Up in the Air

Chapter 1

Copyright © 2013 | CrayonChomper | Up in the Air

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Chapter 1

Anyone would like to think that they're an overall friendly person – the kind of friendly that people smile at you in the hallway but they don't walk all over you like one of those stupid WELCOME mats on everybody's front steps.

Nathan – or Nate as everyone now calls him seeing as he's cool now and all – apparently believes that best friend and doormat meant the exact same things.

The time we met is a perfect example – it was in kindergarten and involved him jumping into the sand castle I was playing in, nearly blinding me in the process. He apologized with a crumbly cookie during lunch and we were friends ever since.

But we don't have to look too far into the past to prove how unhealthy our best friend-ship is.

Wait, Is best friend-ship even a word?

For the past five minutes, I've been sitting in the driver's seat of an old Ford pickup truck in front of a driveway I normally would not have been spotted at. Four minutes of that have been spent pretending not to notice the make out session that could just win this year's MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss if there was a film crew standing by.

Nathan and Amanda could definitely pass off as movie stars. They weren't the class It Couple since freshman year for nothing.

Oh crap. Not Nathan – Nate, I told myself.

Until high school started – or until he started dating Amanda Reynolds two weeks into high school – he'd always been Nathan. Then Amanda told him that Nate sounded cooler and the whole school jumped on the bandwagon.

I was sure people would go back to calling him Nathan once the pair of them broke it off but, as evidenced by the heavy make out session happening on the Reynolds' porch, he and Amanda were still going strong.

It's now the second Monday of our senior year in high school and they haven't broken up yet. In teenage years, they're practically an old married couple.  They're the high school equivalent of an arranged marriage: the jock and the cheerleader.

That first week of freshman year, they'd made it onto the JV teams – football for Nate and cheerleading for Amanda. Now, of course, they're high school royalty: the football captain and the head cheerleader.

I groaned in frustration. While I rambled on about best kiss awards, nicknames and high school popularity, one minute had passed.

To think I might be late on a rare day I woke up early.

My snooze button was my best friend in the morning. My alarm starts blaring at six-forty-five but I don't get up until seven. Most mornings, my brother just comes into my room and pulls me out of bed. Like me, he values his sleep but he doesn't have my knack of sleeping through thunderstorms.

I couldn't wait for them to finish their make out session on their own. Homeroom was in fifteen minutes and I figured that the drive from Amanda Reynolds' house to school would take twenty.