Besotted

CHAPTER ONE

(Dela's clothes for school ^)

"Everybody in the entire continental US knows that the students at Perrymore High are spoiled rich kids!" Dela said, pointing at her mother with a carrot.

"Oh, everybody in the US huh? That sure is a lot of people. So tell me, where did they learn that? Is there a national inquiry into Perrymore High, or is it more of a media coverage thing?" Her mother replied drily, raising an eyebrow at her teenage daughter.

"Funny. I'm just saying that they're alright, but I don't particularly feel like inviting twenty of them over to eat cake with."

"So you'd rather celebrate your seventeenth birthday with grown adults instead? Reasonable."

"Lila's not an adult," Dela pointed out.

"Lila doesn't count. She's practically attached to you at the hip, it would be surgically impossible for you to have a party without her."

Dela thought for a moment. "Well Frances then."

"Frances is older than you and me put together," her mom laughed.

"Exactly! We've got a whole range of ages there. Plus, she's not an adult, she's elderly. So there."

"I know that you're smart enough to know that elders are indeed adults, so I'm not going to bring that up. Look sweetie, I'm fine to keep the guest list as it is, I'm just concerned. You were born at the mental age of 30 and if you keep holding the Perrymore kids at arm's length, you're going to go to college as an 80 year old."

Dela stopped chopping her carrots and looked at her mom. "Your math is cooked."

Her mom reached over and stole a carrot, popping it into her mouth. "And your carrots are small!"

"Only because you eat half of them!" Dela shrieked, running over to stop her mom stealing more of her food.

As Dela put out her school things that night, she thought back to what her mom said. It was true that Dela was holding her school friends at arm's length. They were nice, and perfectly fun people to waste a free period with, but she couldn't help but think that it was better that they were friends only at school. She had spent her whole life perfecting a 'blending in routine', where she spoke a little in a class, messed around a little, drew just enough attention to herself to help everybody to the conclusion that she was, on the whole, average.

And she was fine with that. In fact, she enjoyed not being noticed. She worked hard at it. Because in the little town of Annapolis, Maryland, everybody did know that the kids who went to Perrymore High were rich in that quiet we've-got-three-cars in the garage, but still keep ourselves human through taking our kids to mini league soccer, kind of way. And that made them entitled, a little shallow and on the whole, dangerous in a way that only Dela seemed to understand.

Rich kids like that were able to do anything and still know that at the end of the day, they would end up on top. They could get into fights, vandalise, ruin the lives of everyone around them. In Dela's eyes, they were like criminals on the night of the Purge. Totally unaccountable and totally terrifying. And that may seem like an exaggeration, but she had seen it happen and she didn't want to be in the fallout of their games.

So instead, she knew that her seventeenth birthday was going to be exactly like the last sixteen. Her mom, her best friend Lila, Frances the landlady, Mrs Grose their slightly eccentric neighbour and Tom (the only man her mom would consider marrying if he wasn't gay), all standing around a cake that she had made (her mother couldn't cook to save her life), and singing until about 10pm when the whole gig would wrap up because Frances had to go home.