I gaped at him. "Richard!"
"What? I wasn't being sarcastic; I really do think it's cool." He smiled at me.
"She's not imaginary. She's REAL. In fact, she's your sister! Her last name is Yaghlaqar!" I probably screwed up the pronunciation, but everyone does, so I didn't think it'd be an issue.
"I have an imaginary sister?"
I did a facepalm. "What did I just say?"
Tracie put a hand on my shoulder. "LOTTIE. CALM DOWN. He's only a freshman."
"Well that's not very nice. We are in no way an inferior species," said Richard matter-of-factly.
I sighed. The more I talked to them, the stupider they thought I was. "Never mind," I said before I walked over to the vending machines.
I put a dollar bill into the machine and was just about to select an Orange Crush drink when I felt a cold hand on my shoulder. I turned around and saw Jiao grinning maliciously.
"Jiao, what the heck?! Why are you playing such a terrible joke on me? I know you can be kind of an ass sometimes, but this is ridiculous! Even your brother's in on it and he's not like that!"
"You know 'heck' is really a combination of the words 'hell' and 'fuck', right?" She snickered. "Very fitting, because you're fucked and about to be given a taste of Hell."
Her once-brown eyes had turned as red as two cherries, and her voice became completely different. "Those Estefany Aguabella songs are mine. She robbed me. Now I will take them back!"
"No you won't! I'm a better singer than you and you know it. Sorry Jiao, but the better singer always wins in the end."
"¡Jiao ya no existe! Mi nombre es GLORIA JOSEFINA VILLAVERDE."
Although Jiao was fluent in Mandarin and Uyghur, she couldn't speak Spanish to save her life, much less her grade. Between the perfect pronunciation of every word in that sentence and the mispronunciation of her own name - she pronounced it 'Chao' - I could tell that she was not herself anymore.
Someone else was.
