The Sister Of Popular

Chapter Fourteen

Calm down, Lexi.

I stormed into my bedroom. The first thing I did was throw my school-bag across the room.

Calm down.

I wanted to scream. But I couldn't, because my mum would come running upstairs and ground me for trying to get sympathy. Nobody ever believed my story of what happened. Only Thomas, and that was just one person.

Just calm down, Lexi.

I picked up a pile of old books and threw them at the wall. I threw one of my old home-school folders on the floor and jumped on it. I stamped all the energy out of me.

Calm the hell down, Lex.

How do I calm down? I desperately asked myself. I looked around the room and saw my paintbrushes and art pencils all in the cylindrical pencil-holder on my desk. I still had my sketchbook out from a few days ago. I wasn't very tidy; instead I tended to leave things everywhere. That wasn't good if I wanted to find a particular thing, but it was the way I liked it. The only thing I really thought was important in my bedroom was my painting equipment and phone, and they mostly stayed in the middle of my desk the whole time.

Painting. That was it. That would calm me down. It was the thing I was best at, the thing I loved doing the most. The thing that had earned me my friends.

So why had I been stupid enough to go partying and lose Lucas, Holly and Robyn?

I sat down at the table, rolling my baggy sleeves up and picking up a small B pencil. I drew what came to heart.

I only realised I had been scribbling on the page mindlessly when I looked properly at the pencil lines five minutes later.

I didn't know what I expected - I wasn't really controlling my pencil, I was just drawing what I felt. I expected something like a sad face or something interpreting pain.

But definitely not a mess that a five-year-old could draw.

Maybe it was because my mind was full of confusion, regret, hurt, sadness, anger and just everything. But it wasn't just that, otherwise I might have drawn something other than random lines and curves everywhere.

I had lost myself in popularity.

Popularity didn't matter.

True friends did.

And I should have been happy. I had them, Levi didn't. But I was being a brat, and I wasn't appreciating what I had. I was jealous of Levi for having all the 'cool' and 'popular' people as friends, and even when I had my real friends come to me for who I really was, I kept trying to get Levi's lot to like me.

And now I just had Thomas left.

It only took me losing them to realise it.