“Just let him off the hook,” Chase presses.
He’s still really trying to go to bat for Warren and get me to let him out of his volunteering shifts. I’ll never understand the grip that boy has over the other two.
“Look, I’m not forcing him to be there,” I say again for what seems like the millionth time. “If he doesn’t want to go, then he shouldn’t go. It’s not my fault whether or not he gets into trouble.”
“Yeah, but you could cover for him and then no one would know, and he wouldn’t have to get into any trouble at all.”
I stop in my tracks and glare at him.
“If you don’t let up and stop pestering me about this every single day, then I’m going to find a way to make Warren do more volunteer work than he already has to,” I say. “And you know all you have to do to get what you want is tell me why he needs to skip out so badly. Everyone else has to volunteer. Why shouldn’t he too?”
I feel a smidgen bad about it when I see Chase’s face drop. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Why then do you keep making a habit of jogging up to me and annoying me about Warren and his extreme aversion to volunteering? Anyone else would have dropped it by now.”
“What can I say,” Chase says with a smirk slowly spreading across his face. “I’m not used to letting up, I guess. Besides, I don’t jog up to you just to try to get you to let Warren off the hook. We talk about other stuff too.”
He’s right, we do.
We’ve engaged in a number of different chats and variations of small talk over the past few days on my way to class. I find most of them amusing—reminiscent of those first few weeks here at Ridgecrest, when he was actually friendly to me in class.
But he does find a way to always make the chats end with some sort of comment about Warren getting out of his volunteer work again, and I’m reminded of how that all turned sour so fast.
If I didn’t like talking to him so much, I would act more annoyed than I already do. It’s definitely odd how Chase seems to be making it his personal mission to spring Warren from his volunteer responsibilities though, and I wonder why he’s so concerned about it to begin with. Neither he nor Sterling seem to mind their volunteer assignments.
Not much, anyway.
It can’t all be just because Warren doesn’t like having to work with me. I’m still convinced that there’s something else going on, and the more all three of them refuse to tell me the reason, the more I’m convinced of this.
At this point, I’m barely even thinking about getting back at Warren anymore. I just want to know for my own curiosity.
If I’m being honest with myself, not knowing is kind of starting to eat me alive.
When I get to lunch today, I join Bridget and her friends at their ‘invite-only’ table. I expect to get a lot of condescending looks and eye rolling, with probably a few snide comments sprinkled around for extra effect, but instead they’re all surprisingly civil to me.
This isn’t the first time I’ve joined them. It also isn’t the first time I’ve made awkward eye contact with Alaska from across the room and mouthed a hasty, “sorry,” before sliding into a seat beside an increasingly annoyed looking Bridget.
Or maybe that’s just her face these days. Maybe I’m finally wearing her down.
“So, we’ve noticed that you’ve been spending a lot of time with the boys,” one of the girls says.
I can’t really remember her name; I think it might be Tammy or something. Honestly, a lot of these girls look the same to me. I wonder if that’s what they’re going for—all trying to look like slightly different versions of the same person. I don’t really see the point in being such a boring conformist.
I much prefer my unbuttoned blouses. At least then, I know what to expect when they decide to spit insults in my face again.
“What’s that all about?” she asks, prying further. I may be imagining it, but I swear she glances ever so briefly in Bridget’s direction, and then back to me.
“What do you mean?” I say, pretending like it’s no big deal. “I have volunteering with Warren, cross paths with Chase on campus sometimes, and just recently started talking with Sterling after I helped Bridget entertain him once when he had to wait on her to go finish an errand out of town.”
Beside me, Bridget stiffens like a board.
Last term, hell, last month these girls would have immediately followed suit—pretending to find interest in something else. They would have at least changed the subject.
But instead, today, I watch as the girl beside me subtly shifts her posture so that her elbow is on the table, ever so slightly boxing Bridget out of the conversation.
Subtle, but not so subtle.
I can see Bridget start to fume. It’s almost like one of those cartoons where the smoke starts to come out of someone’s ears and their breathing starts to sound like a locomotive.
I, in turn, feel a slight thrill bubble up inside me.
“Tell us all about it,” the girl presses on. “Like what is it that you and Warren do together when you are volunteering?”
“Uh, we don’t really work together,” I say, purposefully coy. “I mean, we’re both there but we do our own things.”
She seems underwhelmed by that answer, so tries again with one of the other boys.
“Do you ever go jogging with Chase?”
“No,” I say, tossing my hair over one shoulder, feigning disinterest. “I don’t jog.”
This just makes her sit up a little more excitedly. “No? You naughty thing,” she says, her imagination making up far more than I could ever attempt to insinuate. “What do you talk about with Sterling? Or you know … do you do any talking at all?”
This question rubs
