Sunflowers and Four leaf clovers

Aftermath

Shelby sits at her usual spot on her 'friends' lunch table, eating the pasta salad her mom made her, but she can't focus on anything and instead ends up picking at her food.

Toni Shalifoe is a lesbian.

In hindsight its fairly obvious, but the thought never crossed her mind before.

But more than a lesbian that girl clearly has anger issues. She never once talked down to her or mentioned her sexuality, and yet Toni blew up in her face out of gosh darn nowhere.

Although in Tonis defence, she is right, if her father knew she had a friend like Toni, theres no saying what he would do. 'specially not after last time.

Maybe it's better this way, being friends with a girl like that would only complicate her life further. And they'd never be able to hang out at her house anyway, so what's the point if they'd hardly be able to see each other.

Yeah this is for the better, clearly Gods path for her, does not include being friends with that group. So she takes a lesson from the bible and gives thanks for what she has, for this Gods path. She clears her thoughts of the other girls out of her brain, drawing her eyes away from their table, and focuses on the friends she is grateful to have. 

As she turns her attention back to her table, Ryan sits down with his tray and joins in the conversation,

"Ryan?" Shelby says without thinking, the group all turns their heads towards her, conversation falling short, 

"Wassup Shelby,"

"Andrew said you two were getting lunch out today?"

Ryan and Damon share a look, and Ryan licks his lip nervously before putting an overly-confident grin on his face, "Right yeah, no that was the plan, but I uh, had to cancel last minute, he should be around here somewhere." 

He glances around for a moment before Damon starts the conversation back up, "So shelby, got any Paegents coming up soon?"

She's slightly taken back to have one of them ask about her life, normally she's on the outskirt of the group, "Oh well that's real sweet of you to ask Damon, I have one in a couple months, so I've got some downtime leading up to it."

"Sweet," he says nodding his head dumbly, before one of the girls cuts in and starts up a group discussion.

Shelby focuses back on her food, the small smile fading from her face, as she starts to pick at it again with her fork.

After a few minutes it becomes abundently clear that Andrew isn't around, so she decides to call it a day and head to the library to cram in some more studying.

"I'll see y'all around," She says with a grin, standing up. She closes the tupperware, and puts her half eaten lunch back into her bag. She gets one or two 'see ya's' and walks towards the exit.

Walking past Toni's table she subconsiously goes to push some hair behind her ear before realising she still has it tied up from chemistry. After a split second of deciding if its worth it or not, she stops in her tracks and faces the table. 

Fatin notices her first and stops mid ramble.

"Shelby? What can we do for you."

"Fatin hi!" She says grinning, "Sorry to interrupt y'all but I just gotta return something to Toni."

Fatin and Dot both turn to give Toni a look, but she just blanks them instead frowning at Shelby. Her frown does lift slightly though, as Shelby pulls the hairband out effortlessly and lets her hair cascade down her back.