Opposites • Cake

1

Being confident was something that always came naturally to Calum. His good looks and quick wit made him popular with the boys and irresistible to the girls. This is what made him top of the school. He wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but he wasn't stupid by any stretch of the imagination. He was well off, well mannered and his parents had always given him exactly what he wanted at the click of his calloused fingers. Unfortunately for Calum, his parent's attempts of keeping him on a tight leash hadn't paid off, and in recent years they had given up, giving Calum the ability to do whatever and whoever he wanted. 

The boy walked through the corridors with a girl on his arm, just another one of the girls that fawned over him on a regular basis. Her skimpy clothing and long, blonde hair made her unrecognisable from the rest of the girls that hung around Calum and his football friends, but that didn't seem to matter to her. Not when she was walking through the school on the arm of the most popular boy there. 

The same couldn't be said for Luke. Luke's shy and reserved nature has landed him with a grand total of one friend. Although he was grateful for his best friend, Rosie, he knew that if he just tried to be a little bit more outgoing he might have made more friends than just her since starting the school 6 years ago. At the tender age of 16, Luke was still just as shy as when he started, but the sass that resided in him surfaced regularly to bite Rosie in the ass. As the two teenagers sat opposite each other in their usual corner of the lunch hall, their eyes drifted towards the door where the Populars were barging through the swing doors. 

Leading at the front was Calum, the one and only and Luke's nose wrinkled in disgust at the amount of noise that the group made as they entered the slightly more peaceful than normal atmosphere of the lunch hall. 

"Why do they always have to be so loud?" Luke muttered, fiddling idly with the bracelets twined around his thin wrists. 

"Just so we don't forget about them, they'd never want that to happen." Rosie stated sarcastically, twirling her short, freshly dyed pink hair around her fingers. 

"You need to stop dying your hair, you're going to go bald." Luke said, watching as his best friend stuck her tongue out at his disapproving tone. 

"Lighten up, Grandpa." She scowled, throwing one of her skittles at him. 

***

A loud bell signified the start of Luke's last lesson of the day as he settled into his chair as the front of the classroom. Although he used to go for the back seats to avoid the stares of the class that made the hairs on his neck stand up and his mouth go dry, he found that tactically, the front seats positioned him closer to the teacher's gaze, and less prone to teasing, name calling or being hit with some sort of ball. 

The lesson was English, and Luke always felt a lot more relaxed when sitting in that classroom. It wasn't like any other lesson, his favourite teacher led the class and ever since he had started to talk to her more, they had been exchanging books on a weekly basis. 

Unfortunately for Luke, Calum had decided that the middle of the classroom is where he should sit, surrounded by his posse of neanderthal football players. Each lesson he slings his blazer over the back of the chair and slumps down in it, twiddling a pencil around his fingers and doing nothing but distract the class. 

Luke sat with his head down in the lesson, his small black sketchpad opened in front of him and a stumpy charcoal pencil positioned between his skinny fingers as he etched delicately onto the paper. Lost in his own world, Luke continued to draw on the thick paper while the teacher called his name. 

"Luke. Luke!" Miss Johnson half shouted, making Luke's head snap up to the front, blush creeping up his neck to show above his collar. His throat began to close up and he could feel the eyes of the class on him.