

Beep... Beep... Beep...

Maybe she did blame the driver a little. Perhaps if he hadn't piloted his flat-bed truck into the passenger door of her mother's car, then she wouldn't still be hearing the constant beeping of the heart monitor from the hospital.

Her heels clicked as she sauntered toward the lunchroom, where her best friend Daisy was waiting for her. It was her first day back at school, after all. What kind of best friends wouldn't want to see her?

She faltered a moment outside the cafeteria doors. She shuffled her tawny leather jacket and checked the ruffles on her silky white shirt, checking for perfection. Adjusting her blonde hair to fall down her back like a waterfall - just the way she liked it - and pulling her brand new leather bag up her shoulder a few inches, she shoved open the weighted doors.

The layout of the room had barely changed. Perhaps, she pondered, the room had been like this since its genesis. The paint was chipped from the bricks at elbow-height nearly all the way around the room. The floor was heavily scuffed, the black and grey marks from thousands of shoes leaving their own impression on the cool marble flooring.

The jocks and cheerleaders maintained their well-kept pedestals neighbouring the drama kids. Nobody ever questioned the motive for the intermingling of the two seemingly unrelated social groups, as it was understood that the football team and the drama kids always had at least three relationships going at one given time. The commanders were the power-couple of Ian Buske and Benjamin Harris. Ian Buske was the star quarterback of the football team who had led the Dust Hill Dragons to back-to-back victories at national competitions, and Benjamin, more commonly known as Benji, was the writer/director/producer/star of every musical to ever grace the stage of Dust Hill High. Wedging anything between the two resulted in a perpetual scorning from the majority of the student body.

The other social groups existed further into the abyss that was the lunchroom, but Valerie was only interested in the popular crowd. Her friend Daisy was currently in an on/off commitment with Benji's younger brother, Simon, so she had earned both of them temporary admittance to the table that is looked upon by the nerds and the hipsters.

She strode over to the table filled with high school royalty and took a seat beside Daisy and Simon. The two were locked so tightly together that it would be difficult to fit even a penny between them. Daisy's head was perched atop Simon's shoulder and the two were murmuring sweet nothings directly into each other's ears.

"Valerie! Welcome back!"

Valerie watched Daisy's lips as she hears the words, but her lips remained immobile... and the voice she heard was decidedly male. Her head snapped around and she found herself staring into the bright cerulean eyes of Teddy Buske.

Teddy Buske, to Valerie, was the most alluring human being ever to walk the face of the Earth. One look at his sandy brown hair or his rippling biceps made Valerie's mouth run dry and forced her knee to hop up and down sporadically. It also didn't hurt that he was the younger brother of the star quarterback or that he was the team's first-string linebacker. He looked at her expectantly, his ivory teeth showing molar to molar as his smile shone light directly into her own amber eyes.