Managing Boys

Managing Boys (1)

“Extra, extra! Read all about it!”

I looked up from my lunch and at Parker, who slapped his copy of the school’s newspaper in front of me before sitting down.

“Why do you even have a paper?” I couldn’t help but ask him, staring down at it for only another second before turning back to my food. “Usually you take it without even looking at it and then go burn it after school.”

He shrugged, flipping through it now. “Zoey’s tired of me ruining the things that she and the rest of the newspaper class worked so hard on. She said she’d burn me if I destroyed another copy.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “And we all know you’ll do whatever Zoey says.”

His face turned red and he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Shut up.”

I grabbed onto the newspaper now, a little intrigued by it. Both Parker and I never read the school newspaper when it came out, but we were forced to have a copy because everyone was required to get one. It was how the school put their news out there, but I could have sworn that only three people out of the newspaper class even read it.

“Zoey said that this one’s got something good in it,” Parker informed me now as I continued to flip through the paper. “She didn’t have enough time to tell me what because we were both late for class, but knowing Zoey, it’s probably not that hard to figure out what it is.”

I slammed the paper down just as he had finished speaking, knowing I had found what Zoey was so excited about. Parker looked down to where I was now pointing in the paper, and he rolled his eyes again.

“It seems like Hello Aria even made it to our school paper now, huh?”

I made a face, pushing the paper away without even reading the whole full paged article. I didn’t even want to look at their pictures. I wasn’t a fan of them like every other girl was, so I wasn’t about to waste my time by reading about them in the school paper. I didn’t see how a band had anything to do with school anyway.

“Wow, you must really hate them,” Parker snickered, taking the paper back from me.

I shook my head at him. “I don’t hate them. They just… annoy me, that’s all. They haven’t done anything to make me hate them.”

“Whatever you say,” he started, a smirk growing on his face now, “Aria.”

“Ugh,” I groaned at my own name, dropping my head into my arms on the table. “Don’t call me that. I’ve heard that fifty times already, and it all had something to do with that damn band and how I’m so lucky that my name is Aria.”

Parker snickered now. “It’s your name, isn’t it? What do you want us to call you if we can’t call you by your given name?”

I threw the rest of my lunch into the nearest trashcan without even getting out of my seat. I'd lost my appetite.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged, lying my head back down on the table. “I’d like to go nameless while I try to figure that out.”

Parker laughed at me, and I couldn’t help but smile at him a little. At least his presence made me feel a little better about everyone fussing over my name just because it was the same name as the one in that band.

“Maybe we could reverse your name and call you Aira,” he suggested now, and then burst out laughing when he saw the look on my face at that new nickname. “Okay, it’s decided. I’ll call you Aira.”

“No! Don’t!”

He snickered. “Okay then, Aria.”

There was no way I was ever going to get out of this torture.