Mission 101 Heart Captured

[18] - Suffering

♠ ♦ Brooklyn's P.O.V ♦ ♠

After Ari left me all alone in Calculus, I decided, for my sanity, that pretending Jackass didn't exist would be beneficial and the safest thing to do. However, that does not mean that I didn't notice his eyes burning holes into the side of my face, or the sneaky glances he threw my way as if hoping to be caught staring.

I had successfully managed to ignore him for the rest of the lesson; however, I did not manage to escape from him after the lesson. He somehow managed to grasp onto the edge of my fingers and hold onto them for the next two minutes. It took me what felt like hours to get out of the crowd that I purposefully threw myself into in an attempt to escape him. Obviously it failed, and now, I was stuck with him latching onto my hand like his life depended on it.

I tried to tug my hand away from his grip, but he held on tightly, tighter than I ever imagined he could. To everyone else, it might have looked like I was in a hurry to get to class, but he was holding me back because he wanted me to stay by his side. Maybe it might have even looked like I was a shy girlfriend who was insecure and didn't want us holding hands in public.

Of course, I was neither of those two things, but I could see people giving us all sorts of looks as we passed by. Seeing the art room come into view was like looking at the opportunity to flee into heaven, and I would finally have an excuse to get him to leave me alone.

But boy was I wrong.

He dedicated the rest of his day to following me around and trying to get me to talk to him, but I never gave in.
I caught up with Ari after lunch in physics instead of during lunch because I had to sit with the peppy cheerleaders that were always nagging me to do one thing after the other.

As soon as I found out about everything that had happened between her Aaron, I flipped. I couldn't believe that she had the guts to do something like that. A huge part of me was more proud of her than shocked because she had done something to defend herself: she stood up for herself. It was then that I realized that those boys had changed us, maybe even for the better. But that didn't change that fact that they were bad news and would only bring us trouble.

After school, I made Ari join us for cheerleading practice. Obviously, it took a lot of effort to get her into a cheerleading outfit that I had made for her and El. She was a really pretty girl, but she just needed confidence. What better way to gain confidence than to be thrown into the air by a bunch of preppy cheerleaders?

It was safe to say that we were all very cautious when it came to the stunts when she practicing with us. To be safe, I only let her do the most simple of the simple stunts with the crash mats because we had all expected her to fall off. I was slightly surprised to see how calm and relaxed she looked while doing all the cheerleader stunts. Before we did the first stunt with her, I told her to treat this like a mission and that she would be alright. And that was exactly what she was doing.

We went through the actual routine that I would send them to competition with, and I hadn't told them that I may not attend the competition with them, I wasn't ready to decide yet.
I could tell that Ari was feeling better and a little more confident by the look on her face while we did the routine. Instead of her usual look of self defeat, she had a smile on her face. I was happy that she was finally starting to be confident in her self, even if it took a bad boy to take interest in her.

After an hour of flips, jumps, cheers and repeat, we were all exhausted. Even though I knew that the team needed more practice, I let them go. Then, Ari and I made our way to my car so that we could go to training. We both tried to call and text El multiple times to find out where she was and if she would bother showing up to training or not, but we got no reply.