Remy Unenchanted

Chapter Four- The Moment I've Always Been Waiting For

            “Well...” I began, but I couldn’t say more. I kind of forgot I really sucked at telling lies.

            “Well?” she prompted, instantly impatient.

            I shrugged. “You know. We—we were just walking together and I suddenly had the guts to talk to him. You, uhh, you saw his face. He totally hated me.” Okay. At least that was true, though just slightly.

            She gave me the suspicious eye, but my stomach growled and made us both look at each other. Any other time, my stomach growling would have topped my Not-To-Do lists and would have embarrassed me to death. But this time, with Angela laughing at me and momentarily forgetting that stuff about Kyle Hughes and my (apparently impossible) conversation with him, I was just glad it growled.

            Saved by the bell. Or more like, by the growl anyway.

___

            “Rems?”

            I stopped chewing my salad, closing my eyes. Not now. Without even turning around, I already knew who was standing right behind me. Sitting across me, Angela stared over my head. And by over my head, I meant  way over my head. Wes was that tall.

            “I take it you’re still mad.” He sat beside me, eyeing me with his green, green eyes.

            Ignoring him, I just continued eating my food. Call me shallow or anything, but I was really pissed when he brushed me, his best friend, off for a phone call from his life-sized Barbie doll. It just didn’t seem fair. Not that I was jealous or something.

            “Wait, you’re mad at him?” Angela asked me. “You never tell me anything.” She gave her I-can’t-believe-you-did-not-tell-me-this look.

            “Shut up, Anj,” Wes said in an annoyed voice and continued staring at me. “Come on, Rems. You won’t even tell me why you’re mad.”

            “Well, excuse me, Wesley. It’s Angela for you.” Angela glared at him before looking at me. “Remy, Remy, Remy. First I see you talking to Kyle Hughes. And now you’re mad at this guy? Did you even forget why best friends exist?”

            “Wait, what?” Wes asked her.

            The thing was, Wes and Angela, both my best friends, shared mutual feelings: They hated each other. If I left them alone for just one second, they’d start stabbing each other with their forks and biting each other’s ears off. So Angela just ignored Wes, pretending as if he didn’t speak at all.

            “Remy. Not that there’s nothing wrong about being mad at this guy here, because really, who wouldn’t be pissed at him? But like I said, you have to tell me these things.”

            “I was asking you a question,” Wes said trough gritted teeth, obviously irritated.

            “I was choosing not to answer,” Angela hissed back. “I’m well within my rights.”

            Wes groaned. “But I think I heard you say that she—and I mean she—was talking to Kyle Hughes. Either that, or I heard you say that we finally achieved world peace.”

            I slammed my hand on the table. What was so impossible with me talking to Kyle Hughes!?I stood up with my plate and was planning to say something witty and clever, but all I came up with was some strangled noise that sounded remotely like a shriek.  “Remotely” being the operative word.

            “Remy?” Angela looked at me, wide-eyed. They both were, actually. I was never really the type to stand up and get pissed when they were in the middle of arguing (their favorite pastime), so I totally understood if that was the reason they looked so shocked.

            Or maybe they were just looking shocked that I managed to sound like some sort of shrieking elephant.

            “Enough is enough,” I said. “You guys can go bite each other’s ear off, and I won’t care.” With that, I walked out on them and ended up carrying my plate around the cafeteria, looking for some other place to sit at.

            Instantly, I regretted ever walking out.

            First, they were my only friends. Second, now I was table-less. Third, I left my juice in my haste to make my big, dramatic exit. So, yay friendless, table-less, juiceless me.

            Oh, the irony of my life. Here I was, a soon-to-be fairy godmother, in charge of making miserable lives better, and here I was, incapable of making my own miserable life better. For a fairy godmother, I kind of sucked.

            But honestly, my biggest mistake was this: I sat with Kyle Hughes and his friends.

            Everyone stared at me like I was some sort of science experiment that might blow up without warning. Kyle, particularly, looked really surprised.

            “Um, hi, Kyle,” I said, smiling.

            Bad sign number one: He didn’t smile back.

            One of his friends fake-coughed the word loser, and I really tried not to flush in embarrassment.

            Bad sign number two: His friends were obviously hating me already.

            “A-ah, umm.” Kyle looked at me and actually had the guts to say, “Does anyone know her?” He said it in a who-in-the-world-is-this-weirdo voice, and I swear I so wanted to slap him right then.

            “Thank you so much for letting me borrow your magazine, Kyle,” I said. “Should I give it back now?” Where the whole school could see?

            He seemed to have sensed the threat and he glared at me. Like he was saying Don’t you dare embarrass me in front of my friends.

            I tried not to cringe and just said, “I could grab it now.” I reached for my bag.

            “No!” Kyle quickly yelled. “No.”

            I swear his friends gasped. Like they couldn’t believe Kyle actually let me borrow his magazine, let alone knew me. Seriously, why did it seem so impossible?

            “You’re saying you actually know her?” One of the three girls, the blonde one, directed the question at Kyle, but she was sending me scary death glares. I especially didn’t like the way she said “her.” I looked away, not meeting her gaze.

            My bigheaded crush? That, I could deal with. Blonde girls with scary glares? That, I couldn’t.

            “Umm, sort of,” Kyle answered, sounding like I was forcing him to do so.

            “You do?” the guy across me asked. “Seriously?” He talked about me as if I was some sort of contagious creature and that being in my presence was deadly.

            “As a matter of fact, yes, I do,” Kyle said. Bad sign number three: He was smirking. “In fact, let me introduce her to your guys.”

            Oh. My. Gosh. I never thought this moment would actually come. I did dream of this moment more than once over the past two years, but I never knew it would actually happen. This was it. This was the moment Kyle Hughes will finally introduce me to his friends.

            “Everyone, this is,” he said, “my dog.”

            My mouth dropped open. I looked at him in horror, and he just looked back with a confident smile. Seriously. A dog?

            So much for the “moment I’ve always been waiting for.”