I slump down in my seat and check out my classmates. They’re all so phony.
Except.
I sit up a little straighter when I catch sight of her. Unlike the rest of our classmates, who wear their coolness like a mask, this girl is beautifully uncool. She’s perched on the edge of her seat, so caught up in what Miss Donaghue is saying that she’s somehow managed to scratch her cheek with the wrong end of her pen, leaving a line of blue across it. She has frizzy brown hair bursting out of a thick blue elastic, no makeup, and she’s wearing a sweater that’s at least two sizes too big for her. And yet she’s stunning. She has these huge brown eyes and the softest features. She’s so painfully real that it almost hurts to look at her.
I take a last look at the picture of my Highland friends and then turn off my phone and stash it in my bag. I have a mission now, and it makes me feel better. Today, somehow, I will get to know this beautifully uncool girl.
Jessie
When people call you Lezzie, you learn to fear the whole locker-room experience. So when I saw gym on my schedule this morning, I broke out in a cold sweat.
If not for the long line snaking out of the guidance office, I’d have dropped that class faster than you could say Team sports give me hives. God bless the inefficiency of our guidance counselors, though, because in the kind of plot twist that just doesn’t happen to girls like me, my whole world changed inside the sweaty confines of the girls’ locker room.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
At the beginning of class, I was sitting on the gym floor feeling like the answer to one of those which-of-these-things-doesn’t-belong puzzles, when the coolest girl to ever walk through the doors of our school actually came and sat next to me. The whole school had been talking about Annie Miller all day. She moved here from the city, and she’s like some kind of exotic animal plunked into the middle of our boring lives. I’d first noticed her in English. She was dressed all in black, with thick eyeliner rimming her eyes, and I’d pegged her as a stoner before I got a good look at her. She defies categorization. Under all that black, she was luminous. With bright red hair that fell in shiny waves down her back and green eyes so bright they didn’t even look real, no one could possibly confuse her with a waste case.
In gym, Annie plopped down next to me and smiled like we were old buddies. “You’re in my English class, right?”
Let me just take a moment to marvel over the fact that Annie noticed me. I almost checked behind me to make sure she wasn’t talking to someone else.
“Y-yes. I think so. Miss Donaghue?”
Annie smiled so wide I could see her back teeth. “Isn’t she great?” She leaned toward me. “I was thinking we should sit together at lunch.”
I felt like I was going to explode right out of my skin. It was one of those moments that feel so good they’re almost painful. Sweat prickled my palms and my heart raced, but not in the bad I-think-I’m-going-to-die way. It was . . . pleasurable panic. I guess normal people would call that excitement.
We spent the rest of gym class earning detentions for our poor attitudes, and I didn’t even worry about getting into trouble, which is so not like me. It all started with Annie insisting that she was the worst gym student ever. I took one look at her athletic build and called her bluff. Hilarity ensued. We fell over ourselves trying to be the most uncoordinated, and we failed miserably at hiding our laughter from our overzealous teacher, who apparently thinks she’s training future Olympians rather than teaching gym to a bunch of apathetic teenagers.
By the time we headed into the locker room after class, I was so recklessly happy that I forgot to keep my head down and not attract attention. It was an oversight that did not go unpunished.
“Looks like Lezzie Longbottom has a girlfriend,” Emily Watson sang.
My heart stopped. I couldn’t breathe. Being humiliated was one thing, but having it happen in front of someone like Annie was unbearable.
“What did you say?”
I blinked in confusion. One second Annie was right beside me, and the next she was across the room, bearing down on Emily and her friends.
Emily patted Annie on the head like she was a little kid. “You’re new here, so you don’t know about our little Lezzie Longbottom yet.”
If I could have tunneled through the floor to escape the scene in front of me, I would have.
“Longbottom?” Annie asked, her hands on her hips. “Like, as in Harry Potter?”
Emily faltered, and Annie looked at me with an eyebrow raised. I nodded haltingly.
“Well,” Annie said with a shrug of her shoulders, “that sounds like a compliment to me.”
The girls burst out laughing.
“Maybe not to a bunch of bleached-blond illiterates like you, but to those of us who read, we know that Neville Longbottom was the real hero of Harry Potter.”
“Who are you calling illiterate?” Emily challenged.
“Well, if you’d actually read the book, you’d know that Neville is all about bravery and kindness and loyalty to his friends.” Annie walked over and looped her arm through mine. “I’m pretty proud to have a friend like that.”
“Girlfriend, you mean,” Emily snarled. “You’re obviously a lez just like her.”
Annie tossed her hair and blew Emily a kiss. “You wish, honey. You wish.”
Annie’s defense of me in the locker room was like battle armor, and I spent the rest of the morning feeling invincible. That is, right up until the moment when
