Nathaniel Jean's Senior Year

18: Nathaniel Jean's Friends: Part Two

Double update??? What????

Things just kind of soared from there.

     The concert was awesome. Brendon Urie's vocal range had me shitting my pants, and experiencing it with a group of people who'd so quickly become my friends was out of this world.

     The next thing I knew, I was being added to group chats and invited to dinners. One evening, Eric came over and we spent hours playing video games and annoying my sister, laughing like two boys who'd been friends a whole lot longer than a week. It really was a struggle to fathom the fact that I'd so quickly fit into a group of people so different from myself.

      I hadn't even realized until now that Lilliana Rogue was in my Computer Sciences class. Next thing I knew, I had someone new to walk with and talk with and joke with in the hallways. The issue of her rather obvious little crush on me still existed, but it wasn't bad enough to take away from how much I liked her as a person. She had a thing for me, sure, but she was still nice and funny and cheerful and clever, and she never pushed things too far.

      My other friends caught on to my relationship with her pretty quickly. They started making kissy faces and really annoying comments, like "Nate's pulling weird chicks now, huh?" and "That girl's got so many daddy issues, I bet she's a total freak in bed."

      "Dude," I said to Trevor, my nose scrunched up in disgust. "Shut up."

       Trevor rolled his eyes. "You know, you're no fun anymore, Jean."

"Hey," Lilly said one day as we left the computer lab. "So prom is this weekend."

      I may have choked a bit. If this was going where I thought it was going, I needed to devise an abort mission fast. "Er, yeah, it is."

"I'm not actually going," she said, and I had to hold back a sigh of relief. "And neither are the others. We were kinda just gonna dip on the dance, get dressed up, and go to one of our houses, maybe booze a bit, you know?"

I furrowed my eyebrows. It made sense that Lucas would avoid the event, but I didn't understand why the rest of them would. "Why aren't you all going?"

Lilliana shrugged. "It wouldn't be any fun. I'd been planning to go, but I sold my ticket a few weeks ago. People like us don't fit in at occasions like prom. We'll have way more fun getting drunk and acting like idiots than we ever would watching Shawn get crowned prom queen."

I thought on her words for a moment, pausing for a brief second to look at her quizzically. For the first time since I'd begun hanging out with them, it registered in my head that Lucas wasn't the only person in his friend circle with a bad label to his name. As a matter of fact, all of them had something that set them apart from the students of Listrougth High. They were each different in their own way, and here in Nowhere, Nebraska, different was never a good thing.

For Halima, the difference was the most obvious. She was half Pakistani and a devout Muslim in a heavily Catholic, shamelessly racist place.

When Teresa Lois married Aziz Khan, who was at the time a stranger to the community, she'd met quite the backlash. The young couple had chosen to live here due to Teresa's demanding job, and had eventually grown rather respected, but that didn't stop odd stares and comments from bigots who believed that Mr. Khan didn't belong in this country, let alone this town.

Halima definitely received a portion of the heat. With her head always wrapped in a hijab, it was hard to mistake her for what the residents here considered normal.