Playing Evelyn

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Five years later...

“Yo Susan, did you do the chem homework for next period?” Bradley Deeds asked me in a hushed tone. Being the quarterback and having an impressively sized chest as well as incredible lung capacity gave him a significantly louder “hushed tone” than any normal human. Naturally, every student currently in the library either glanced in our direction questioningly or with irritation depending on whether they were nerds or not.

Ignoring the fact that my name was not Susan nor had it ever been Susan, I simply nodded and tried to shrink in my seat to avoid to avid / pissed off looks of the other patrons.

“Can I borrow it?” he asked, slightly louder this time, oblivious to the death glares being sent our way by Mrs. Brows, the librarian as well as Jenny Tisdale and Abigail Hunt, two of the biggest nerds in Westerfield High, other than myself.

To avoid further attention I simply slid him the answers to the chemistry homework and tried to will him into the ether.

“Wow thanks, Suze. You have no idea how much I appreciate this.” He flashed me what I suppose he thought was a charming smile but I’d seen this act before. Jocks like Bradley didn’t talk to nerds like me and they never smiled at nerds like me unless they needed something. In this case, Bradley needed the continued use of my homework while I needed him to get away from me as soon as possible.

As he scribbled his answers sloppily into his own notebook I noticed him making several mistakes and judging by his lack of IQ, he wasn’t doing it to ensure we wouldn’t be caught cheating but because he couldn’t focus on anything that wasn’t a football or a cheerleader for more than ten seconds.

I briefly contemplated my status and decided I was definitely not the cheerleader type but I would not put myself as the polar opposite of a cheerleader. Thinking about it, the opposite of a cheerleader would be a goth girl, right? I am neither cheerful nor depressed. I am simply invisible.

Thus, though we’d been going to the same school for four years now, not to mention I’d been Brad’s personal cheat sheet for about three of those four years, he still had no idea what my real name was.

It was when I first entered high school that I decided to become invisible. I was thirteen and it had been a few months after I’d discovered the truth about my father. It didn’t take long for me to discover something unexpected about my mother. As it turns out, she’d been secretly dating a man she’d met while waitressing at a diner near our house. Apparently he’d come in once because his BMW had a flat tire and he needed to use the phone, took one look at my mother and fallen in love. After that, he’d returned to the diner every day for a week before my mother had agreed to date him.

They got married in the summer before I started high school. Three short months after I learned that my now deceased father was a has-been junkie, I was standing in pink taffeta beside two beautiful petite blondes with a fake smile pasted on my lips pretending that my world hadn’t become as unreal as a soap opera.

Those two petite blonde girls were my new step sisters, Chrystal and Francine Trent. Their father, George Trent was in his early forties, going bald and had a slight potbelly but it was obvious to anyone looking that he adored my mother. My mother who was pretty, blonde and petite just like my new sisters looked more like their mother than mine. I was the odd one out and even though George tried to make me as comfortable as possible in our new mansion, I mean house, it was impossible.

Not that I didn’t like the man. I did. Very much. Not only was he very nice but he made my mother smile in a way I’d never seen her smile before. So even though I felt like a duck amongst swans, I smiled demurely and accepted all the changes that came my way with as much grace as I could muster.