"You look out of it." Sarah placed a gentle hand on mine her dark brown eyebrows scrunched in concern.
I looked up from my picked apart cheeseburger. "Oh," I grunted.
"You not eating? That's weird." Geo took a seat next to me a pile of nachos, cheese, meat, and any other topping one could think of were piled on her plate. For some unknown reason she loved nacho day. I couldn't get over the brown clump they called meat.
"Ladies." Rob Manning, my not so secret long time crush, winked at us. I sighed annoyed by the fluttering of my heart. His friends Dave Giles, Chad VanBurre and Damien Jensen followed with a hello and filled the rest of our table.
Rob and I have been cool, hanging out in similar circles since middle school, but I never had the balls to ask him out. He never had enough interest to ask me out so there I was, stuck.
I looked up at Geo whose eyes were following after Dave. "Are you emprinting him into your memory G?" We all laughed.
Georgina glared at me. "You've no right to talk punk."
I grimaced and turned my attention back to my burger. I told Geo in a spur the moment Mrs. McDowell is gone moment that I would ask Rob out. I was under duress it couldn't count right!
"You're chickening out aren't you?" Courtney whipped her long fire red hair behind her shoulder as she dumped dressing on her salad.
"No!" I sank down when everyone looked at me. "It's just stupid." I whispered.
"You like him I don't see what the issue is." Courtney raised a well groomed eyebrow. "Personally I don't get it. The boys at our school just aren't interesting to me." She faked a yawn.
Geo rolled her eyes shoving a nacho in her mouth.
"I still don't think I should be held accountable for something I said while grieving the passing of a dear friend." I kept picking at my burger.
"Sounds like a cop out to me." Geo mumbled with a mouth full of nacho.
"Just because you made the dance team doesn't mean you can't get benched." Rachel Himrick batted her bright blue eyes at Geo. Rachel eyed Geo's tray with her lip curled up before she brought her eyes back to Geo. "If you don't get those legs up during the kicks even Melissa Jenkins won't be able to save you."
For some reason Rachel had it out for Geo ever since middle school. Now that Geo made the school dance team, against Rachel's wishes, Geo's been dealing with the wrath of Rachel the Reaper. "What do you think Leslie?" Rachel looked over at her friend slash grinder monkey. Leslie had been following Rachel around since she popped out of her mother's womb. Geo rolled her eyes looking up from under her long dark lashes. It didn't make sense how Rachel was able to make Geo retract inside herself.
For heaven's sake Geo was in martial arts, wrestling, and track she could no doubt take Rachel, but for whatever reason she seemed to regress back to middle school sixth grade when Rachel started terrorizing her. "No thunder thighs in our outfits Rach." Leslie added and the two girls laughed uproariously as they made their way to the other end of the table closest to Rob and his friends.
"Sometimes Geo I really hate that girl." I took a big bite of my burger watching Rachel sit between two other girls at the other end of the table.
"I wouldn't understand why." Sarah glanced up at us from under her dark lashes. Our eyes met and all four of us laughed.
"Geo, you're going to help me study for the math quiz right?" I pushed the tray away uninterested.
"Yeah sure. Shouldn't be too hard. Call me I'll walk you through the review from last class."
I nodded. "Would have been better to have an excuse to spend the night."
Sarah captured Geo's averted eyes. "I didn't know you were even trying out for the dance team."
Geo shrugged. "I wasn't going to, but I..." Geo trailed off poking at her nachos. "I told myself I would you know senior year and all."
I nodded chancing a glance at Rob. I sighed. He was laughing at something Dave Giles said. Rachel tossed her blond hair showing her phone to Rob.
Why weren't guts something I was born with? I pulled on one of my curls. Or super shiny blonde hair. Life would be easier, right?
*~~~*~~~*
"Iris?" I looked up at my mother from the pencil sketch i was barely paying attention to.
"Yeah ma?"
"Your math teacher called."
