Magnetic

Chapter Twenty-Six

Tesla had dyed her hair back to brown.

I didn't want to tell her this, but it looked much better than the blonde.

She still had the extensions, because they were sewn in, but they didn't look bad. Just very different.

I still wasn't used to them, even after all the extra shifts I had picked up. I no longer hung out with Paisley, Gage, and Brady, so I had a bunch of free time.

After the fight between Brady and I, I started eating lunch in Mrs. Dunbar's classroom.

Brady, Paisley, and Gage would go to the classroom that hosted newspaper during our lunch period, so I'd be completely alone.

One day, I was in the corner, eating from a snacks-size bag of chips, and Mrs. Dunbar came up to me in the cafeteria.

"Are you alone?" she asked me, glancing around to search for other people that I might possibly be eating lunch with. When she didn't see any, she said, "Come with me. You can eat in my classroom."

I followed her to the drama room, and she unlocked it. Deja vu from the day I came in to enroll washed over me.

When the two of us sat down, her at her desk, and me at mine, she asked me, "Have you been sitting alone at lunch since you came here?"

"No," I told her. "I sat with three other people. But, I kind of had a falling-out with them, and so they don't eat with me anymore."

Mrs. Dunbar nodded and stuck her hand into her bag of microwave popcorn. "You had a falling-out with the whole group?"

I shrugged. I was still iffy on the details, since that whole night seemed like a blur. Feeling dizzy, falling asleep, waking up to Brady on my front porch. I'd been trying to stay away from Gage and Paisley, as well. Being friends with none of them seemed much easier than being friends with two. "I had a fight with one member. The other two, I've kind of drifted apart from."

"Did you force yourself to drift from them?"

She hit that nail on the head. "Yeah, I did."

Drifting away from Gage was terribly hard. After all, he was family. Meaning I'd see him at family dinners and hang outs, but in the week since the fight, we had seemed to successfully avoid one another. Which was a good thing, because a run-in would be extremely awkward for the both of us.

"Why'd you do that?" she asked.

I shrugged again. There was no easy answer for any of this. "It was easier to. I'm the type of person who constantly had people leaving their life. It's easier to just not have many people in my life I care about. It makes them leaving me much less painful."

"Nicki," she said, bending over her desk to face me, "you can't live in fear of people leaving your life. Of course it's going to happen, but once you meet the right people, they won't leave your life. They'll always be there."

Mrs. Dunbar, since the day I met her, had always given me good advice. And I thought about her advice some more as I unpacked a large box full of children's toys onto their designated table.

Dominic appeared beside of me with yet another box. "Can I ask you something?" he said.

"You just did."

He rolled his aqua eyes. "Why did you pick up more hours? Don't you have some sort of social life?"

I didn't really know how to respond to either question. My answer to the second one would probably be no, because now, I didn't really have any friends to spend my time with. But I didn't know why I picked up so many hours. Maybe because I wanted to distract myself.