Rivals

Warming Up

Snow covered the streets, houses and cars as we studied into January. It was about a week into the new year that I found out some unsettling news. My friend Kayla told me that Tyler's girlfriend slept with someone else on the night of the New Years party (a drinking event for high school students that took place in the middle of a forest at -14 degrees Celsius New Years Eve night). As much as I didn't like Tyler, I really felt bad for him at that moment. I didn't think anyone deserved to be hurt like that, no matter how rude they'd been to me. I wanted to do something about it, but I knew it wasn't my place to get involved. Instead, I messaged our mutual friend Nate the night I found out.

Elizabeth: What would you do if you found out someone you know was cheated on

Nate: uhh why

Elizabeth: Because I found out someone I know's girlfriend cheated on them but I feel like I shouldn't get involved because I'm not friends with anyone involved and I don't know what to do

Nate: I say they have a right to kno. who is it?

Elizabeth: Okay you can't say anything if I tell you

Nate: K 

Elizabeth: Tyler's girlfriend cheated on him at the new years party

Nate: o they arent together anymore

Elizabeth: What???

Nate: yea they broke up like a week bfore the party

Elizabeth: So she didn't cheat on him???

Nate: Nope

Elizabeth: Well fuck, okay

Elizabeth: I mean that's good to know, cause I felt really bad for him

Nate: lol ya no he wasn't cheated on

"Kayla you dumbass they broke up!" I yelled from across the room.

"What?"

"Tyler's girlfriend didn't cheat on him, they broke up like a week before the party apparently," I explained.

"Oh you're still on about that?"

"Yeah I just asked Nate."

"Huh. Well I don't know, that's just what I was told," she shrugged and walked away.

As stupid as I felt about texting Nate, I was genuinely relieved to find out Tyler wasn't cheated on. I didn't like him, but I'd seen him with his girlfriend and he seemed like he cared about her. If he'd been betrayed like that I would've felt terrible. I mean, it still sucked that they broke up but I didn't really care about that part of it.

January came to an end and so did my Physics and Pre-Calculus classes. February kickstarted four new classes that I would have for the semester, and I had the pleasure of sharing yet another science class with Tyler. He sat at the table next to me in Chemistry 11 for another 5 months before school would come to an end.

We managed to avoid each other for the most part, however, for the entirety of the semester together, and I don't feel bad saying that it was incredibly peaceful. He didn't seem to brag nearly as much in Chemistry as he had in the previous semester.

The only time we did interact, he was able to make me feel like a complete idiot. I was holding a beaker with some sort of metal in it, and I needed to weigh it for a lab. I found the scales sitting side by side in the corner of the room, where Tyler was weighing his own empty beaker. I made my way over with my element and placed it on the scale, only to realize I'd forgotten my pen. On the other side of Tyler, however, I could see a lone, abandoned one awaiting me. Because he was just standing there watching the scale, I reached over to grab the writing utensil. It was to my surprise that he moved suddenly and I knocked his beaker off of the scale. This wasn't a big deal, because there was nothing in it and it didn't break, but I felt foolish.

"You couldn't just walk around, you had to reach over me into my personal space to grab the pen?" he asked me with a frustrated and ridiculing tone.

"Sorry," I said as I picked up his beaker and put it back on the scale for him. I wrote the number the scale showed on my paper as fast as I could and left, while he just shook his head at me. I wanted to die.

It was during this course, that I found out how much Tyler was hated by a group of people in the school. Jess, one of my friends, told me one day that she and a group of girls were going to talk to the principal about his behaviour and how rude he was. I was asked if I wanted to take part and I turned down the offer; as much as I didn't like him, I didn't think he was mean enough to be taken to the principal. He was pulled out of class one day to talk to the head of our school and I didn't hear anything about it after that, but his behaviour didn't change. A part of me was happy about this, because I secretly very much enjoyed the comments he made to other people; he didn't sugar coat anything or filter what he said, and what came out of his mouth was often what I was thinking in my own head.

Take, for example, when he once reminded a girl that was reading an article out loud that she has a voice inside of her head that she can use to read things. He also very often rolled his eyes or scoffed at obnoxiously loud people that I myself was being annoyed by. 

He was relatively funny, too. Once he walked into a class I was in and Nate by saying, "Hey look, it's the Asian that gets B's in math," and while it might sound rude or just not funny, I almost snorted at it at the time.

With everything else going on in my life, I nearly forgot about his existence during the time we had Chemistry together. That is, until I got an invitation to the awards ceremony in June when it would be revealed who got the top student in each class.

*Queue dramatic music*