The moment I step into the cafeteria, I know I’ve made a big mistake. The chaos inside the room makes it so much harder to talk or to think. Liza leads me towards the table where she and her friends always sit. It’s the same table which I thought I’d be banned from. But I have a second chance.
Already things have changed drastically. The three theater girls are talking to one another—giggling over what looks like one of the old yearbooks—before they looks up and notice me. Riley is sitting beside the theater girls. She’s talking to Darren, the one who looked at me funny the other day.
They are all people I knew but don’t really know. I don’t think they know me past descriptive words such as the loner and the goth girl who doesn’t have the style.
Depressed might as well have been stamped onto my forehead. That might make things a little easier for them to identify me.
Before we even make it to the table, we’re sidelined by two people I never thought I would have to speak to.
Zoey and Trisha are back. I had hoped that whatever they’d told Liza would have been just something about a class. Instead, it looks like they might have some other business with her.
Zoey cocks her head at us. She’s holding a tray with fruit and vegetables. It looks bland. “You’re Mia, right?”
“Maya,” I say. Awkward silence falls over us.
Zoey recovers with a quick smile. She looks at Liza. “Well, then. I forgot but we’re meeting in the gym later, okay?”
Liza nods. The small smile is a courtesy, nothing more.
Zoey gives me a glance over. I should be use to it, but I still feel small. I avert my eyes to my feet, trying to tuck my arms in further to my side. I don’t look up when Zoey and Trisha walk off, going to the other side of the cafeteria. I don’t need to look at them to know they’re looking down on me.
“When did you become friends with them?” I mumble, tucking my hands under my armpits. I might look like a fucking idiot but I don’t care as long as I feel better about my body. I wish I can just disappear right here.
But Liza is the important thing here.
“When did you start to care?” She continues to the front of the cafeteria and grabs a clean tray from the pile.
I pick up one after her.
“I’ve always cared.”
“Bullshit.” She slams a scoop of mash potatoes on her tray. “You’ve never cared who I was hanging out with. I’m surprised you’re ever half here.”
I scoop up the same amount and shake it off on my tray. “I said I care.”
“Hm.” She moves on to the pizza.
For the first time in what feels like forever, she places a piece onto my tray first. It’s like being hit with a rock. It isn’t the nicest thing she’s done for me, but it’s the best thing she’s done for me this week.
Pitiful. I know.
The pizza looks disgusting on my tray. The pepperonis and the grease slide off the side of the melted cheese make me want to throw up. I hold back the sickness and try to look towards the other kinds of foods they have laid out. I really can’t focus on anything but her words.
We go to checkout. We swipe our school cards and walk toward the lunch table.
My stomach churns as we sit down beside one another. This is more awkward than I thought it would be.
“So, spit it out.”
That is just like her. She wants to get straight to the point.
She takes a rough bite of her pizza and looks at me.
I clear my throat and look around the table. The others—her friends—are trying to look like they aren’t paying attention. I know they’re listening in.
“Um…” I open my milk and take a long drink. Calm. Just get it out. “Lianna is…”
Liza rolls her eyes and takes another bite. “I’m tired of hearing about Lianna. I thought you wanted to talk about how I was right and you were wrong.”
“That’s true but…” I sit my milk down. “Things have changed. Lianna and her mom are…”
God. Why can’t the words just come out?
“They’re living with us.”
Liza drops her pizza. The red sauce splatters across the table.
“What the fuck?”
She shakes her head.
I take another drink, wishing I could run away instead. That’s not going to happen. If I want Liza back, I have to do the most uncomfortable things.
“But we’re not friends. I don’t even talk to her.” I take a deep breath and let out a shaky laugh. “Actually, she’s kinda obsessed with me.”
I scratch the back of my head.
Obsessed doesn’t quite cut it. We’re both infatuated with each other.
But Liza doesn’t need to know that.
She looks around the cafeteria as if she is looking for an answer out there. Maybe she’s looking for reassurance from her friends across the table, but they look just as shocked as she does. I don’t know what I expected when I let the words out. They all probably think I’m insane for letting this happen, but they don’t know I have no choice. How as I—the socially awkward girl who can barely talk to her best friend—suppose to talk to my mom out of letting Lianna live in our spare bedroom?
