Toni's hated Shelby Goodkind for as long as she can remember; she honestly can't even recall how it started, if Shelby had made some rude comment about her sexuality or her laziness or the way she slouched in her seat in class, or if she's just always hated Shelby because Shelby has always seemed like the kind of person she should hate.
Toni moved to bumfuck Texas with her sister-via-adoption Martha and Martha's mother at age ten and has never enjoyed it there, most of all because she's never fit in with uptight religious bigots like Shelby and her boyfriend and her best friend and all of the future pageant queens and frat bros Shelby seems to surround herself with. Martha, frustratingly, can fit in anywhere and get along with anyone, but Toni's short fuse has always made it impossible to be passive-aggressive with her in that condescending "bless your heart" way that Shelby's ilk seem to be so fond of, and so when they fight, it always goes from passive-aggressive to aggressive-aggressive pretty quickly, with Martha trying valiantly to mediate between her best friend and a girl she, in her own words, thinks is "sweet but sometimes misguided, kind of like you, Toni".
Toni's not sure when it all went to shit this hard, though, to the point of screaming matches in the parking lot over something as mundane as a fucking English project, and yet here they are, only a struggling Martha standing between Shelby Goodkind and an early meeting with the God she loves so much, because Toni's pretty sure she's going to fucking kill her.
"Just walk away," Martha pants into her ear as she frog-marches Toni away from Shelby's cold, razor-sharp gaze, and it's only the worry she can hear in Martha's voice that makes Toni oblige her. "If you get another suspension they'll expel you."
It's fucked up, Toni knows, that she can let such a fake-sunny vapid Jesus freak pageant girl get under her skin, and when she really thinks hard about it--though she often tries not to think of Shelby at all--she muses that it's the fakeness of it all that gets under her skin, because there's something there, something she can't quite place, that burrows itself into her and gnaws at the back of her mind. She feels it when Shelby's got Andrew's hands all over her in the halls at school and she's trying to make him move them away because she's a Good Christian Girl and apparently can't show any sign of sexual desire for another human being. Sometimes she feels it when Shelby's stare burns a hole in the back of her head during English class, where they're unfortunately seated diagonally from each other and occasionally made to work in groups. Most of all she feels it when Shelby walks by while she's making out with Regan in the halls and Shelby can't seem to even fucking look at them because they disgust her so much.
But they're juniors, are barely a month into the school year, and that means Toni's doomed to at least another four semesters of sharing space with her, so she does her best to minimize it and keep a wide berth when she can, and Shelby has always seemed to want to do the same. Which is why Toni's so stunned when Shelby shows up at Fatin's birthday party, of all places, given that Toni and Fatin have been open about their past hookups and there's obviously going to be drinking and general debauchery; it's Fatin, for fuck's sake.
Toni's pretty sure Shelby's breaking her curfew or something. She's got Andrew all over her again and seeing a couple being couple-y makes Toni wish she and Regan weren't currently in the "off" stage of their regular cyclical relationship drama. They've been doing this for nearly a year now, and Regan's so sweet, most of the time, and it's the best sex Toni's ever had aside from maybe one particularly good time with Fatin herself, and there are definitely real feelings there on both sides, but Toni can't remember the last time she committed to anything other than basketball and she isn't sure when the best time to start is.
Anyway, Fatin's party is where everything with Shelby starts going completely off the rails, and in the last way Toni ever expected it to.
She's drunk, she knows, and she can tell because her usual cynicism is gone and she's actually starting to enjoy the company of some of these people she usually hates calling her classmates. Rachel and Nora, who are sisters and have nothing in common to show for it, are giggling drunkenly nearby as they watch some of Andrew's friends crash and burn while attempting a keg stand, and Leah, the best English project partner Toni's ever had to Shelby's worst, is swaying drunkenly in the corner with swollen, red-rimmed eyes as she glances repeatedly at her phone. Dot's doing shots with Fatin and a few other girls, and Martha, much to Toni's frustration, is talking to Shelby.
