TIWIS

BETA: A Million Dollar Deal... 1.1

I walked across the hall with Wailey noticing a lot of stares and people shaking their heads in our direction. As we continued down the hall more eyes kept looking at our direction, one would think I should have gotten used to this by now based on how many times it had happened, but NO!! I was getting nervous as hell and freakishly sweaty too. I looked at Wailey wondering if she even notices them. “Want to go eat lunch?” Wailey asked. I looked at her feeling as though I should just punch her in the gut. I mean, was she blind? Couldn’t she see how her even walking with me was WRONG, now she wants me to eat with her? I smiled looking at her as sincerely as I could manage and said a lie, “Err… no”, hoping she wouldn’t see right through my lies I added, “I ate not too long ago”. She looked at me almost laughing then she said, “That’s alright then, you could just watch me eat”. I was beaten. I swallowed my pride and even led the way to the cafeteria.
The place where Wailey sat was so far away from my usual corner. She sat in the middle of the cafeteria, on the raised platform where cheerleaders, drama queens, and their jock–dogs sat. The platform was round and Wailey’s table was right in the middle of it, bringing me back to my original statement, ‘Wailey sat right in the ‘middle’ of the cafeteria’. Her reason for choosing this table was not because of the type of people sitting there but because of the lighting. According to her, that table had the best lighting for her food-art. Imagine that! Apparently, ‘food-art’ was more important than my dignity.
I walked up to the food stand when Wailey said, “I thought you weren’t hungry?” noticing I’ve been caught, I decided not to go down so easily, “Now you don’t expect me to just sit and watch you eat now do you Wailey”, I replied putting emphasis on the ‘w’ in her name. She merely smiled but I could almost swear I heard her say, “Now what a pair we’d be huhn?”
Waking to the table, I tried my best to ignore everyone, but they didn’t make it any easier. I heard barking from one corner, hooting from the other, and I almost tripped. Damn, why am I so clumsy?
We finally made it to the table and it was like a magnetic pull, every prissy, jockey, annoying person came to sit on that table, all of them making careful effort to ignore me by not ignoring me. One of the cheerleader girls said, “Aww, Ada your food looks so lovely, way more than the shirt freak show (making a not so subtle gesture towards me) here decided to wear out of her house.” At saying this, everyone on the table sniggered except Wailey and I. I looked at my clothes; I had worn black jean trousers with a tee and my favourite black hoodie that had dark grey leather vertical stripes on the sleeves. I looked great, what was she talking about? I began to wonder if Wailey was just weird or if she really didn’t notice how the other students acted around me, or maybe it just brought her joy to see me in a slump. Thinking more about it, I decided that it had to be the first. Wailey was nice and just Weird–Ailey. She was too nice to derive pleasure from my pain and too nice to tell the other guys to stop bullying me because according to her, they were just having a little fun.