Ellie is Cool Now

Chapter 3

I can't sleep.

I stare at the ceiling as my anxiety-ridden brain takes it upon itself to flash back to every painful high school memory.

It's no secret that I wasn't popular in high school.

I didn't get invited to parties. No one asked me to a dance until senior year. I found out later the guy only asked because his friend was going with my bestie and he didn't want to go stag. We danced once and his breath smelled like sushi and tequila.

I dated a boy named Greg for three months, the only boy I ever kissed in high school. He wore those baggy jeans with the hammer loop and enough AXE body spray to suffocate a canary in a coal mine. Kissing him was like sucking on a slug. He ruined me on saliva swapping until well into college, and even now, I remain skeptical of its merits.

The only boy I genuinely lusted after in high school was the one, the only Mark Wright.

I get up and walk to the bathroom to splash my face with cool water.

Come on, Ellie. Sleep. All the cool kids are doing it.

I find a zit that I swear I'm not going to touch. I swear I'm just going to get a closer look, but then I attack it until it resembles a traffic light on my cheek and... Great. Now I'm going to go to my reunion with a big honking zit and a withering sense of self-worth.

I grab my laptop on my way back to the bed. Sleeping doesn't seem to be in the cards tonight, so Facebook stalking it is.

I look up Mark's profile. We're not friends, so all I can see is a picture of him in front of a New York skyline. He hasn't changed at all, except he dresses better and has a slightly more flattering haircut. I know through some of my mom's tennis club friends that Mark went to law school in New York and got a job at a big law firm there. The chances of him being at the reunion are slim to none.

Thank God.

I click on his picture to make it bigger. My stomach flips. I still think he's attractive, even after everything that happened. Way to not give a shit anymore, Ellie.

In high school, Mark was not the kind of guy girls usually lusted after. He was not a football player or a basketball star. He wasn't an angry emo kid with a band or a sexually ambiguous drama club nerd.

Mark played soccer and he was just kinda okay at it.

He was one of the pseudo-popular kids. The B-listers. The ones who were okay to talk to me in AP history, but would have rather cut off their left forearm than hang out with me at a football game. On the surface he wasn't special, but it was the little things about him — the shy smile, the small gestures of kindness, the dork just barely hiding — that I liked.

And I wasn't special, either, to be honest.

I didn't fit in anywhere. I had one extraordinary friend — my best friend — but the rest of my associates were about as cool as I was. We weren't in drama, and we weren't in band. We couldn't have cared less about sports, and we'd rather have been murdered and have our skins turned into footballs than cheer for an actual game.

We were the Miscellaneous kids, the et ceteras, the nobodies, the "insert-name-here who?"s. And no matter how much we acted like it didn't matter, we all secretly — desperately — wanted to be popular. Sure, we'd heard all the shit about how you should be true to yourself and not try to fit in, stand out, blah blah blah. But if we'd gotten invited to one of Brock Crawley's legendary parties, we'd have nearly vomited from excitement. The mayor's bad boy son lived in a big house that backed up to a golf course. His place was the clubhouse of the in-crowd.