Thirteen
Eli
I woke up in my bed, head pounding and feeling more confused than ever. I remembered bits and pieces of the night before, but not all of it.
I remembered arriving at the party, drinking, seeing Benji, then ending up in the car with Javier. Now I was tucked into my bed safe and sound.
The first move I made was to grab my phone.
I opened it to find multiple texts and missed calls from both Ricky and Bella.
I must have ended up getting separated from them because all of their texts were asking if I was safe and alright.
I shot them both a quick text to let them know that I was okay and would call them later in the day.
I winced when the lights in the room abruptly flicked on. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the light, and when they did they revealed my siblings.
"You owe me twenty bucks, again." Emerson beamed as her twin sighed in defeat.
I ignored their obvious attempt to rile me up and I shut my eyes.
"We thought you got caught," Easton said, his voice much closer to me than before.
My brows furrowed. “Caught by who?”
“The cops. What, were you too drunk to remember?”
That caused my eyes to open. Cops? The police busted the party? I didn't remember any of that. He was right, I was too fucked to recall that huge event of the night.
I wanted answers to the foggy parts of the party, and luckily I had two eyewitnesses standing before me. "Do either of you know how I got home?"
"We don't keep tabs on you, kid." Emerson said ‘kid’ as if I was eight years younger than her. I didn’t fully expect her to remember what I was doing at the party because I was pretty sure she was drunker than I was.
Unfortunately, I remembered that part of the night.
The image of her dancing on the countertop was permanently ingrained in my brain.
"I saw you get in the car with that guy," Easton said, taking his shirt off and throwing it on the ground. He went into his drawer and began to look for another shit. "Y'know, your mortal enemy, or whatever. The guy that's better than you at everything."
"Javier?" I asked. My brother nodded. "He isn't better than me at everything."
"We both know that that isn’t true."
I bit my tongue and held back my response. Easton was trying to find some way to get under my skin, like always. I didn’t have the energy to be angry. I rolled over on my side and tried to go back to sleep. I had only been awake for two minutes and I was already over it.
It was then that I decided to agree to participate in the competition.
I had things I needed to prove, and Thinkfast would help me do just that.
I just needed a guardian's signature. Luckily, I had mastered the art of forging my aunt's signature years ago so that wouldn’t be an issue.
My rival and I were officially going to be working alongside each other.
Speaking of Javier, this was the third time Javier had helped me out for absolutely nothing in return. I couldn't remember the majority of the night, but it was clear that he was there for me.
I still wanted to hate him. I wanted to blame him and be angry at him for constantly being better than me, like my brother had so kindly reminded me of.
It was getting hard to do that, however.
I was beginning to realize that he might actually be a decent person.
I was starting to see that my hatred may have been misplaced.
Was that supposed to mean that I should start being kinder to him?
Well, at least somewhat kinder than I had been before.
Maybe I'd find him in the hallway and not give him the evil eye.
Maybe I'd stop cursing under my breath every time he came near me.
Maybe I'd put my own ego aside and be cordial with him, because each passing day he kept being nice and I continued being an asshole, I began to feel more and more like a bad person.
I hated Javier Cortez. I hated that he was smarter than me. I hated when he teased me. I hated that stupidly smug smirk he wore when he knew he was right. I hated how everyone else loved him just because he was himself.
But those were also the reasons I wanted to be around him.
The next day at school I wanted to thank him for what he did for me.
I couldn't remember what exactly it was that he did but based on what I could remember I needed to give him my gratitude. I was also in a pretty good mood that day, so telling him ‘thanks’ wasn’t as difficult of a task as it would have normally been.
He was standing in the hallway with his girlfriend, Paxton, and two other irrelevant people. They all stared as I approached, but the irrelevant two were shooting daggers with their eyes at me. It was like they were staring into my soul. It was hella creepy, actually.
"Uh, hey," I greeted him awkwardly as I fidgeted with my fingers.
One of the nobodies scrunch their nose in annoyance. "What do you want?"
I didn't know why he was talking to me, I didn't even know his name.
