Charlie Whitmen loves sports, junk food, video games, cars and basically anything-if not everything-your average teenaged boy would find interesting. But wait a second, Charlie isn't even a boy! Oh no, she's actually a girl!
Bet you didn't see that...
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Playing Tattle-Tale
Without knocking, Nick barges into his sister's room, a luminous smile gracing his face. "Charlie, guess what!" he shouts out giddily as he bounces up and down on the balls of his feet. His entire body is buzzing with excitement and he cannot wait to share the great news with her. She's the first person he wants to disclose the information to because, well, she's the only one who has knowledge of the subject.
Charlie doesn't bother looking up from her math homework and replies to Nick with the most stoic expression he's ever seen her wear, "You got genital herpes?"
The upward parabola on his lips immediately disappears from sight as he tries not to scowl at the girl. When she says stuff like this, he can't help but wonder where and whom she had learned such things from. "That's not funny," he grumbles. Next, Nick stalks over to her bed and makes himself comfortable. The sudden addition of his weight causes the mattress to dip and Charlie's laptop to slide off the lap-desk. She fixes it before it could fall and turns to her brother.
"I thought it was hilarious," she counters. He's the one who told her to guess. It's not her fault genital herpes had been the first thing that popped up in her head. It's most likely because today's lesson in her mandatory health class revolved around sexually transmitted infections and how dangerous they could be.
A handful of students had been extremely uncomfortable. They were squirming in their seats the entire time, while Mr Liu, their teacher, displayed graphic photos (no nudities though, of course; he wants to scare them, not scar them) of the different effects the infections could have on your body.
Charlie had been one of the few students who didn't get bothered, mainly because her mind had been elsewhere at the time. In her opinion, however, all of this is common knowledge. Over the years, she naturally picked all of the information up, along with the dos and don'ts of high school. The T.V. dramas also helped a lot. Yeah, it probably would have been a smarter choice for her to have taken the class during her freshman year with Jillian and got it out of the way as soon as possible but she wasn't thinking then.
And since she kept pushing it back, Charlie has no choice but to suffer through it alone now with a bunch of fourteen and fifteen year-olds. Witnessing the underclassmen, who are just too naïve and innocent for her taste, have their brains poisoned by the ugliness of the world is probably the only entertaining thing in the class.
Welcome to reality, kiddos.
"Let's be serious here," Nick mandates. "You remember Skylar, don't you?"
Charlie recalls the identity of the girl and nods. "Yeah, she's the one you were writing about in your diary, right?"
His nostrils flare as he speaks through gritted teeth. "For the umpteenth time, it's not a diary. It's a journal. Get it right, would you?"
