Little Miss Perfect

Ch. One

"Do I really have to go?" I asked for the tenth time in a desperate attempt to sound convincing.

My mom looked at me with the same sympathetic smile that she'd given me the nine times before. "Yes, sweetie. Trust me, it will be good for you."

"I don't need to go back to high school. I already graduated."

"I know that, but I'm worried about you. Just try, for me?" She leaned against the counter across from me and gave me a look, pleading me to go through with this even though I knew that I had no choice in this. She didn't need my permission to force me into this, and I didn't need to be okay with it. I wasn't okay with it.

I rolled my eyes at her and then quickly scarfed down the rest of my bowl of cereal in hopes that eating away my nerves somehow might work. "I'm going to be miserable, I hope you know that."

"You'll make friends," She assured me, going back to putting away the last of the clean dishes.

"Yeah. Who doesn't want to be friends with the freaky genius new girl?" I muttered sarcastically as I put my now empty cereal bowl in the sink beside my tall mother.

"Stupid people," She smiled, wiping her hands on her jeans as she leaned against the counter beside me. "Besides, Luke will be there. He'll help you out."

"I don't need my overly charismatic brother pushing his friends onto me out of sympathy," I argued with a look of distaste. I was sure that Luke had nice friends and everything, but I could see him paying them off to be nice to me or to hang out with me or something just so that it would look like I had friends. I really didn't want that to happen though.

My mom laughed with a bright smile as if she wasn't worried about my impending doom at all. "You'll be fine. Put some effort into this though, at least for a month. If you want to quit then, I'll pull you out. Deal?"

I nodded at her but I was still very hesitant. "Fine, whatever. It's not like I have a choice."

She kissed my forehead like she did when she knew that she'd won an argument. "That's the spirit, Lindsay," Looking at the time, she realized that it was almost time for us to be getting to school so she rushed over to the stairs to yell for my brother. "Luke, let's go!"

Seconds later, Luke came rushing down the stairs with his school bag slung over his shoulder. All three of us shared the same dark colored brown hair but I think that Luke's was darker than mine just by a little bit. He was taller than me, even though he was minutes younger but other than that, we looked a lot alike; thin brown eyes, small noses, we even had the same long smile.

"And you don't even have to do well in your classes, that's not what I care about at all. Just make some friends," My mother added, as if that helped me think better of the situation. It didn't.

"That works for me too, right?" Luke asked as he was running his fingers through his hair in an attempt to make it look less like a tangled mop on top of his head.

"You haven't graduated yet," My mother reminded him. "Once you graduate, you're more than welcome to go back and flunk every class. First time around, though, it's school before friends."

"Not fair," He claimed, but he knew that he would never win that argument, and quickly gave it up.

I gave him a small glare because he didn't realize how good he had it. "At least you don't have to do it twice."

"Yeah, whatever. Come on, we have to go now or we'll be late," Luke informed me that it was go time. I was going back to high school even though I'd already graduated so many years before. My mom didn't think that I had any friends, and she was right, because I might know everything but one thing that can't be learned is how to talk to people. The one thing that Luke excelled at, I just couldn't get right.