Forever & Always

Chapter 3

With a thud of my head against my headboard, my first day of senior year in Florida began. I apparently had a wish to concuss myself before age 20, and so far, I was on my way! I rolled out of bed, and sleepily made it to my bathroom to get a shower. I turned the water on and leaned against the cold tile walls, hoping that something might shock me awake. Unfortunately, I'm a teenager, and we never get enough sleep, so I started to doze off again when the water turned warm and was only awoken again when my mother banged on the door, warning me that the bus was scheduled to stop at my house in fifteen minutes. 

I quickly sprung to action, washing my body faster than I ever thought possible, then drying myself off. I normally let me hair air dry, but desperate times called for desperate measures, so I grabbed the hair dryer from under the sink and switched it on, hoping for the best. I did all I could to make my hair look presentable, but in the end decided that I was just going to leave it down and let it be. I wasn't trying to impress anybody. I ran back into my room, grabbed a shirt and shorts, passed my mom in time for her to hand me a Pop Tart and a water bottle and made it outside just in time for the bus to open it's doors and let me on. 

I climbed the steps and had the realization that there definitely were more kids than there was space on this bus. From what I could see, there were already two people to a seat, so either I was going to get stuck with the bitch seat in the back of the bus with a larger student who was taking up most of the seat himself, or I was going to have to make two other people extremely uncomfortable by tripling up. In the end, I decided that I would take one for the team and sit with the big kid in the back. As I made my way to my seat, I could've sworn I heard people sigh in relief. The moment I sat down, however, I made the mental note to pay attention to the route to school, because your girl Riley was about to start walking to school. That's right, like a fucking pioneer. 

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Turns out I didn't live that far from the school at all, so walking was actually a much better alternative. I wasn't about to sit bitch every day for the rest of the school year. Just because I wasn't rich enough to have a car to drive to school every day doesn't mean I have to suffer on the bus. As soon as I stepped off, I took a deep breath of fresh air, something I had been waiting to do since getting on board. It was so stuffy in the bus and the bus driver was obviously a smoker, because the smell of cigarette smoke was quite pungent as soon as you walked on. I looked around to see what my new school was going to look like. Immediately, my high school senses kicked in. 

First, you notice a carrot-toned fake tanned group of girls all jumping and down in their crop tops and ponytails as if they haven't seen each other in ten years by what seemed to be the main entrance to the building. These kind of girls always annoyed me, and for those of you reading this, this may pertain to you, but I'm sorry if you don't agree. I will admit that there are exceptions to every rule. In my experience, however, these girls were typically cheerleaders because they really thought that meant something popularity-wise. Maybe in a John Hughes movie from the '80s or '90s, but it's 2016, toots. Time to wake up and realize that tanning beds cause cancer, cheerleading doesn't really mean shit anymore and that with the amount of hairspray your wearing, you won't want to walk past anyone with a lit match. 

Then, you have the nerds. I never minded the nerds. They always huddled together, which was probably the best tactic, honestly, because at least you could flank each other when people tried to dump you into trash cans for talking about Pokemon like it was still socially acceptable at 18 to still be obsessed with it (there was apparently an unwritten rule that once high school hit, Pokemon could only be discussed in a nostalgic fashion in order to not be relegated to nerd status. Watch out, football players. Mention Pikachu once as a joke out of context and you my friend are going to be lone wolfing it all the way down the social ladder to what you believe to be the bottom rung).