Prologue #2
Bracing herself for whatever mean things the new girl might say, Brinley was shocked when instead, the girl smiled at her.
“Hi. I’m Cypress. What’s your name?”
“Brinley.”
“Cool. Want to be friends?”
Brinley was shocked. She could only stare at the other girl in confusion.
“You’ve got the coolest hair! I just love it.
I tried to talk to some of the other girls, but they were stupid and told me they already had enough friends.
As if there’s some limit to the number of people you can be friends with.
My dad was in the military and we moved around a lot, but he’s not a soldier anymore so we just moved here for good.
I’ve gotten pretty great at figuring out who the nice people are, and who’re the mean ones in new schools.
And you look nice. So…want to be my best friend? ”
“Um…sure.”
“Awesome! What’s your favorite subject in school? Mine’s science. I’m going to study global warming. Figure out how to stop the glaciers from melting, or at least try to slow it down.”
Brinley was having a hard time wrapping her mind around the fact that this pretty girl wanted to be her friend. But Cypress didn’t seem to expect her to say anything, she talked enough for the both of them.
“I hope those girls aren’t your friends, because they’re talking bad about you. I wasn’t sure if you knew that or not.”
“I know.”
“Well, whatever. Like I said before, they’re stupid. All they want to do is talk about boys. Yuck! Do you like science?”
“Um…not really. I don’t really have a favorite subject.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.” She looked crestfallen. But then she smiled again. “That’s okay. I can help you with our science work. What are you good at?”
Brinley stared at her blankly. She wasn’t sure what she was good at. Not much. She said the first thing that came to mind.
“My sister does pageants. I’m good at making sure her dresses look good before she goes onstage.”
Cypress looked confused, but then she shrugged.
“Cool. Do we have assigned seats in the classroom? My mom was late dropping me off today because all our stuff was delivered this morning and she let me unpack my room because she knows I hate having everything in boxes, so I didn’t get to school before recess. ”
Brinley nodded at her.
“Is our teacher nice? Would he let me sit next to you? Do you sit in the front or back of the room?”
“Front.”
Cypress wrinkled her nose.
Not wanting to do anything that might make her very first friend reconsider choosing her as a best friend, Brinley said quickly, “But I bet if I offered to help you out, since you’re new and all, he’d let me move to wherever you want to sit.”
Cypress beamed. “Sweet!” She leaned against the wall next to Brinley and stared out at the kids running around the playground. “All right, tell me everything I need to know about everyone. Who the nice kids are and who are the ones to avoid.”
“Um…me. I’m the one you should be avoiding.” The words came out before she could think better of them.
“Why?”
Brinley shrugged. “Because I’m weird. Ugly.”
“What? No, you aren’t.”
The conversation felt unreal. This was the first time in Brinley’s life someone had told her that she wasn’t ugly.
She fell in love with this girl right then and there.
Not in a hand-holding kind of way, but in the way she felt about Callista…
well, how she felt about her before her sister started to realize how different they were.
“Seriously,” Cypress said, sounding put out. “You’ve got awesome curls in your hair, and those freckles are adorable. And your eyes…they’re huge! Like princess eyes. And their color’s like the green water at the beach in the Caribbean.”
Brinley was shocked. Princess eyes? No one had ever said anything like that to her before either.
“I’ve just got this boring brown hair and brown eyes. I’m a dime a dozen, I look like everyone else. Ick. You’re unique, Brinley, and if I didn’t already like you so much, I’d be jealous.”
Before Brinley could respond, the bell rang, indicating the end of recess.
Cypress linked her arm through Brinley’s. “Lead on, bestie. I wonder what we’re going to do for science today. Hopefully it won’t be a repeat of what I already learned in my old school.”
They walked arm in arm toward the door, and Brinley felt as if she was floating on air.
She had a friend. A best friend! She had no idea how long it would last, but she’d enjoy it while she could.
Because if there was one thing she’d learned over the years, it was that once people realized how ugly she was, they eventually distanced themselves. Made excuses not to be around her.
It had happened time and time again in the last few years of school. When any new kid realized just how much she was disliked by everyone else, how none of her classmates wanted to be around her, they decided she wasn’t worth the risk of befriending.
