It Started with a Bet... (Watty Awards 2011)

"I bet you fifty bucks I can get any girl you want to go out with me."

"Haley!"

"Christa, what's up?"

I pause and allow Christa to catch up with me. She chatters on and on about some party I missed and I just smile and nod. I wasn't always this way.

The summer before freshman year of high school , my best friend Trina died in a drunk-driving accident. I spent a long year wrapping my head around the tragedy, not speaking unless spoken to, trying to decide if there was any meaning to life now that she was gone. I'd known Trina since preschool. We were closer than peanut butter and jelly in one of those sandwiches.

Sophomore year, my parents sent me to therapy. High school was bad enough, and the tales of “basket-case Haley” didn’t help. I didn't want to talk to people but they kept trying. Talking to me, around me, and Trina's name just spinning and spinning in the middle of their muddy words.

So I used my determination and buried Trina's ghost in my heart. Between my efforts and therapy, I was able to lock my emotions away permanently within a year or two.

I smile at Christa's story and laugh in all the right parts. I've built my way back up now. In junior year, I returned as a “normal child,” an idea which the other students were surprisingly supportive of. Welcoming back Haley became the school's official hobby. It was cool, apparently, to feel sorry for the girl who lost her best friend and to help her "get back on her feet.” Now it’s my senior year. I'm considered normal. Not popular by a long stretch, but in the middle. I smile and talk to everyone and they know who I am. But I don't care about any of them.

I enter art just before the bell rings, dumping my bag onto my table with a thud. The room is enormous, with large tables scattered together near the center of the room. Closets and office dividers help separate the rest of the space into storage and studio areas.

I pull my iPod out of my pocket and grab my sketchbook from my backpack. It's one of those thick black books with white pages covered equally with notes and sketches and photocopied pieces of art. We're doing a project on nature in cultures and I picked "Asia". Not really a culture, I know, but I like the flexibility. I wander over to one of closets with the word "library" painted in flowery letters on the door. Pulling a honking enormous book on East Asian art out of a cubby, I go back to my desk and begin taking notes. The bell has already rung twice and more or less everyone is working. Some movement catches my eye and I looked up. Trevor Choi is late, as usual.

Trevor Choi is one of those people that everyone either knows or has heard about. He runs with a small group of people too cool to care what people think but cool enough where it doesn’t matter anyway. These are the guys who act like they sleep around, but really don’t. So instead they spend their time playing other stupid games.

Trevor sits down across from me at the enormous table in the center of the room next to his friend Matt. Like all members of the crew they seem like normal, weird, perverted guys. Good looking perverted guys. The two joke between themselves while I stand taking notes. I don't know why, but I'm never able to do art sitting down in this class. I'm listening to some intense dance pop when I realize that the teacher is trying to talk to me. I pull an earphone out and answer, ignoring Trevor's chuckle. When the song changes to one of my favorite soft ones, Waves by Holly Miranda, I hear them speak.

"Did you hear that Eric lost the bet?" said Matt.

"For real? What a loser. I would have been able to do it in a heartbeat. No matter what the girl."

"Psh, yeah right."

"I bet you fifty bucks I can get any girl you want to go out with me." I hear a pause.