Just For Glory | COMPLETED

Go-Get-Him and Naturally Hard-to-Get

I only had one week left of sophomore year. This was even harder for me to grasp than it was for the average soon-to-be junior, because my old schools had gone from early September to the middle of June. However, for some reason, the district I'd left after fourth grade had decided to shift the year back, which basically meant we were in school from the middle of August until the end of May. I'm not sure, though, if that was the only reason the year seemed shorter than all my other years of school.

Well, actually, I had one week of finals left and then it was summer. I would've expected Piper to be stressed and neurotic like a lot of kids with her grades were, but she wasn't. When I asked her if she was studying, she just shrugged and told me that she wasn't worried because her current academic standing in each class would allow her to fail each final and still pull an A-. If I were to start caring about my class rank and grades compared to the rest of the year, I would hate Piper. A lot.

Of course, Piper was still always ready to surprise.

There were things that were always the same with her, including her newfound "duty" to personally dispose of any cigarettes she found me in possession of. While it was mildly amusing in a very broad sense of the word, I also found it pretty annoying that she would throw away even a just-lit cig and give me a reproachful look. I told her that she was bugging me, and, true to form, she raised an eyebrow and said, "Well then, stop trying to light them around me. Besides, it's for my good as much as yours. Do you want me to go into anaphylactic shock? And you know, Donovan, I can't stop you from smoking anything when I'm not around. Just don't come crying to me when you get diagnosed with emphysema."

I would never tell her, but Piper was funnier than she knew. She had both her unique brand of sarcasm and her dry wit to fall back on, and that made it hard to stop myself from really laughing at some of her jokes or observations. I wasn't used to that. Even at fifteen, Jamie made me laugh by just being my childish little sister. I just never really had a friend who made me laugh on purpose, even when I wasn't high, which also said something for her sense of humor.

Three weeks after the day we had waited for our rides and it seemed like everyone else was getting slightly frantic about finals. Study hall was one of the more insane periods, since it seemed the rest of our class had discovered that it was a class that didn't have a final in which they could study for classes that did. So, ironically, the rest of the class was studying for the first time during the final period while Piper did nothing for the first day all year. When I told her that, she laughed and congratulated me on my use of an English vocab word. Irony. Piper was all about the usage of random vocabulary words in everyday life. That made a lot of sense to me when she told me, because I could remember her saying things like "facetious" and "ambivalent" in a totally—mostly—normal conversation.

Bored out of my mind during the two-hour "final" period in which people were allowed to do exactly the same as any other day, I found myself unable to do anything but tap my pencil repeatedly. Piper shot me a look over the top of Don Quixote and raised an eyebrow. This provoked me into doing it louder and faster for thirty seconds. Whoever said I'm not, on occasion, immature was lying.

I glanced over at a neighboring table and saw that the girl sitting there had a stack of magazines next to her. I nudged Piper, who jumped and scooted away, and said, "I want one of those magazines."

Piper followed my gaze and stifled a laugh when she saw where I was looking. "Are you serious? Let's see, we've got..." She squinted and read off the titles: "Seventeen, Teen People, Cosmo Girl...Gee, Donovan, what are you waiting for?"

I didn't answer as I walked over to the table and tapped the girl on the shoulder. She looked up at me, and it took a moment for me to place her. It just so happened to be that girl, the one I had "evaluated" on that fateful day (September 29), just before I did the same for Piper. I couldn't remember her name—something "cute" like Kelly or Jessie.