If I Fell

Chapter Five

By the time school ended, I had managed to calm down. And not tell any more people to screw off, which I think is a big plus symbol in the ‘Allison’s an awesome person’ column. Just saying.

However I had done that by avoiding everyone I could manage during the entire day after that first class. I might have been able to give tight smiles to whoever said hi, but I didn’t linger and chat to them, I spent my lunch hour hiding away in the library and kept trips to my locker to an absolute minimum.

Although, I wasn’t sure that was necessary, for all I knew Marcy and Mike might be mad at me.

Good. Let Mike be mad at me, maybe he’d stop looking at me the way he had this morning.

At that thought crossing my mind, I shook my head, rubbing the heel of my hand against my forehead as I walked through the empty hallway.

I honestly didn’t know what to think. Was this what it felt like to have an identity crisis? Because it sure wasn’t fun. It was like being torn in two separate directions, and I couldn’t exactly understand why.

Well, I could completely understand why I wasn’t on my friends’ side of the matter – even if they probably didn’t know there was a ‘matter’ in the first place. I’d never known that they were cruel like that. Why should they treat another person like that? And I couldn’t seem to remember if they’d done it before. I mean, it wouldn’t be hard to get something past me. Most of the time I spent the days at school blocking out the girl’s – particularly Marcy’s – mindless nattering and trying not to hear about sports from the guys. But you’d think I would have heard if they were talking like they had today.

Yet at the same time, I wasn’t on Cole’s side. And it wasn’t because he didn’t have money, wasn’t involved in sports or part of ‘our crowd’ as Marcy had put it. It was because the few times I’d talked to him, he wasn’t exactly pleasant. Actually, he was a jerk to me.

There! That’s it. He was a jerk. He is an absolute jerk.

And despite it all, here I was, torn between people I’d known my entire life and a guy who I’d just noticed existed a week ago.

If you look at it that way, it probably should have been a simple answer of what I should do. I knew them, the good and the bad. I didn’t know him, he was a complete mystery to me. It was always safer to go with the things you know.

But… I don’t know!

It wasn’t like I wanted to be best friends forever with him, just the phrase made me shiver. I didn’t want to be partnered with him for this class assignment. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to talk to him anymore, no matter how dead set I’d been on finding out what his name was last week.

There was just one thing I was sure of, my friends were wrong. They were so wrong about treating someone like that, someone they didn’t know at all.

It wasn’t even like I was that nice of a person, I probably was just like them and didn’t know it. I wasn’t the best friend to Marcy, I didn’t even like to talk to her half the time. I obviously wasn’t a good friend to Mike… or maybe I was too good of a friend to him, but I should have done something to flat out say I didn’t like him at all – though I’d thought telling him I didn’t want to go out would be enough. I could compile a huge list of things that weren’t good about me.

But this had made me feel sick, not just angry, queasy to the very points of my toes.

Having lingered around late after class, pretending I didn’t understand the homework – not true, by the way – I had managed to dodge the rush out the door. Beside a few lingerers that loitered in the halls, I was completely on my own.