Cecile's New School

Is Lovesickness an Excuse to Miss School? (I wish it was.)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

"If you put a quote at the beginning of a book chapter, then it does two things. One, it makes people take the book more seriously and two, it makes the book look edgy.
I messed both of those up didn't I?"
-Kailyn Ghetto Frederick

Cecile paced in the small space of a bathroom stall. She took not even two steps then turned around to repeat the process.

The girl hasn't come out of the desolate bathroom for an hour since the lock down. She enclosed herself in a stall to either sit on the toilet, careful to hold her skirt above the water beneath her bottom, or nervously prowl around the tiny space.

Cecile paused for a second to clear her mind and perform an experiment. She waited until her heart was steady. She allowed a memory of Foster to come into her mind. A simple one.

It was her birthday. Foster had driven her to go get ice cream when she was overwhelmed with a surprise party, with surprises being her worst fear. It was one of the only moments when Foster was purposely sweet. Her heart immediately pounded at the speed of a hummingbird wings.

Other memories came flooding in without warning. Other memories of him. Many memories. Foster's cute costume at the Halloween dance, him watching her preform for the acting club tryouts, him giving her his shirt when she was only in a bathing suit at the park, him helping her find the rooster's lost little sister at the Mall, him when he drove her... everywhere.

She gave a frustrated grunt and crouched down. She laid her heated face in her hands. Her dull blue eyes glanced over at the toilet water. She needed to cool her face down.

Cecile wrinkled her nose. Ew. Did she just think of that while looking at the toilet? Disgusting. Cecile stood up and left the stall to go to one of the three sinks of the girl's restroom.

The faucet gushed water, non-toilet water, into the sink. She dunked her face into the cool stream. The sharp bite of pure ice cold water that only a place called high school could produce gave her the reality check she needed. The cascading droplets over her skin, eyelashes, and lips grounded her.

She pulled away and stared at herself in the mirror. The renewed fire in her blue eyes looked familiar and it gave Cecile some comfort.

"You are fine!" The nail of her index finger clinked against the glass as she scolded herself. "You like Barrett Brown! Why are you worried about your four-eyed sidekick? He has nothing on the mysterious love interest!"

'Everything's not as black and white like you want to think it is.'

She shook her head to try to rid it of Foster's voice. She squeezed her eyes shut to the truth and gripped her hair. "Barrett! For twenty-six chapters, now twenty-seven, you've liked Barrett! You can't just change stuff! That's not how this works!"

'Let me step out of my bounds of sidekick a little.'

She opened her eyes wide. She folded her arms in defiance over a trivial thing. False confidence exuded from her pores as she stared at herself in the mirror with an insane glint in her eye.

"Okay then, Ms. Stubborn; forget love for a bit. Remember your true intentions and don't focus on a side-plot! It is your time to take over this school! This people won't even know what hit them! The filthy heads of my doomed enemies will writhe under my feet as I become the most popular girl in school! Doom doom doom doom doom, doom doom do DOOM, DOOOM doom do-"

A person stepped out from one of the stalls. Cecile's voice cracked before she stopped singing. The random girl nervously picked a sink farthest from Cecile.