Streaker.

11

Luke just barely made it to his English class before the bell on Thursday morning, and if he had been just a second later he would have gotten marked tardy.

All week, Luke purposely took an extra long route to get to class today in order to avoid his friends. He was just not interested in talking to them at all because he knew that no matter what he did, his friends would find something to make fun of him for.

So Luke took an extra long time at his locker and just stared into it, pretending that he was searching for something. Then he went into the bathroom and took an extra long time looking at himself in the mirror, trying to flatten out his hair this time instead of sticking it up. Finally, Luke took an extra long time walking down the hallway, going as slow as he could so there was no chance of him running in to Calum or Michael.

"Hey, where were you?" Ashley whispered as Luke sat down, out of breath from running the last few feet down the hallway.

"I just took my time walking from math to here." Luke shrugged. He took out the homework that his teacher was going over and set it down on his desk, even though he already knew that he'd done everything right and didn't need to make any corrections.

"Luke, why are you doing this?" Ashley sighed. She reached out and fixed a piece of Luke's hair that was probably sticking up still.

"I'm changing up my look, I don't think that my hair looked good like that. Ashton wears his hair down flat and all these girls like him, so - " Luke said nervously, trying to search for any reflective surface in the room that he could use to look at himself.

"That's not what I meant." Ashley chuckled quietly. "I was asking why you've been ignoring your friends for the past few days."

"Oh, right." Luke nodded. He shrugged, not seeing why Ashley was thinking so much about this. "I'm just mad at them right now."

Luke hadn't spoken to any of his friends since Saturday night, when he got drunk at Ashton's house and all everyone cared about was a frozen pizza. Luke ignored when Calum and Michael tried to talk to him in the halls and he rejected all of Ashton's calls. At lunch, Luke would go to the library and eat there while playing around on his phone instead of sitting with Calum and his girlfriend like he normally did.
He was sure that he'd make up with them eventually, but for now Luke was enjoying his time alone.

"Why don't you just talk to them about this? I'm sure that they'll apologize to you once you tell them how you feel." Ashley suggested. She always seemed to look at the brighter side when it came to things like this, and Luke thought that it was funny that she'd offer advice like this to him and then not accept any of his own.

"No, that won't work." Luke sighed, shaking his head. "This has happened before, it'll all blow over in a week."

"I just feel bad, Luke. And I hate the fact that you spend your whole lunch period in the library." Ashley said, no longer even attempting to pay attention to what was going on in class. It looked like they were all getting into groups to read again, so Ashley and Luke could probably sit there and talk for the rest of class anyway.

"It's kind of interesting, actually." Luke chuckled nervously. "And one of the librarians is really nice, she always offers me these mints that she keeps behind her desk."

"Do you take them?" Ashley laughed, raising an eyebrow.

"No." Luke said, scrunching up his nose and shaking his head. "I really don't like mint that much."

"I don't really either." Ashley laughed, finding yet another thing in common between her and Luke.

"I wrote a song about mints once." Luke shrugged, picking at the corner of the paper set out in front of him.