Bottled Blue

Two

Winter break had been almost perfect. I got to stay home from school, spend time with my family. I was free of the trials of a teenager in a prestigious private school full of rich assholes and the children of celebrities. In a way, I was sad to go back to school. Not because I had to spend time with a bunch of jerks, but because at the end of the year, I'd never have to see any of them again.

I'd been going to school with Jett Kanellis since freshman year. My brother and I went to public school until high school because our mom was worried we'd get more ridicule in public school. Our parents weren't famous. Or rich, for that matter. But my mom was a sex therapist and wrote a book that Oprah endorsed. So sometimes people called to have her on talk shows. And one of us would go to school, and someone would repeat words from her book verbatim. They were especially fond of the section on masturbation.

Going to private school really didn't change that. All it did was give my parents more control over who got to do the teasing. My brother graduated two years before me, and then I was left to deal with it on my own.

Jett Kanellis and I had never run in the same circles. He hung out with a whole group of other people. But he was the tightest with three of them. His best friend Finn and two girls named Katie and Vivian. While Finn had never really done anything to me, Katie and Vivian had decided to make my life a living hell since day one.

Well, actually, that day came later. They'd once tried to befriend me by inviting me to Katie's birthday party freshman year. But Katie was such a spoiled, rich brat that I ended that night walking to town by myself so I could call my parents from a payphone.

From that moment on, they decided we were all enemies. And that was perfectly fine with me. But a year after that, I learned to never go to high school parties ever again. Mostly because my best friend Becky and I got invited to a popular kid's party, only to end up there with Jett and all his friends.

One game of spin-the-bottle later, and I found myself locked in a closet with him.

It was my first kiss. And I hated that I'd given that to him without him even knowing. And he'd been so pompous and assholish about it afterward. Smiling like a dickhead. Like we had a secret. Or like he knew something about me that he could hold over me for the rest of my life.

I never went to another party. And I had no intention of changing that. Jett went out with Becky a few weeks later and had been just an ass to her as he was to me. We'd never once shared a class together. I had classes with his girlfriends, sisters, cousins, and friends. But never him. Not that I would have cared or anything. Just that it was the first thing I noticed when I walked into biology after lunch.

Science classes were always my absolute favorite. I loved just about everything that fell under that umbrella. Even math. It was always changing. Always exciting. And ignited some creative spark in me that other people got from painting or music. For as long as I could remember, my head had been filled with questions. My mom always said it used to drive her insane. "Why is the sky blue? What is dirt made out of? Why do animals live where they do?"

So, of course, Kanellis had to ruin a perfectly good class by being in it. Sitting at the other end of the room with his gaggle of friends, looking like a Greek statue with Katie Williams fawning over him. The class was empty of anyone I'd consider a friend, even a minor one.

I took a seat at the back of the class, farthest away from him and his friends. We had little tables set up, two people per table, and I was gratefully alone until the bell rang. Then my teacher did the unthinkable. He hit me with a pain that was sudden, sharp, and really freaking sucked. After going over a lengthy description of this semester's coursework, he dropped the "teamwork" bomb. But what made it really really suck was that he said the word "Assigned" right before that.

"This semester is all about teamwork. You're going to be partnered with this person from this day until graduation. You'll have to sit at the same table every day. You'll be forced to get along with that partner. If you don't and you think they're a pretentious twat, that's too bad. You're stuck with them. Every project, every homework assignment, every miserable minute of your life will be stuck with that person."

So okay, he didn't actually say it like that. But that's the gist.

I hated when teachers did that. My Government teacher was the same way. We had alphabetically assigned seats and couldn't even talk to people we liked. Not that it would have mattered because I didn't like anyone in this class anyway. So it's not like I could have chosen my own partner. But I knew. I had a gut feeling. Deep down inside. I was going to get paired with either Katie Williams or Jett Kanellis.

"We're doing this alphabetically to make it easier on everyone," the teacher said as he reached for his roll call list. There was a moment of hope—a flicker of it inside me. My last name was Inglewood. There was one whole letter between I and K. And if the number of students before me was uneven, I wouldn't get paired with Jett. Easy peasy.

He began reading off the names of paired partners. He set the only A and B at the first table. Then as the room shifted to his new arrangements, he continued onto the next desk, not caring how quickly anyone got to and from their seats. I stayed at the back, clutching my messenger bag to myself, praying that I didn't get stuck with Jett, counting the number of students whose last names I actually knew.

He stepped up to the fourth table and set his hand on it. The duo who'd been sitting there got up to get out of the way.

"Aasha Inglewood," he said. "And Jett Kanellis."

I could have cried. I wanted to curse and scream at him, beg him to give me someone else. Anyone. Even Katie Williams, if I had to. I didn't care. Just as long as it wasn't Jett. But he moved onto the following table, and he already made it clear that he wouldn't be changing it up just to please us. "It's about teamwork. Not friendship. You don't get to pick your coworkers in a lab."

I stood reluctantly and went to the table. Jett moved over from where he'd been sitting on the other side of the room. He was already smirking. I glanced at him once and took the stool closest to the wall. Please don't let him ruin the only class I actually loved? He smoothly took the stool next to mine and leaned his arms on the table.

"How's it going, Smurfette?" he asked. I lifted a single finger, the middle one, to show him how I felt.