The Friend Zone

Chapter One: A Good Friend and A Bad Influence

 "Tess, get up, you have psych in ten!" my roommate Whitney said one afternoon, shaking me awake.

"Shit," I said as I rolled out of bed to see it was ten minutes to two in the afternoon and I had a class across campus in ten minutes.

"I've been trying to wake you up for ten minutes," she laughed.

"I've gotta go," I said, sliding on my sandals over my fuzzy socks and grabbing my phone and notebook before rushing out the door.

I wasn't the greatest on being on time, I had always had to set alarms for everything, and I mean everything. I'm not stupid, I'm actually quite brilliant but I don't seem to apply that brilliance to everyday situations very well.

"Late again," Taylor, my best friend, remarked with a smirk as I sat down next to him in class.

"I fell asleep at one and my alarm didn't go off. Whit got me up five minutes ago," I whispered, opening to a clean sheet of notebook paper.

"Here's a pen," he smirked, answering my question before I even asked it. I swear we had spent so much time together he could now read my mind.

"Since when are you prepared for class?" I asked, taking the pen from his hand.

"Today," he replied with a wink.

###

"Going to Caf tonight?" Taylor asked as we walked out of class an hour later.

"Uh no," I replied, "Don't you remember? It's the home opener tomorrow against St. Norbert who we apparently barely beat for the league title last year, everyone on the team has been talking about it non stop since school started."

Sometimes it was like we had been around each other so long he started ignoring me whenever I went off on a tangent, which happened pretty often.

"Oh yeah," he replied, "I remember now."

"Yeah right," I remarked, rolling my eyes as we walked across campus, the trees and ground covered in a light blanket of crisp white snow, making me slightly regret my decision to just slip on a pair of sandals instead of closed toe shoes.

"I remembered! It's on my phone! Kayla's reminded me of it like five times in the past week," he replied.

"Oh," I replied quietly, rolling my eyes ever so slightly.

Kayla was Taylor's girlfriend since the beginning of the school year, she played on the varsity hockey team with me and I could not stand the girl. She was nice enough when Taylor was around but she didn't speak to me at all outside of that. I also suspected she was slightly jealous both that I was just as good as she was at hockey and best friends with her boyfriend.

"I'll see you tomorrow night then," he said as we got back to my dorm.

"Yeah," I said, "See you tomorrow night."

###

"You and Taylor are so cute," Whitney smirked as I walked into our room.

"Not in the mood for it Whit," I sighed, throwing my backpack onto my desk.

"Sorry," she said as I flopped down on my bed with a huff.

"Don't you have class?" I asked.

"It got canceled," she replied, flopping down on her bed and texting away on her phone.

Whitney and I had been friends since our sophomore year of high school back in New York where we were from. That's where I met Taylor too, my eighth-grade year.

We were Taylor's billet family when he played junior hockey in my hometown. My Dad thought I needed company while he was at work and decided that bringing in a 16-year-old hockey player to befriend his 14-year-old daughter was a fantastic idea. We were kind of forced to be friends at first and I tried to steer clear of him at school especially because he and his teammates were so popular and I was pretty much a fly on the wall at school. It wasn't until my freshman year that we really hit it off. I can still remember the first time we hung out together.