Cupid's Daughter

Chapter 8~ Classroom Catastrophe

Sam bit her lip and smiled to herself, lifting her chin a little higher. Noah caught my eye before I could look away, and for a second I just appreciated him being here, making an effort. Sometimes it was easy to forget that he was the popular jock way out of our league. It was like that moment weeks ago, the day of the very first time I had spoken to Noah; sat at the traffic lights near Pat's diner. We'd just been singing and laughing, and even though I was embarrassed, there was no difference between us. Noah was just a guy and we were just two girls being silly and being ourselves. This kind of felt like that.

Sam fell asleep less than an hour later, her head draped over my lap. Noah and I had changed the channel given that neither of us really liked Mamma Mia, and much to my dismay Noah had settled on a channel showing Cupid. I groaned as he got comfortable on the couch, putting his feet up on the futon.

"What have you got against your mom, anyway?" Noah asked, easily returning back to his normal, less sensitive self.

I shook my head and sighed. "You mean aside from the fact that she left me and my dad when I was eleven, I haven't seen her in two years and haven't spoken to her since my sixteenth birthday?" I asked sarcastically, staring bitterly at Courtney Conway's stunning face as she laughed on-screen.

I couldn't believe people actually fell for her juju love crap.

Noah was silent for a long moment. "Why did she leave?"

I looked away from the screen and my mother's face and focused instead on a loose thread on my pants. "She wanted a career more than a family, I guess." I shrugged. I rarely talked about my mom to anyone but Sam, and even then I was hesitant. When people wanted to talk to me about her, they usually just wanted to know how they could meet her or work for her or get a cameo on the show. Of course Sam wasn't like that, she just tried to get me to call her or send a letter or something, which was probably even worse. It was hard to make people understand that even though she was a relationship guru, my own relationship with her was strained. They just figured I was being a moody teenager and dramatising everything. Maybe I was, who knows anymore.

"My brother Nate won't even talk to my dad." Noah said, out of the blue. "They had a really bad fight a few years back and stopped talking altogether. No one will tell me what it was about."

I remembered Nate, who was a Senior when I was a Freshman. He was more rugged than Noah, as if he'd experienced more than an old man had in his seventeen short years. I'd passed him in the halls and I remembered that he would smile at me, unlike all of his jerk.. I mean jock friends who didn't even know Sam and I existed.

"I remember Nate." I mused with a smile. Randomly my mind flickered back to the scene in the lunchroom today, and how I'd spoken to Noah in a way that I shouldn't have. "Hey, I'm sorry about today... what I said to you." I said quietly, my eyes rolling over Sam's sleeping figure. She looked so peaceful.

Noah shrugged and shook his head. "You don't have anything to apologise for, Isabelle."

"But you were just being kind! I was so rude to you and you'd done nothing to deserve i-"

"- I said it's fine, little Cupid." Noah cut me off with a small smile, before he gently moved Sam's ugg-boot clad feet from his lap and stood up.

"You're going?" I asked quietly, trying to hide the slight twinge of disappointment I felt.

Noah nodded and checked his phone quickly. "It's almost twelve. I should get back before my folks call the police again."

I raised my eyebrows as I looked up at him. Sam's head was still in my lap so I couldn't stand up to walk him out. "Again?" I questioned dubiously.