Queen of Nothing

27. into the thick of it

The writer's guild had quickly become a labor of love, and it was easy to throw myself into it after the disaster that was college admissions season. 

I'd been outright rejected from about seven out of the eight Ivy League colleges and had gotten waitlisted at UPenn. My only real options at that point were UCLA and NYU, the latter of which had been a pipe dream and completely unaffordable. Due to my family's evasive tax history, what with my mother conducting her international "business" and my father being MIA for the past couple of years, FAFSA had decided that I deserved aid in the form of unsubsidized loans only. 

I told myself that when I found Sallie Mae, I'd give her a piece of my mind. 

But until then, I'd continue to write my little short stories and hide in a corner during guild meetings. Mostly, I attended these meetings to hear other people talk. In just a few weeks, I'd gotten friendly with the others and had even worked up half a nerve to write something. 

It had taken a twenty-minute pep talk in my car after school when I'd decided to get out, my story tucked away in the notes app of my phone. I'd foregone the option of reading off of a script in case (and heaven forbid) I magically lost the physical copy and then the entire school would find the inner ramblings of one disgraced queen bee, Mahi Dasari. 

I'd almost turned the corner, pushing through the initial waves of people, when Lola ambushed me, eyes red and streaming with tears, fists clenched. 

"Lola?" 

"Is it true?" she hissed. 

"What?" I frowned. I'd messed up plenty recently, but I couldn't think of one reason Lola could hate me. She'd adored me in a way that made me uncomfortable at times, but she never behaved this way towards me. 

"You slept with Jordan. Is. It. True?" She enunciated every word with such severity that I had the good sense to be intimidated by her 5-foot self. 

"No, I didn't," I replied, "but for some reason, everyone's been accusing me of that lately." 

"You're a slut," she cried, "you're a fucking slut." 

"I'm sorry, where is this coming from?" I asked, trying to adopt a reasonable tone, "Who told you this?" 

"J-jordan," she hiccuped, "he said you seduced him and that's why we c-can't date anymore." 

"He dumped you because of me?" 

She cried harder. 

"Lola, I didn't sleep with him. Jordan's a sleazeball, and I wouldn't go near him even if I wanted to." I tried to put a hand on her shoulder in comfort but she shrugged it off aggressively. 

"He's not a sleazeball," she sniffled, "don't call him that!"

I looked at her with sympathy, "Lola there's a reason he would get you so drunk at these parties." 

"W-what?" She looked up at me with those big doe eyes and I felt all big sister at that moment. 

"Didn't you ever get uncomfortable with how he would behave around you when you would drink? At my birthday he was trying to manhandle you when you were drunk, so Katie and I took you somewhere safe so he wouldn't get to you-" 

She looked down, all of a sudden, and a tiny rage filled her body. 

"You locked me in that room?" She looked up at me, hatred filling her pupils, "Jordan broke up with me the next day. Said I wasn't fun anymore. Now I know why."  

"Lola, no," I tried to reason, "that's not what happened." 

"You probably locked me in that room so you could get him all to yourself, huh?"