It’s our only option to even keep our home.
Liza snaps out of her stupor and turns to me. She cools her features, trying as much as she can to not show how disgusted she is.
I can’t really blame her when I’m just as disgusted. Maybe even more so given the fact that I have to share the same hallway and bathroom. It shouldn’t be that bad.
But I think back to this morning when Lianna had finally crossed the last boundary between us. I can’t decide if she is doing it because she likes girls or if she’s only teasing me.
Given the evidence up and until now, I don’t believe she cares about me enough to want to sleep with me. She might be a slut and doesn’t mind spreading her legs for any guy in this school, she has to have standards.
Fortunately, I’m not fuckable enough.
Liza nods her head as if that is all it takes for the information to sink into her thick skull. I know by the years spent with her and from the fact that she’s been bashing Lianna for all our high school career that it won’t be that easy for her to not just lump me in with Lianna now. We could have come to a different conclusion, changing the paths we’re heading down, but if I’m getting closer with Lianna, that shot will be out the window.
I really want to believe Liza has more heart inside of her than that. I really wish I knew what kind of person she was outside the scared teenager I’m looking at right now.
Back when we were younger, in the days when we didn’t have to worry about what others thought, we would have laughed our asses off about this. Lianna would be nothing but a whisper in our ears.
But this prison has warped our minds. We’re conditioned to believe all the lies floating around, to listen to all the fucking nodes this school has labeled as the popular.
Even saying it doesn’t make any difference.
She reaches across the space between us and takes my hand into hers. I jump as her soft cold skin brushes over mine. I look down at our conjoined fingers. A thick lump gets stuck in the middle of my throat. Tears sting my eyes.
“I forgive you,” she says.
Her thumb brushes over my knuckles. It’s comforting for all but a second. And then I’m thinking about all the horrible things she said to me. “Let’s just forget this happened and move on.”
“I really want that.” My voice doesn’t sound like my own. I sound like a ghost haunting a shell and its trying to piece the fragments of its old life together.
She gives me one last smile. It isn’t as big as I want it to be. Somehow it isn’t enough. Through all the pain I’ve gone through to get the courage to talk to her, its a letdown. I don’t know what I wanted or what else I could want. Liza is going to take me back. Lianna be damned.
Why is it though that I feel as if I’m making the biggest mistake of my life?
The rest of lunch is like pulling teeth but in a good way. Liza keeps the conversation going between Riley and me, picking up the pieces when I let the silence go on for too long. I don’t know much about Riley except she works for Pizza Hut and her mom really likes to party when Riley isn’t there. Like most of the kids in my school, I don’t know anything about them except vague and weird facts. These things get stuck in my head though I know I will never need to use them.
Liza is the only one in which I got a little under the surface. It’s actually by accident that we even became friends in the first place.
We were in the fourth grade. She was on the chubby side back then while I was the outcast because I was darker than the rest. Kids would sometimes come up to me and pretend I didn’t understand English.
The day she spoke to me was the day a set of boys on the playground had the idea to play the deportation game. The game was simple: get Maya deported from the swing set.
Like most games made up by little kids, it sucked. Ass.
It didn’t take long for them to grow bored of it, but they never left me alone. They liked to throw rocks at me or twigs when the teacher wasn’t looking. You would think that the teachers would be more away of these things when our school was no means big. Our little city was barely over a thousand people. Kids were kinda scarce here. We might even be overrun by the drunks roaming the streets.
And I remember those boys’ face. Their names too. Those are the kinda things you’ll never be able to forget.
“Maya, what did you have for breakfast this morning? A burrito?”
The redhead snotty kid laughed and slammed his friend on the shoulder. “Or a taco?”
They busted out laughing like it was the best joke they’d heard in years. It might have been funny enough to warrant a chuckle at our age, but as I thought back on it, most kids wouldn’t find the humor in it.
I know I didn’t.
I wrapped my arms around the pole of the swings. I buried my face into my shoulder as hard as I could. My brown curly hair covered most of my face, but I knew if I cried they would be able to see it.
That’s when she came along. Her short blond bob of hair had been a spark of interest in the early semester. She’d become popular that year because it was also found out that she could draw dinosaurs and giraffes without help.
