Poor Little Rich Girl | ✓

Chapter 12: I Look Like A Total Southern Belle, Right?

Chapter 12: I Look Like A Total Southern Belle, Right?

“Have you been avoiding me?” Ben asks, suddenly behind me, making me jump.

“Shit Ben, you scared me.” I exclaim, jiggling the knob on my locker.

I finally got it today. My locker, I mean. When I got to school this morning, I was called to the office and they gave me this locker. Thankfully it’s a top one. Because here at this weird school, there’s top and bottom lockers. At my private school in L.A., our lockers were size of four of these stupid block type lockers. The lockers are even painted an ugly forest green color, but they’re lined in an unattractive lime green color, the letters spelling out, ‘East Elm’.

Either my locker is being stupid and stuck or I just can’t open it. In L.A., the lockers were much, much easier to open. We were assigned student I.D. cards and we’d just scan them on the locker barcode and it’d unlock. Smart, right? Much smarter than this stupid system. I mean, anyone can break into a locker; it’s not that hard.

Yesterday I was issued out all of my textbooks - all five of them - and I’m nearly about to pass out on the floor from the weight of all of them. There’s the four I have for my core classes and an Art one. A textbook for Art! Why? I don’t know why you need a textbook for Art, but apparently you do. Anyway, in addition to all the books I’m holding, my mom brought me all this crap she thinks I need for school yesterday evening. Pencils, about seven packs of paper, pens, cap erasers, binders for each of my classes and two of those obnoxiously big erasers that say, ‘for really big mistakes’, which I guess is supposed to be funny, but it’s not. It’s not funny at all. It’s just annoying, I think. So surely, you can understand how annoying it is to have to hold all of this shit while trying to open this stupid locker which is refusing to cooperate.

“So? Have you?”

“No, Ben,” I tell him, trying to get my locker open. “I haven’t been avoiding you.”

It’s true, I haven’t been avoiding Ben. I just haven’t actually talked to him since Wednesday. It’s only just now Friday, after all. I’ve seen him around the halls, at lunch and practicing soccer on the field after school, but I haven’t actually stopped to talk to him. Besides he was either around his friends or busy each of those times, so I didn’t feel the need to interrupt. It’s not like we’re friends or anything.

“Are you sure about that, Steffy?” He asks, leaning against the locker adjacent to mine.

“Yes, I’m sure. Why would I be avoiding you?”

“I’m gonna take a wild guess and say it has something to do with Wednesday.”

“You mean because of the party?”

“No, because it was a little humid, yes because of the party.”

“Okay, Captain Sassy.” I reply, still trying to get my locker open.

“Do you need some help with that?” Ben curiously asks me.

“Yes, please.”

Ben leans over to my locker and I tell him the combination. He spins the dial and in a few mere seconds, he pulls the metal locker door open. “Tada.”

“Thanks,” I say, putting my stuff in. “What?” I ask, seeing that he’s still standing there.

“What, what?”

“Why am I still looking at you?”

“’Cause you’re not blind, sunshine.” He chortles. “Serious question though.”