BREATHE FOR ME

Chapter 10: Euphoria

"Well if you're going with him, then who are we supposed to be riding with?" Morgan asks, her tone being far from friendly. "Lucan and Ren always take us as a group, why's he deciding to ride alone all of a sudden? Are we not good enough for him now?"

"He's not riding alone." May sighs, later that night as we all gather around Julianne's double bed together. Her wooden floor is littered with different coloured dresses, shoes, hair straighteners and make-up pieces; all left over from our race to get ready. When Julianne invited me around at the start of the week to 'get ready together', she really did mean business. For the last two hours, the six of us have been rapidly getting changed into our dresses, applying make-up in every reflective surface in the room, curling and straightening each other's hair and taking group pictures. Now the six of us, who are all dresses up to the nines, lay back against the bed, waiting for the boys to arrive to pick us up. "He's riding with Gen."

"I just don't understand why we couldn't all ride together like we normally do. We always arrive as a group, a unit." Morgan shrugs. At the start of the day, we all had to pick a different coloured dress so that we weren't all matching. Having first dibs on colours, Morgan chose a scarlet mini dress with long sleeves. It's fair to say that she looks beautiful in it. Hell, she'd probably look beautiful in a wet big bag. She hasn't spoken to me much all night, not that that is unusual of course. But oddly, she seems colder with me since I mentioned to the girls, at the start of the night, that Lorrie is driving me to the party. I opted for white in hopes that Maddie would let me borrow one of her going out dresses given that I don't have any myself. Believe it or not, I wasn't the biggest party girl back in Oklahoma. May is the only person in the room that knows that this is my first party. Being the good sister that Maddie is, she was happy to lend me one. So here I lay, on Julianne's pink comforter, wearing a white satin mini dress. It's not something that I'd usually go for, given its short length and low neckline, but as soon as I put it on, May bounced up and down in excitement, claiming that I looked like a 'sexy angel'. She then insisted on straightening my long hair for me, letting its glossy rivers of dark brown loose down my back, and did my make-up, keeping it minimal and natural with some mascara, blush and sparkly lip gloss. Anyways, it seems that I fit in nicely with the rest of the group, who are all wearing different coloured mini dresses in different styles.

"Morg, honey, we aren't the Navy SEALS. We don't need to travel as a unit all of the time." May replies, whilst tucking a loose strand of her curly hair back into its high-rise bun. She chose the colour yellow, which suits her tanned skin and complements her very skinny legs. As I look around at all of the other dressed-up girls in the room, all buzzing with the bubbles of their ciders and prosecco concoctions, I realise that all of them look like Victoria Secret models with their long torsos, thin thighs and sharp features. I can't help feeling like a little munchkin compared to them. "Anyways, it's not like the girl had a choice," May gets up off of the bed and pulls on a pair of black stilettos, adding another few inches to her skinny frame. "He threatened to make her history classes a living hell for the next two years."

Morgan also gets up off the bed, placing her cider on Julianne's desk. She looks over the bed at me, her long fake eyelashes hooding her pretty eyes, before letting out a long sigh and getting off the bed as well. She also begins putting her heels on, looking down at the floor instead of at the four of us left on the bed. I glance at Dalia, in her pretty pink midi-dress, and she offers me a comforting smile. Julianne, however, in her little black dress, rolls her eyes in Morgan's direction in an effort to make me smile.

"You're right, sorry Gen, this isn't your fault." Morgan mutters, eyes remaining glued to the floor. "It's just weird."

As I'm about to reply, Piper's phone begins to ring loudly next to the bed. Halfway through re-applying a bushy eyelash to one of her heavily eye-liner-ed eye, she panics, commanding one of us to pick up her phone. Morgan gladly does so, reaching a slender arm across the desk and swiping up the phone, covering her ear with it. At the same time, the doorbell sounds. This only seems to panic Piper more, causing her to rip both eye lashes off, giving up with them all together.