Chapter One
Lunch. The toughest time of day for a new student. Although, I’ve gotten so good at navigating the lunch tables on my “first” day, that I can usually pick out really well where to sit and where not to sit.
This lunchroom was pretty easy. I could pick out almost instantly the popular girls, the jocks, the geeks, and the nerds. I walked past the popular girl table, hoping some of them would ask me to sit with them. That has happened before. But I dropped down on the popularity scale real quickly when I found out the totally hot guy I was making out with was the head cheerleader’s boyfriend. Hey, don’t beat on me, I didn’t know at the time. But when she caught us he said that I was the one who started it. Some catch, eh?
The popular girls ignored me. Like they usually did. Oh well, it was worth a shot. It was unlikely that the jocks would ask me to sit with them since the popular girls ignored me, so it was either the geeks or the nerds. If you’re stuck in that situation, definitely go with the nerds. Usually the geeks go off on a tangent blabbing about Lord of the Rings, comics, video games, and other random crap that you have absolutely no idea about. While the nerds also sometimes go off on a tangent, at least it’s something about school and it’s stuff you’ll have to learn anyway. Once I met a pretty cute guy nerd who was willing to tutor me. And right when things were really starting to roll, my parents just had to sell the house.
Oh. Oops. I forgot to mention what my parents do for a living, which is actually why I’m so experienced in matters concerning school lunch seating patterns. They flip houses. So basically what happens is, we move into a house, fix it, sell it to someone else, then we move somewhere else. As you can imagine, this is pretty inconvenient when school is concerned. I’ve begged and pleaded for my parents to homeschool me, but they say they’d rather have me go out and make friends rather than stay cooped up in the house all day. Whenever they give me that line I just want to scream at them, how am I supposed to make friends if we keep frigging moving all over the place?!
“Is anyone sitting here?” I asked, bringing my tray full of cafeteria food over to the nerd table. A girl looked up from her geometry book. Her dark blue eyes were hiding behind thick oval glasses and her black hair was cut in a short bob.
“Oh, nope,” she said and smiled.
I put on my best smile back and sat down, then took a quick glance around the table. A boy and another girl sat at the table. The boy looked up at me and frowned, but said nothing.
“What’s your name?” the black-haired girl asked.
“Madeline,” I said, “but I hate that name so call me Lainey.”
“Okay Lainey,” she said. “I’m Bethani.”
“I’m Lakisha,” said the other girl. She had long blonde hair tied up in a ponytail and sparkling light blue eyes. I wondered why she wasn’t with the popular group. She sure looked like she belonged there.
“Ralph,” the boy said.
“So are you new?” Bethani asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “From California.”
“California!” Lakisha said. “Is it sunny?”
“The part where I lived was,” I said.
“Lucky!” Lakisha laughed, looking out of the window. “It’s always kinda gloomy here.”
“I noticed,” I said, looking out after her. Sure enough the dark clouds were covering up the sun again, they same way they had this morning at the bus stop.
Ugh. I knew my parents were crazy when they said they wanted to buy a house here. Someone with their experience should know that nobody wants to live in a place that’s always gloomy. Unless they were evil monsters or something. But then again my parents don’t usually care who they’re selling to, as long as they pay big bucks for it.
“What house did you move into?” Lakisha asked me.
“Oh. The brown one on…um…Winchester Lane,” I said.
“Oh, that one. We all live near there, maybe we can walk back from school together,” Bethani said.
“Sure,” I said, picking at some of my lunch. It sure didn’t look very tasty. Very rarely cafeteria food is.
Ralph was eyeing me weirdly from across the table. Boy, was his stare creeping me out. It sent a chill down my spine. I ran my hand through my brown purple-streaked hair, trying to ignore it.
But it was practically impossible because every nerve in my body was screaming to get away from this guy.
As if listening to my instincts, the school bell rang. I quickly got up, said bye to everyone, and dashed off to my next class, occasionally looking back to make sure Ralph wasn’t stalking me.
