Strings Attached

Chapter Two

"That is no excuse," he said. "Please sit down."

I quickly obeyed, and he smiled and placed a sheet on my desk.

"I hope you studied," he said. "This test is worth thirty percent of your grade."

I almost fainted at the horror of it all.

***

"Basically, I think I just failed English," I told Louise in Government.

"Tough luck, my friend," she said. "Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose."

"That's easy for you to say. You are a walking genius." I sighed.

I was pretty sure Louise was the valedictorian, even if she refused to tell me her class rank.

Louise was quite humble, and she did not like to show off, so she never told anyone what number she was, but we all suspected that she was the number one in our grade.

"I'm not," she said.

"You are," I said. "I just hate it... I will never be good enough for Columbia!"

"Columbia would be lucky to have you," she said, patting me on the back.

Louise and I met in ninth grade. We have had at least one class together since we were freshmen, and we kind of got along. We were good friends, but I would not consider her my best friend. I did not have any friends besides her, so it would not be fair to say that she was the best out of a nonexistent list of friends.

In all of our three and a half years of friendship, we had only gone to each other's houses twice, and it was because of projects, so we were not the kind of people who liked to hang out after school. That was another reason why I did not consider her my best friend. Best friends hang out outside school; we did not.

We were kind of close, and we sat next to each other at lunch and talked to each other if we saw one another walking down the halls, but we did not call each other, text each other, send messages to each other, or had any contact with each other outside school. We spent the whole summer without knowing about each other, and we liked it that way.

Louise and I were too goal-oriented to even consider having close friends or boyfriends. We knew that having best friends would mean that once we left for university, we would have someone to miss and someone to make us want to come back, and we did not want to come back ever again. We wanted to leave and never look back ever again. Our parents even told us that they would follow us to whatever place we went to after high school, so Brianna and Mom would leave with me as soon as I graduated. It would be our chance to have a fresh start.

"Christina, did you hear me?" Louise raised both her eyebrows. "Columbia would be lucky to have you!" she repeated.

I sighed. Columbia was my dream school. I wanted to be an engineer, and I heard that Columbia had a wonderful program for engineers, which immediately caught my eye. I just did not think that a university like Columbia would ever notice an average girl like me. I was applying, but I was not feeling any positive about it.

"I'll never be accepted," I said.

"Why are you always so negative?" she asked, growing frustrated. "You are the salutatorian! You have a grade point average of four! Columbia will accept you!"

"Being number two is not the same as being number one," I said.

She sighed. "Sometimes you really annoy me."

I chuckled. "Sometimes I even annoy myself."

The bell rang, and we all took it as our cue to leave. Of course, our teacher did not like it when we took it as our cue to leave, even if we were supposed to, because he yelled, "The bell does not dismiss you! I do!"