There really wasn’t anything special about her. In the she walked or talked, I couldn’t pinpoint any personality in her. Besides her short bobbed hair and the red mark on her cheek, she didn’t stand out against all the other girls in class.
But this moment, when she stood beside me with her hand clamped tightly around a barbie doll she’d brought from home, it had changed the course of our lives.
The boys had stopped yelling. She turned to me, not with a smile, just a blank look on her face. Her eyes were clear pools of blue with nothing in them. She was a hollow husk of a child, but I didn’t mind. I knew there was something better inside of her than there was in the boys that had been yelling at me.
She held the doll out to me. I looked at it.
There were many times the boys handed me things that would end up hurting me. Pens that zapped or gum that snapped my fingers. They’d laugh as I cried.
It felt like the entire school hated me.
Liza was different from all of them. She actually tried and was nice to me. All the other girls acted as if I didn’t exist. I was a ghost sitting in the back of the class. A girl who no one wanted to be friends with. The girl who all the boys liked to make cry.
That was me.
I had hesitated, hand hovering over the doll. It wasn’t the prettiest doll. She was covered in dirt. Her blond hair was matted in a wad while a single pony tail tried to tame it.
The doll reminded me of Liza. She was the only other girl in the class who didn’t have many friends. She had some. They didn’t always talk to her or invite her to play with them. But she was treated better than I could ever wish for.
When I wrapped my hand around the doll and Liza had let me hold her, it was the start of something greater than what my life had been up until then.
Looking at Liza now, I still see the little girl who gave me a chance. She’s giving me another because Liza is a better person than anyone in this school.
A better person than I’ll ever be.
I wish I could make it up to her or show her I’m grateful she saved me from the darkness I’d been trapped in. I’d failed her once. I wasn’t going to let it happen again.
We stood from the lunch table. I don’t know what it is that makes me look over my shoulder. I think it might be out of pure habit.
But I can also feel someone’s burning gaze in my back. The sensation is like hands running up my sides. They wrap their hands around my neck. Their fingertips dig into the nape of my skull.
Lianna stands with her arms crossed at the door of the cafeteria. The back door leads to my locker and it’s one of the few places where there isn’t a massive load of body traffic.
The frown pulls at her lips in a horrendous way. Her beautiful face turns into a grimace that would make a troll run for its money. She stares at me with furrowed brows. A chill runs down my spine as she curls her finger.
I gulp.
I look down at my tray and then at Liza. She’s talking to Riley about the English project I now have to do with Lianna. She doesn’t notice the exchange between Lianna and I or that Lianna is even here. She’d have a fit if she did.
I ignore the quirked finger and Lianna’s burning gaze. I follow Liza to the trashcans.
“That’s great. I’ll text you after math,” Liza says to Riley as she dumps her tray. “We can finish the outline at your house if you want.”
“Sure,” Riley says. She gives me the side eye. I’m surprised she gives me that much attention.
I’m the piece of gum stuck on the bottom of her show that is determined to stay. I raise a brow and glance behind me again.
Lianna is still at the door. She has her back pressed against the doors. Her face has turned from angry to furious. Her cheeks are flushed red. I doubt I have more than five minutes before she forces me out of the cafeteria herself.
I swallow down the fear bubbling up.
“Liza,” I say while dumping my untouched food. I pray she doesn’t hear me over the thumping of my tray against the side of the trashcan.
But she turns to me. She’s wearing a smile. I can only hope it lasts while I utter my next words.
“I forgot something in my locker. You go ahead of me.”
We both have social studies next period. I hoped I could smooth things over with her, but Lianna wants something from me.
Liza gives a small laugh and pats me on the shoulder. “What did you forget?”
I struggle to find the perfect excuse. Our books are kept in the classroom and we didn’t have homework.
“I…” She waits patiently. The words stumble out before I have the chance to think them over. “Pads. I’ve got to get pads.”
Liza and Riley bust out laughing.
“Okay, jeez.” Liza turns and grabs Riley’s arm. They disappear with the rest of the crowd, their voices drifting back to me about their shared project.
My eyes drop to the floor and I walk to where Lianna is waiting for me.
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