Faris from Fairytale

3. School - Zain

I stood outside of Gia's house. I didn't think about the importance of giving her my phone number until I woke up this morning. Fortunately, I was only outside for a minute when she came out. I started to speak, but her appearance caught me off guard. There was something different about her. Her cornrow braids were down, it didn't look like she was wearing makeup, but her lips were shiny. She wore a short sleeve red shirt with the jeans she picked out at the mall.

She smiled at me. "Good morning, friend." 

When she walked past me, she smelled sweet like candy. Then, she zipped up her backpack and started to put it on her back, but I took it from her. "I'll carry it."

"It's not even heavy," she stated.

I gave it back to her. "Why do you look like that?"

"Like what?"

"What's that on your lips? Are you wearing perfume?" I found myself questioning her.

Gia smirked, "Are you trying to be my play brother or something?"

I got a hold of my emotions. "Umm... When we get to school, my friends might try to mess with you, but just talk to them like you talk to me. Oh, I gotta take you to the main office so you can enroll."

"My mom and I did that last week." She handed me her notebook. "Those are all my classes."

I looked at her cute handwriting. She put a small circle above her lower case I's instead of a dot. I told her, "We have some of the same classes, so you can sit next to me in all of them. We just have different math classes. And when you go to the gym, I'll be at football practice, but at least we'll have the same lunch."

"I can't wait for lunch," Gia exclaimed.

I held out my phone to her. "Let me get your number. You can call me if you get lost."

She squinted her eyes. "If I had a phone, I would've gave you my number already."

I dug in my pocket for an ink pen and wrote my number in her notebook. "When you get a phone, you can call me."

She shook her head. "My parents don't believe I should get a phone until I'm out of high school, but if I get good grades this year, I could possibly get a phone my junior year."

"Nah, I think your parents' just don't trust you," I joked.

She rolled her eyes as she took her notebook back. "Anyway! I can't wait to see how popular you are."

I never saw myself as being popular. I guess I never cared to think about it. When we walked through the doors of the school building, I heard my name nonstop.

"Good morning, Zain!"

"Zain, what's up man?"

"How was your weekend, Zain?"

And this was just from the teachers. After briefly answering them, I looked over my shoulder to see that Gia was following closely behind me. Thankfully, our first two classes were the same. I walked down a hall and went up the stairs. It was normally quiet up here since juniors and seniors always got to school either right before or after the bell rang.

When we got to the top of the stairs, I looked down the hall to see no one else was up there. I turned around and asked, "You okay?"

Gia looked at me strangely. "Why wouldn't I be?"

I informed her, "In thirty minutes, this school will be full of students, and you are the new girl. You will have people in your face wanting to know who you are and where you're from."

She asked, "Are you going to leave me or something?"

I looked at her, still wondering why she looked so different to me. I said, "You can tell them that I'm your boyfriend if they try to talk to you."