Countdown

Four Days Left

I stared at the navy blue, starry ceiling above me, trying to coax myself into getting up and joining my family for breakfast. Come on, Grace, I thought. Just four days. You only have to keep going for four more days. Knowing that any moment, my parents were going to wake me up and bitch at me for lying here so long, I climbed out of bed, feeling my feet hit the cheap carpet of my bedroom floor.

Checking my phone, I saw a text from Izzie:

hey, when i told sofia u were blocking outside #s she told me 2 txt u and tell u that she enrolled in the same drivers ed class as u u and couldnt wait 2 c u there.

And then another one, sent three minutes later:

i think u 2 should hang out. she seems kinda cool and u srsly need more friends.

It was Saturday, which meant I had to go to my early-morning Driver's Education class. Due to an unfortunate incident involving the old Driver's Ed teacher, one of the practice cars, and a few too many Jell-O shots, our school no longer offered the class, so you had to take it privately. I had begged my parents to sign me up for the afternoon session, but it was full, so we had to be out the door by 9:45 on a weekend morning.

My mom had gotten up to help me get ready and make sure I managed to choke down a full breakfast, which taught me another fascinating fact about my body- it turns out, that when you've been subsisting on Clif bars, VitaminWater, and the occasional frozen burrito for the last two months, being forced to eat a three-egg omelette with bacon at 8:34 AM makes your stomach hurt like the goddamn devil. I had read somewhere that quite a few World War Two POWs had died because they were refed too much, too quickly after having been starved by their captors for so long. Sadly, my mom was not persuaded by this argument, calling it "stupidly melodramatic" and making me eat anyways. To make things worse, I was out of Advil.

But the one thing I couldn't stop thinking about was having to see Sofia again. I wondered what she believed about me, since she had only moved here after the petition was deleted. The usual new kid clamor had kicked in for her, and everyone was fighting over which clique Sofia would end up belonging to. I had always wished there was a more streamlined way to do this- maybe we could have the new kids sit with each lunch table for one day, and then have a ceremony at the end where they would choose their alliances. It sure would be less chaotic.

I found a My Chemical Romance T-shirt that Ariana had given me a couple years ago, threw my unruly hair back into a scrunchie that had gone out of style thirty years ago. After pausing a moment to laugh mirthlessly at how stereotypical I looked, my mom called me and we left for Safety First Driving School.
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The first thing she did was sit down next to me.

"Hey, did you have a good weekend?" said Sofia, shyly.

"Yeah, it was fine. Did you finally got a cello?" I asked, praying for the teacher to come in and start the class.

"They had me pick it up on Friday."

A long, awkward silence emsued. There was an elephant in the room, and we both knew it. But if she wasn't going to bring it up, neither was I. Deciding to take her lead, I waited for her to penetrate the quiet.

"You can't escape me, you know."

Sofia smiled, setting her things down gracefully on Carly Anderson's empty desk.

"Unfortunately. Hey, where's Carly? Is she absent?" I asked.

Small talk. Gossip. I can do this.

"I heard she skipped to get high with- what's her name, Angelina? The one who wears all the eyeliner," answered Sofia.

"Oh, yeah, Angelica Rosen! She only shows up to school like, twice a week, and when she does she's high as a kite. She only gets to go to Dixon because her dad donated a whole bunch of money to the science program."

"Wow," she said, shaking her head.

At that moment, a whole group of girls in name-brand UGG boots, including two of Ivy's minions, walked in late.

"I'm going to sneak over there and sit with them, okay? Sorry. Catch you later?"

"Do what you want," I responded, sighing.