The cafeteria was packed to the brim with students. Many of them crowded in the lunch line while others filled the numerous tables, their chatter echoing throughout the room.
I clutched my paper bag in my hands. For the rest of the day, I’d kept to myself. I didn’t look at anybody, I didn’t talk to anybody, I didn’t try to make friends. And during the little ‘icebreakers’ my other teachers had, I stayed as hidden as possible.
Against my efforts, people still stared and whispered about me. They steered clear of me and ignored me. It was like I was a plague.
And it was happening again, in the scariest part of the school day. As I passed table after table, I noticed the surrounding students glance at me and whisper to their friends. Heads turned to look, like a wave following me.
I kept my gaze on my feet. I couldn’t act up again. All I wanted was to find somewhere to sit and eat alone.
I finally found an empty table near the corner of the cafeteria. Sighing, I took out my sandwich and water. Maybe I would go online. Maybe I could shut myself away from the world.
Why did I even care about the brothers’ opinions of me? Since when did I care about what the families thought of me? All I wanted was to not get beat up every day.
A shadow came over me and I looked up. A girl with chocolate brown hair tied in a French braid stood in front of me with her tray, smiling behind pink-rimmed glasses. “Hi there,” she said.
“Uh… hi.” I cleared my throat, my voice coming out squeaky. “Hi,” I said clearly.
“Is it alright if we sit here? My friend and I can’t find a table.” She jerked her head towards a girl behind her. The girl smiled and waved, also carrying a tray.
“Oh, uh… s-sure.” I motioned to the empty benches curving around the circular table. What else could I say, anyway?
“Thanks!” She waved to her friend and sat down. I returned to my lunch. Did these girls want to just sit here, or…?
“So, um…” The brunette chuckled awkwardly, nudging her glasses up her nose. “I think we’ve met before.”
I blinked. “We have?”
“Are you Diana Watson?”
I blinked again, surprised. “Um… yeah. How did you know?”
She brightened, her cheeks turning rosy with joy. “I knew it! I don’t think you’ll remember me, though… it’s been, like, 12 years.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Thelma Williams.”
Thelma… it sounded familiar.
“Thelma? From… Preschool?” A smile twitched on my lips.
She nodded excitedly. “Yes! You remember?”
“Yeah…” I nodded, looking at her with awe. “It’s a small world.” I couldn’t believe I even remembered her.
She glanced at the other girl. “This is my new friend, Kate. She’s in my Spanish class. Kate, I went to preschool with Diana.”
Kate shook my hand with a bright smile. “That’s c-cool.” She was a tall girl with dark brown skin and long, beautiful black hair that shone under the light.
“I can’t believe we found each other after so long! What are the odds?” Thelma twirled her school spaghetti around her fork.
“How did you recognize me after all this time?” I asked.
“Well, I have, like, a… photographic memory.” She tapped her head. “So I’m good at remembering a lot of stuff. I recognized the shape of your eyes, your jaw, the color of your hair.” She took a bite of her spaghetti. “My parents-” She stopped. “Excuse me.”
She raised her napkin to her mouth and leaned to the side, spitting out the spaghetti. She placed the napkin on the tray and continued. “Anyways, my parents had me advance a couple grades, but I was pretty lonely because I didn’t fit in with the older kids. So they let me be with people my age. But I’m gonna take a lot of AP’s, IB’s, Honors… not to brag, though, sorry.”
“You’re not.” I smiled at her. “That’s really impressive.”
She pushed her lunch tray away. “I remember the last time we saw each other. Remember when Celeste Zucker let you borrow her spring toy, and she didn’t let me because I was still three? She said it was only for four-year olds.”
I smiled as the memory vaguely blinked in my mind. “I… I think so… yeah. I gave it to you when she wasn’t looking.” I chuckled nostalgically and bit into my sandwich.
“Then, after that, you… left.” She stopped, turning red. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry or-”
“No, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
There was a pause.
“Um…” I smiled at Kate. “So… Kate?”
She nodded as she bit into her hamburger. “That’s right.” She stopped, her face contorting in disgust, and sputtered the meat onto her napkin. She quickly gulped down her juice box.
I winced. “I’m guessing school food isn’t that good?” I asked as I ate my own lunch. I mentally thanked Davis for packing it.
“It’s terrible,” said Thelma.
Kate pushed her tray away, calling the food a name under her breath. “So you know Th-Thelma? That’s p-pretty awesome. Why has it been so l-long?”
“I, uh… moved,” I said, taking a mental note of Kate’s stutter. I was initially worried that she’d heard people talk about me and got nervous.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“Her parents-” Thelma stopped. “Ugh. Again. I’m sorry, Diana.”
Well, people would find out soon enough, anyway. Thelma knew what really happened, so…
“It’s fine, Thelma. Um… my parents died in an accident that last day, so I had to go with my uncle and aunt. But… they were horrible, so I became a foster kid, and… yeah.”
“You’re a f-foster kid?” Kate asked curiously.
I nodded. “I’m staying with a family here.”
“Which family?” Thelma asked.
“Uh… the… Fields.”
“Oh. I don’t know them. But that’s interesting.”
“My mom actually h-helps foster kids. She d-donates to charities and s-stuff,” Kate commented.
“That’s nice.”
“So that means we can be besties again!” Thelma stretched out her hand and wiggled her fingers.
My eyes widened as a memory slammed into my mind’s eye. I gasped in delight and chuckled.
I wiggled my fingers against hers before interlocking them together. The handshake was a little clumsy, since I didn’t remember it all, but we managed to finish it. We clasped our hands together and shouted, “Bestest friends!”, throwing them in the air.