Cypress seemed pretty different. She was outgoing and talkative, and seemed to not care what anyone else thought.
And she liked Brinley’s hair. And freckles.
And thought she had princess eyes! It was too good to be true, but for the first time in years, Brinley allowed herself to hope that her new friend might be the exception to everyone else.
Junior Year
Brinley stood against the wall in the high school gym, trying not to fidget as she waited for her date to finish up in the restroom.
Tommy Goeller had asked her to the Homecoming dance, and it was a dream come true for Brinley.
She’d never been asked to a dance before.
Not once. Tommy was in the band and played the trumpet.
He was tall and good-looking, and she’d been shocked when he’d come up to her after school one day and asked her to the dance.
It was pathetic that she was a junior and hadn’t ever been on a date. Not surprising, but pathetic all the same. So she’d been excited to say yes and had looked forward to the night for weeks.
Even the fact that her sister had been asked to the high school dance, when she was only in seventh grade, wasn’t enough to get her down.
Cypress had come over and helped her do her hair, and she’d put on some makeup for the very first time, and the result actually wasn’t bad.
Her freckles were muted under the foundation.
Even if it felt as if she were wearing a mask, she didn’t mind putting up with it because she felt as if she wasn’t totally hideous.
Using what she’d learned from accompanying her mom and sister to so many beauty pageants, she’d picked a forest-green sheath dress that ended just above her knees.
Her normally frizzy hair was pulled back into an elaborate upsweep, and she wore a pair of heels that she had to practice walking in for a few days before the dance.
Tommy was thirty minutes late picking her up, and he’d driven them straight to the high school.
Her sister was going out for dinner first, and their mom had taken what seemed like hundreds of pictures of her and her date when he came to the house an hour before Tommy had arrived.
There weren’t any pictures taken of Brinley and her date, but that was all right because she didn’t like being in photos anyway.
But Cypress had taken a few of her, and of course, they’d taken a bunch of selfies as she was getting ready.
Cypress wasn’t attending the dance. She’d told Brinley in no uncertain terms that she still considered most boys “icky,” and she didn’t like anyone enough to suffer through an entire dance.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t attracted to guys; she was.
It was more that she was too focused on her studies because she wanted to get into a good college and major in atmospheric science.
That…and because of what had happened to her when she was young. Which wasn’t something Cypress talked about much.
Brinley smiled at people who looked her way as she stood next to the wall and did her best not to glance at her phone again to see how long Tommy had been gone. He’d told her that he needed to pee when they arrived, and she’d said she’d wait for him just inside the gym.
Just when she was starting to get worried, and began looking around for a teacher to go check on him, she finally spotted him walking into the gym with a big group of his friends. They were laughing, and he didn’t look around to find her.
In fact, he had his arm around a girl’s shoulders.
Brinley was confused. He’d asked her to the dance…why was he with someone else?
Then it hit her.
The whole thing was a joke.
Tommy never meant to actually hang out with her at the dance at all.
That being the case, she had no idea why he’d actually picked her up and gone through the trouble of this whole charade.
Cypress warned her. Had told her that she didn’t like Tommy and didn’t trust him. But Brinley had been too excited to listen, thrilled to finally be asked out by a boy. She didn’t take her friend’s warning to heart.
She wanted to slink out of the gym. Didn’t want to face the scorn and pity she knew the other kids probably felt for her. Then she thought about what Cypress would do. She was strong. Didn’t put up with shit from anyone. And she wanted to be more like her best friend.
Taking a deep breath, Brinley walked toward Tommy and the group he was with, mentally preparing to tell him off.
As she got close, she saw a couple of the boys handing Tommy some money.
“Never thought you’d go through with it! She looks better, but still gross. You win, bro. Good job.”
“I would’ve thrown up that dinner we had earlier, before heading to her place, if I actually had to go through the farce of taking her on an entire date.”
“Did you have to take pictures with her?”
Tommy laughed at the question as he pocketed the money his friends gave him. He smirked. “Nope. I made sure to get there late. Long after her little sister had left with her date.”
“Callista Deaton…now that’s one hot chick. I know she’s only in seventh grade, but I’d do her in a heartbeat,” one of the boys said.