I nodded. "Mhm." Uh oh. They didn't waste any time did they?
"Are you going to be ready for the quiz?"
I frowned at her. "Of course." I lied. Geo was supposed to be helping me but she wasn't returning any of my calls. "Why wouldn't I be?"
Mother nodded and leaned on the computer desk to face me. "I know you've been through alot lately is all but if you fail this next test you could lose your scholarship. "
Oh crap the scholarship! "Mom I'm fine, really." I really needed to stop lying. I quickly navigated to the scholarship website to check when the application was due. I tried to hide my look of relief when I saw the deadline hadn't passed yet.
My mother nodded and looked away as if there was something else, but she was debating on whether to say it.
"You can say it. Whatever it is."
She smiled hesitantly. "I never asked why you were over there, at Mrs. McDowell's, in the middle of the night."
I looked down for a moment. "I go there to think."
She frowned and crossed her arms. "Think about what?"
Oh how you and dad never shut up long enough for me to get a decent night's sleep. Think about how things would be better if you and dad would just get a divorce already and stop making Issie and me suffer. Think about getting the hell out of this house, city, better yet state for college.
All of those things would have crushed my mother's already fragile hold on reality so instead I said, "I go there to think sometimes when... things get loud over here."
It was guilt that washed my mother's soft features. "Aw sweetheart. I'm so sorry it's just..."
"You don't need to explain." I didn't really want to know.
"I think I do. Your father and I have been going through some things for quite some time as you know, but we're trying to work things out for you and Isabell."
I stood up a lump in my throat. "For us? You think yelling at each other until crazy hours of the night it good for us? I think alternate weekends would be better than that. At least we'd be able to sleep through the night." I winced after the words came pouring out like water from a hose, unchecked, uncharted, uncensored.
"Iris..."
"No mom really." I was already on a roll, a boulder plowing down a hill there was no stopping me.
"Well divorce isn't as easy as it sounds either. I would have thought you'd want us to work it out."
"Face it. You two are miserable. We see that. We're not stupid." Unfortunately, my mother was the town at the bottom of the hill.
"I never thought you were." My mother ran shaking flustered hands through her thick mane of curls. "Your sister and I are going to the mall to do some late school shopping. Did you want to come?"
"When did you and Issie ever do anything together voluntarily?"
My mother stood up tears threatening her calm. "A simple no would have been sufficient."
I did feel bad when I saw her walk away, shoulders slumped arms wrapped tightly around her midsection. I was just so fed up with so much. I tried so hard to take a brighter outlook on life like Mrs. McDowell encouraged me. I tried to water good seeds and be positive, but so much negativity surrounded me I was drowning. How was I going to survive without her? I laughed as her words played in my head:
"The thing about seeds is that if you water them they grow. If you pour life on bad seeds negative energy will prosper and grow if you pour life on good seeds however..." Mrs. McDowell looked up at me from the crouched position in her garden.
"Somehow I think I already know where you're going with this."
"So wise so young." There was a twinkle in her oceanic blue eyes.
We laughed. She was a beautiful woman inside and out.
When I turned off the shower water I groaned. The arguing started early. Maybe it would end early too. I ran a big toothed comb through my curls while I wandered over to the window that looked at Mrs. McDowell's house. Even under the dim moonlight, I could make out her rose bushes. She was always out there caring for her landscape. They were like children to her. I frowned when a light clicked on in the basement. I knew I shouldn't have felt so upset, almost betrayed but I was. That was my space. I closed the blinds and made my way over to the bed. I couldn't imagine someone else pruning Mrs. McDowell's shrubs or trimming her rose bushes.
There were just too many variables in my life and I wanted stability.
____________________
|:| A/N |:|
I'm not in high school anymore. In fact, it's been a minute...or two since I've been in high school so it was a wonderful challenge to write from this perspective. Ode to high school politics and all that drama lol.
Hope you are enjoying the journey so far don't forget to leave me a COMMENT / VOTE. Until the next time. ;)