Not Your Average Nerd

Chapter Four

4

“When did we say we were ordering pizza?” My mother asked, scraping my plate clean over the trash can.

Anica shrugged. “I dunno,” she replied, in English. My mouth made a tiny O as my eyes widened. “I just thought that we would.”

My mother turned around and placed her hands on her hips. “Excuse me?” She asked, suddenly and completely pissed.

“Sorry.” Anica snapped in Romanian. She reached over to grab a plate and, finally, noticed me sitting awkwardly at the table. Her eyes grew instantly. “Ileana!” She shouted, hopping off of the island to run over to me. Damn, she sported some short shorts. I couldn’t believe it… I was sort of jealous of my thirteen year old sister for having the body and style I always longed to have.

I stood from my chair and threw my arms around her the moment she came close enough. She smelled of Victoria Secret Fresh & Clean perfume. I only knew of it because my boss Sarah was notorious for coming into work in the morning smelling as if she bathed in it. Anica walked back over to the plates, took only one thing of cabbage, a tiny helping of potato salad, and half of a bell pepper that she split. “Watching my calories,” she whispered in English, low enough so that mamă couldn’t hear. I nodded my head once. Wow, thirteen and counting calories. Wasn’t that something girls in their 20’s were supposed to do? I never bothered to pay attention to calories, seeing how I could down a large milkshake, fries, and a mushroom burger without gaining any weight.

Her life was so much more interesting that mine was when I was her age. She was on her school’s volleyball team, occasionally danced on their dance team, went to parties, and had already had (and dumped) four boyfriends. According to her, she was ‘talking’ to this one “totally and completely gorgeous” guy by the name of Jeff, who was in two grades ahead of her. The whole time she gushed about her eventful life I kept thinking, what the hell? I didn’t have the courage nor did I have anything that competed to bring up from when I was thirteen. The only thing that happened that was semi-exciting was that a foreign exchange student from Bucharest spent the year with us and all of my classes. What are the odds, right? A Romanian foreign exchange student comes to our school and just-so-happens to have all of my classes. At least I had someone to talk to that year.

Anica picked at her blue nail polish causing little chips to fly everywhere. I sat with my hands in my lap still thinking how shitty my childhood was compared to hers. Mamă sat quietly at the opposite end of the table from me and ate silently. It seemed strange how she fake-cried for me to come, scared me, and even threatened my life and still hadn’t said anything. I figured that she would have been all talk since the moment I walked through the door. Oh, well. She was bound to come out of the shell and find something to spend hours talking about.

“Royce Matthews owns that one clothing shop that your sister enjoys spending money at.” She finally spoke while bringing a fork of Chiftele (meatball) toward her mouth.

“Oh,” I said, bouncing my eyebrows upward. Great, when she finally opens her mouth it’s to inform me about news I could give less than a rat’s ass about. Just hearing that name managed to send a shiver down my back. Royce Matthews, the boy who accused me of showing up in a Halloween costume on the first day of second grade, grew up to the school’s rich spoiled sporty douche bag that every girl seemed to want. He was the one who came up with the nickname “Dracula’s Bitch” back in the sixth grade when our history teacher was going over countries in Europe and Romania came up.

I hated attention because everyone seemed to enjoy putting me in the spotlight so instead of raising my hand and waving it in the air to enlighten the class with my knowledge of Romania, I sat there and let the teacher speak and even give a couple of false facts.