The Boyfriend Factory

Chapter Two

Lunch was normally my favourite hour.

Not because of the tons of friends, and the gossip they brought along with them. Because face it, I had neither of those. Definitely not for the cafeteria food either. I'd always bring doughnuts with me – and the Monday meals sucked.

Why I loved Lunch the most was simple really.

People-Watching.

Yep. People-Watching. I get how I slightly live up to the image that I'm a 'stalker' or 'creep', because yeah, maybe I sort of am, in my own little way. But you'd never really know until you tried it.

Most of my life I'd like to be an observer. I'd never really liked to touch the surface of reality, just liked to watch it. See it. Experience it without really being there. It was like reading a book without turning the pages, or seeing the words.

It was surprising how much you could take from someone's life and situation just by studying their body language, the way they talked, the tone of their voice, the volume, and even their eyes. They eyes gave away more than people cared to notice, but I was there to notice.

I could study a random student for five minutes and piece together a vague idea of their life, who they were.

I could watch the girl from across the room and notice her Irish heritage in the structure of her face. I noticed her being a good listener, always sitting with an intrigued look on her face as her friends talked, only interjecting when necessary so she wouldn't talk over them. How her back was arched away from the rest of the room and her legs were crossed tightly over each other as if she was pushing the rest of the world away, or caving into herself and facing only her friends.

What I meant was, it was truly an experience.

Seeing so many different worlds in one place. Each person their own planet, floating in their own solar system.

Warning – nerd alert.

But the reason I truly was excited for lunch today, was because of Brianna Kent. I wanted to go to lunch, because of Brianna Kent. Weird, right? But not as weird as it seemed.

Brianna Kent was my new focus, the new subject I needed to study and dissect. From a distance really. The whole morning all I could think about was how Ethan wanted me to help him pair up his broken romance. How he'd asked me.

This wasn't new, of course. Loads of people asked me for relationship help, as unbelievable as it was.

I was the master of broken relationships. I could fix any relationship and mend anything that had to do with the boy department. I was they boy tamer. The boy expert. I knew anything and everything to make the perfect boyfriend.

All apart from the fact I'd never had a boyfriend in my life, and sometimes still struggled to even talk to one.

What I did know was that I was good.

Though unlikely to others, many boyfriends or ex-boyfriends did have a tendency to ask me for help. Somehow they found me out of the blue, sometimes I'd drop hints of advice for them, then – bam. I'd be helping them patch up their broken relationships.

Who knew being a hopeless romantic book worm actually paid off?

Some of the boys I'd even helped would start calling me Cupid, or on the rarest occasions, smile at me when we passed each other in the hallway or say hi. It was quite heart-warming, considering I was supposed to be a background character – the one the main characters don't really notice. You know, the ones they accidently brush in the hallway and somehow indirectly helps them find their true love or something. Though that was sort of stretching it a little.