I had seen him hanging around Javier and Paxton a couple of times before, but he was never relevant to me.
His face was forgettable. He was one of the other people who I had never interacted with at all during our school years, yet he still disliked me.
Honestly, I got a small dose of serotonin from having people dislike me. It gave the feeling of importance and it was empowering. I didn’t even know their names, but they knew all about me. They were obsessed, and I got to live in their heads. That was what I told myself, anyway.
"Hey now, don't be mean to Baby Richarson," Paxton said, his tone serious but had a slight playful tone to it. There he went again with that fuck-ass nickname.
"What do you want, Elias?" Diane asked with a roll of her eyes. She put her hands on her hips and eyed me with a look that told me I was the last person on planet earth that she wanted to lay her eyes on.
My first instinct was to say something rude and snarky, but as I had said before, I was in a surprisingly good mood that morning. So, I took a deep breath and remained composed.
"To talk to Javier," I said simply.
Diane scoffed. "Yeah, well he doesn't—"
"Let's go talk then," Javier said, but I noticed was not making his normal eye contact with me. I couldn’t tell if it was me reading too much into it, but it seemed like he was avoiding it. For some reason, that put an uneasy feeling in my stomach.
Diane’s head recoiled when she heard Javier’s compliance. Her lips curled as she whispered something angrily into his ear, and he responded calmly. She then let out a heavy sigh and went back to eating her lunch.
Javier led the way as we walked into the hallway and to a corner where no other students were.
I stuffed my hands in my pockets and kicked my right leg back and forth.
Dammit, I was being awkward all of a sudden and I couldn’t figure out why.
My rival wasn't looking directly at me. Instead, he was taking notice of every nook and cranny of our school hallways as if he hadn’t been looking at these same blue walls since freshman year.
I broke the long and uncomfortable silence. "Uh, I just wanted to say thanks. For what you did at the party.
"It's no big deal," Javier mumbled boredly.
Silence fell between us once again, and it felt odd. It was not like the other times. This time felt tense.
"I'm doing the academic competition… thingy," I blurted to fill the silence. "I'm turning in the paper today."
He hummed in response, meanwhile I was growing frustrated.
His stupid eyes weren’t meeting mine and it was making me want to yell.
I wanted him to look at me the way he had been just a few days ago—scratch that, the way he had been since we first met.
I wanted to feel the intensity of his gaze, but he wasn’t giving that to me.
"Did I do something wrong?" I blurted accidentally.
Javier’s eyes met mine. He was finally looking at me, but not in the way I wanted him to.
He wasn’t looking at me with the usual smugness and smirk, the mannerisms that showed me he noticed me enough to treat me that way.
No, right now he had a blank expression on his face.
His eyes didn’t have the usual glint to them and he wasn’t as focused as usual.
"No?" his statement came out as a question. "What could you have done?"
"Well, I don’t know. You're acting weird."
Javier scoffed as he averted his eyes from me. "I’m not acting any differently than I normally do."
I watched as his eyes focused on something behind me. Out of curiosity, I turned around. It was his girlfriend standing by a locker with her eyes narrowed and arms folded. Her anger was directed toward me, I got that much when she sized me up. Ah, just another person obsessed with me.
My shoulders slumped. "Okay.”
There was no reason for me to be upset. Javier and I were not friends in any way, shape, or form, so I shouldn’t have been upset by the slight change in his attitude. He probably wasn’t even acting strangely, I was simply reading too much into it. Or maybe he was just having a bad day.
The only reason we had to be around each other was for the competition. The first round of Thinkfast was coming up and we needed to practice together to better our chances of winning. The idea of studying with Javier suddenly didn’t sound so unappealing to me.
I cleared my throat. "So, I was thinking that we should probably meet up and study together."
Javier immediately shook his head. "That isn't necessary."
"It is necessary, do you want to lose? I don’t think you do,”
"If we lose it'll be your fault, not mine," Javier said smugly.
I was left dumbfounded as he walked off. He was gone before I even got the chance to think of something to retort. The one time I try to be nice to the guy and he blows me off? That was just a reminder of exactly what our relationship was.