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"MANDY?"
"Or...don't. I mean, you don't have to. But you can if you want...I guess." Amanda stumbled slowly through her sentence, her hands clasping the garbage bags between them growing sweatier with the seconds she spoke to Stanley Uris. He stared at her as though she was speaking gibberish and his piercing eyes made her regret ever pausing and trying to offer an olive branch. "You know what? Nevermind, it doesn't matter, Amanda's fine...forget it."
Amanda turned back around and raced down the metal stairs once more with her face burning in embarrassment. How could she ever think anyone would want to be friends with her? Amanda Bowers had a bad reputation. Mandy Bowers didn't exist and now maybe she never will since the offer of a friend had been so mistakenly appalling that Amanda didn't think she ever wanted to try again.
Like she had told her diary before summer had started, she had no friends. That's what made her a loser. Which reminded her why she never hung out with the people around her even though they coined themselves as losers too - they had friends, she didn't. They victimised themselves, she got on with life as it was.
Too different, too far from ever finding a civil agreement between any of them. Despite Amanda and Beverly's shared fear of home, Bill and Amanda's shared despair of loss...all of them being bullied by Henry. She wondered what they would do if they knew he did that to her too.
Would they pretend they had always liked her and never resented her? Or would they feel so much pity that they would invite her to hang out with them more? Both sounded like terrible options. Amanda felt like scribbling down in her Summer Experience essay that she had tried to reach out just a little bit but like everybody, the people felt unsafe around her.
That would give Mrs. Emory a shock and maybe put it straight to her that Amanda didn't want any friends. More specifically, Amanda didn't need any friends. She had been on her own since her mother passed away and not a day went by that Amanda didn't miss her dearly.
Angrily, she tossed her big bags of bloody tissue into the dumpster underneath the fire escape, making a lot of noise but not really caring before she wiped her hands on her blood-soaked jeans and turned around to march back to her bike.
"Took you all long enough. What the hell were you doing up there?" Richie asked as soon as Amanda had entered his field of vision again - he jumped up from where he lay on the grass and walked over to the girl who grabbed Princess Sparkles harshly from the wall and was about to mount her, but the boy placed his hands upon the handle bars and narrowed his eyes. "What's up, buttercup?"
"What?"
"You're pissed. At who? At what?" Richie mentioned, his hands gripping her handlebars tightly so that when she tried to turn it, he only turned it back and trained his eyes onto hers. Amanda glared at him, but relaxed her face when she realised she wasn't going to get anywhere fighting with the trashmouth.
