Peyton's Point Of View
"Do you see what I mean? It's easy, you just forgot to flip it," Leo explains.
I asked Leo for help with my math problem around seven minutes ago, hoping that he'd get the hint that I wanted to talk to him.
Apparently, he was terrible at taking hints, because he legitimately worked out every fucking step of every problem on the page. He pointed out every mistake, and explained it in depth. He was honestly boring me to death.
"Leo?"
"Yep," he doesn't look up from his notebook.
"Do you want to go out? This weekend?"
"I'll have to check my calendar, but it's possible. We can go to the history museum, they recently updated their audio tours," he says excitedly.
"Um, I was actually thinking of more of a movie and dinner or something," I explain, super aware of Torres watching two seats away.
"Oh," he gives me a sad look. "I'm sorry, Peyton. I'm not looking for a relationship now. You're a great friend, though."
"Oh," I say, awkwardly. Wow. I always heard people talk about getting rejected, but it had never actually happened to me.
I especially didn't expect Leo to reject me. To be brutally honest, not too many girls were interested in him.
Seth bursts out laughing across the aisle, clutching his side and struggling for air.
Mr. Berg looks up from his desk. "Is there a problem, Mr. Torres?"
"Yes, sir, It's more of a personal problem though. This girl I know is extremely desperate-"
"Fuck off, Seth," I hiss across the aisle.
Mr. Berg stands up abruptly. "Both of you out, now. You can come back in half an hour for detention, and maybe you'll think twice before disrupting my class again."
I groan, "Please, Mr.-"
"Out."
I gather my books and head out, ignoring Leo's sympathetic looks.
I hear the door open and shut behind me and I know Seth is following me.
"Where are you going?" He doesn't say it loudly, but in the empty hallway it echoes all around. I keep stalking down the hallway towards my locker without answering.
I twist the lock and swing it open, and he leans against the girl's beside mine, a girl who smells strongly of hairspray. I drop my books in there. I can feel him staring at me with that fucking smirk on his face.
Finally, I slam the door and look up at him in the eyes. Damn him for being so tall. "This is all your fault!"
He raises an eyebrow, amused, "My fault? My fault that you got rejected, sweetheart?"
I frown and slide to sit down with my back against the lockers, and he sits beside me. "Mr Berg used to love me! I've never had detention in my life," I complain.
He stands up and reaches out his hand, which I don't take. I stand up on my own. "Come on," he says and grabs my wrist.
"No fucking way, school ends in fifteen minutes and we have to go to detention," I insist. Seth starts dragging me by wrist towards the exit.
"Seth, no."
"Come on, don't be a little bitch."
"No, you already got me in trouble."
He looks down at me and I have to look away, because I had forgotten how light his eyes were. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way, Peyton."
"Please, Seth. Stop being difficult."
"One more time, sweetheart."
I glare up at him. He picks me up like I weigh nothing, which is definitely not true, and flings me onto his shoulder.
I almost scream, but then I think about how dead I'll be if I disrupt more classes. I let him carry me out into the parking lot and then start banging my fists on his back, but he's a lot stronger than he was when he was when he was a freshman.
Somehow, in a few minutes we're both sitting in his car with the doors locked, pulling away from the school.
"This is illegal you asshole," I tell him. He just turns up the radio.
"You kidnapped me from the school and now you're ignoring me? Where are we going?"
He takes his eyes off of the road and smirks at me, "The mall."
"Why? We have to go to detention."
"Sweetheart, you'll never win the bet looking like that." For a second I look down at my jeans and Color Me Rad 5k shirt, and feel kind of offended.
But then I do what I always do when I'm hurt, "And you'll never win if this is how you treat girls. Girls don't want you to insult their clothing choices, or play the music loud to drown them out, or throw them in your car. Just so you know, that's definitely not classy."
He just continues grinning, "I'd like to state for the record that lots of girls have quite enjoyed being thrown into this car."
I wrinkle up my nose, "That's repulsive."
"Trust me, it wasn't."
"Take me back to detention."
"Those words are probably the least spoken words ever," he laughs.
Silently, I have to agree. Then he continues driving closer to the mall and farther from the school. I glance around the car.
It was actually pretty clean. There were some CD cases scattered on the back seat, an air freshener, and a girl's
t-shirt.
