The Girl Who Wore Jordans

Chapter Fifty-Two

      “Sure!” Lauren nodded, her glossed lips spreading into a happy smile.

      With a deep breath, I allowed the words to quickly tumble out of my mouth, unsure of what exactly I was saying. “I play basketball, am going to UConn on a sports scholarship so that I can play basketball there, and I dress like this normally.”

      Tara blinked, and then blinked again, and then closed her eyes and opened them one more time as she looked me up and down. She then started to laugh, shaking her head about. “Good one, Liz! That was funny!” she finally managed to say.

      “Oh! It was a joke!” Lauren said, understanding what her friend had wrongly implied.

      “Uh, guys, I don’t think she’s kidding,” Alice voiced.

      “Of course she is, Alice!” Lauren assured her. “Liz, you really got us for a second there!”

      “I was being serious,” I said flatly, hating that the people I had referred to a my “friends” over the duration of my year weren’t taking me seriously after I had just told them of what consumed 96.2% of my life (the other 3.8% was dedicated to eating and sleeping).

      “April Fools Day already happened, Liz,” Tara told me sympathetically, as if I hadn’t been informed of the fact.

      “Legitimately, I’m telling the fucking truth right now,” I shook my head, exasperated that they wouldn’t believe me.

      “Liz,” Lauren began, eyeing me carefully, wondering what my next move would be, “I’m in your gym class. I’ve seen you play sports. No offense, but you suck.”

      “You know what? Fuck it,” I proclaimed, determination set in my tone. As the saying went, actions did always hold more weight than words… I turned to the door as the girls looked at me blankly in a shield of bewilderment.

      “Where are you going?” Tara was the first to blurt out.

      “We are going on a little field trip,” I told them, hinting that they should follow behind me. They did so willingly as we made it out of Homeroom 512 without so much as a margin of an issue. Just as we escaped the room, three boys came into view, two of them staring directly at me, while the other had eyes for a certain girl with dirty blonde hair and a brain, named Alice.

      “Well hello, Lizzie!” Dylan greeted sarcastically. “Are you going to run away again or do you have time to talk?” Obviously, he was still fairly pissed about me fleeing early from prom.

      “We were actually just on our way to take a little informative field trip to another region of the school, and then I was planning on explaining everything,” I said in the politest way I could manage. “Care to come along?”

      “Sure!” Alex, who had already gravitated over to Alice and wrapped his arm over her shoulder, answered for the other two.

      “Wait…where are we going?” Eric questioned, not as irritated with me as Dylan had been.

      “You’ll see,” was all I said as I began to lead the group of six others towards the one room in the school that would allow me to express myself in the best way I knew.

      Since we were seniors, prom was over, and I had already gotten into UConn, I didn’t really care what classes I missed to show the people I had befriended over the year the real me. Living a lie was never fun, but neither was having to tell the truth that derived from the said lie. I was coming clean and I had never been more ready. Sure, there were still things that I could lose, but compared to before prom, everything was so much easier and less complicated, in a still completely complex sort of way.