299 Days As a Guy

Chapter 6 - Meredith's Boyfriend

So the following Monday morning, we strutted down the hall, to everyone's outrage and shock, with my arm around Meredith and her sticky static hair. Murmurs were reaching my ear from the crowd of students; "I bet she made him," "I bet she paid him!" "I bet they got together at the Cullen Twins' party." "I bet they played seven minutes in heaven."
Tyler slammed his fist down on a locker very close to the face of one of the rumor spreaders. "I bet you played seven minutes in heaven - with Bethel Baldwin's mom - only it was no game."
I recognized a familiar face sweep past us as we strutted along. Her little mouth was turned down and perfect brows furrowed as her eyes followed us walk past; Candice Bryson didn't understand. But then again, how could I make her understand without telling her the whole story, and by the occasion revealing to her that she has semi-made out with a girl.
So she brushed along, following her group of friends who shot me hateful, dirty looks making my balls shudder.
All through the first and second period literature class, I received yet more cold stares from Candice, when I got forced to invite Meredith to sit with me. Candice then moved across the classroom all the way to the far opposite corner and sat alone hating me so much. Luckily for me, her friends weren't there to shoot me dirty looks. Unluckily for her, it meant that she was completely alone.And all along, Meredith was overjoyed. Her eyes sparkled every time I turned to her after she annoyingly shoved at my sleeve. She loved the envious way with which all the girls glares were fixated on our table during Chemistry class, third period. They probably all wandered the same thing as me; how did this static-haired illuminati freak end up with one of the hot senior guys? By some turn of luck that puberty awarded her with, or more likely just by magic.

"Meredith," I grimaced.

"Yes?" She immediately straightened up from her hunched position, and looked up at me with furiously batting eyelashes. Those tufts of hair clumped together by bad mascara, went up and down faster than Tiff Hudson, during her record break of last year's squatting challenge. "Please respect the line I drew to divide our desk," I seized her condescendingly "and keep to your side of it.""Damn it Ashley," she hissed, "if you weren't so hot to balance out your arrogance, I would willingly shove the sharp end of my eyeliner pencil into your voodoo doll."

"Oh please darling," I scoffed, "if your eyeliner pencil had a sharp end, you would have at least some accuracy in the mess on your face, which you like to call eyeliner."

"Shut up and do as I say." She grabbed hold of my hand and slapped it onto her cheek. It took a moment for me to realise that she was trying to kiss me. I shoved away. "The cure." Meredith breathed in my ear with a ghostly whisper which made my balls shudder - for the second time today. "Remember..."

Hopeless and defeated, I was under her control with the sound of that word. Cure. Its echo circled in my head as I let her pull me closer and stick her mucky, mascara-like lip-gloss all over my face. All the while I pressed my eyelids down shut, counting the seconds until it would be over, and once I opened them again, I could feel Candice's bewildered glace on the back of my neck. I turned around awkwardly, to see not Candice, but the whole damn room glaring enviously at Meredith, who just sat there sucking it all in with a smile on her face as she licked the smudged lip-gloss off her mouth.

Only at that moment it struck me what I had just done. A sickly mixture of word vomit and actual vomit felt like it was creeping up to my lips. Clenching my teeth and turning back around in my chair, I managed to keep it where it belonged. For the rest of third period I felt sick - you know when you're PMSing and you top it off with a bad kiss and you feel awful. Well I mean, as a guy I obviously had no good reason to PMS, but I seemed to be doing it either way. Monday was the only day of the week when I had Candice in all of my classes and if I didn't push her away at the party, maybe right now she would have been the one I was kissing instead of the blob of black sticky lip-gloss that was also referred to as Meredith.