Maybe I could give school one more day… If I wanted to find out what was actually going on, it was my best bet.
~~~
Harry
I’ve never dreaded school as much as I have now.
Even worse, it turned out exactly like I expected. After third period, everywhere I looked, people were whispering and looking at me. I ignored it as best I could, but it was weighing down on me.
I found myself hiding in the library during lunch period. I couldn’t face the other juniors like this. My friends, guys from the team, anyone I knew would be asking me what was going on, and I did not want to talk about it. I had to silence my phone after so many messages flooded in.
The teachers were torturing me with these stupid icebreakers. Almost all my classes had one. People kept asking and joking about Diana and Amy. It was all I could do to not start a fight.
My ASL teacher signed, ‘Switch’, prompting the class to move to a different person to talk to. Thankfully, it was a small class. I sat with a redheaded girl next, waving, ‘Hello’. It was the quietest icebreaker I’d done so far.
The teacher signed ‘Start’, resetting the timer.
“Hi, my name is E-M-I-L-Y, what’s your name?” the girl signed.
“H-A-R-R-Y,” I spelled.
“Nice to meet you. I’m new here.”
That was a relief. Hopefully she wouldn’t have heard too much about my family yet.
“Welcome to S-U-M-M-I-T.” I subtly glanced at the clock behind her. It was 12:10— after this girl, class would be over. I was desperate for the day to end.
Maybe I could go online instead… never mind. I needed football, so I’d be here anyway.
I felt like Job. One bad thing after another. My sister got sick, then she passed, then my parents wanted to foster a strange kid, then we got Diana, now she was here…
She would definitely find out the truth. I wasn’t sure what to do. It was hard to tell her that she was being used by grieving parents. Just thinking about it made me feel so disgusted and ashamed. I didn’t understand why all this had to happen.
Maybe we were that mean to Amy. When we were little, we got along great, but as we got older, we fought more and more. It started to get more unhealthy, less like regular sibling rivalry and more like a divided family. Us against her.
She told us she didn’t want to be with us…
Emily signed the members of her family; her mom and her cat, Buckles. She then asked who my family was.
The bell rang, saving me. The teacher signed ‘Finish’, then wrote, ‘Continue Thursday. Happy first day, everyone!’
“Too bad,” Emily said aloud. “It was nice meeting you, Harry.”
“You, too.” I grabbed my bag and headed out before she could follow up on her question.
Next class was Psychology, normally my favorite. It was the career I wanted to follow. I wasn’t sure about going to Greenfield, but my ‘dream school’ was out of state and expensive. Maybe Waterford would have a good program…
An arm suddenly weighed down on my shoulders, startling me, and a familiar face smiled next to me. I groaned and shrugged him off. “What do you want, Lucas?”
“Nice to see you, too.”
“Whatever.”
He put his arm around me again. “How was your summer?”
I glared at him.
“What? I’m just asking.”
“How do you think it went, you idiot?” I pushed him away again.
“Oh… yeah. Sorry.” He shrugged. “Anyway… did you hear about this new girl?”
“What new girl?”
“Someone…” He pulled out his phone and opened a picture. “That looks pretty familiar.” He showed me. It was a sneak picture of Diana in the hallway.
“Oh.”
“Oh? So, who is she?”
“How should I know?” I tried to act clueless.
“Linda told me she saw you get on the bus with her.”
“Yeah, she’s… some girl.”
“So you don’t know her?”
What would I do? They saw us walking to the stop with her, and they’d see us going home with her. She probably already told others she was with us, anyway.
“And Sam told me your parents were going to get a foster kid,” Lucas added.
“He told you that?”
“Was it a secret?”
“… No, but-”
“Ah…” Lucas chuckled, patting my shoulder. “We’re making the connections here. I feel like a detective.”
I muttered an insulting name under my breath and walked faster, approaching my classroom. “Look, I don’t want to talk about this right now.”
“You’ll have to, eventually.” Lucas laughed as he turned away. I sighed and went into my class, slumping into a desk.
Looking up, I saw a girl staring at me, standing right next to me. “Um… hi?”
“Excuse me.” She went to the desk behind me.
Realizing I’d blocked her, I quickly turned. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you, I swear.”
“You’re good.”
She looked familiar… where did I see her?
“Good morning.” Our teacher entered. Everyone sat down. He wrote his name on the whiteboard and smiled at us. “Hello, everyone. For those of you that don’t know me, I’m Professor Gus.” He pointed at his name. “Those that took Psychology 1 or 2 last year might remember me.”
He wrote ‘Discussion’ below his name. “Now, since it’s the first day, all we’re going to do is have a little Discussion round so you can all get to know each other and reconnect with your old classmates. Every day, we’re going to have a 10-minute discussion round. After that, we’ll proceed with the class. So… two groups of…” He counted us. “One group of 7 and one of 6. I’ll join the smaller group.”
Everyone moved their desks into two circles. The familiar girl sat next to me. One of the seniors in my group started the conversation. “Okay. Hey, guys. Um… so I guess we’ll just say stuff about ourselves. I’m Grant Peterson, I’m a senior, and I’m going to Barlow U next year.” He motioned for the girl next to him to continue. The introductions soon reached me.
I shifted in my seat. “I’m Harry Field, I’m a junior. Um… I’m 17. And I like to play drums and football.” I looked at the girl.
“I’m Mildred Dawson. I’m a junior, too. I’m 17. And… I like hip-hop… and I used to go to Lawson High, but it’s the worst. So I’m here now.”
“I think we can all agree that Lawson’s the worst,” Grant chuckled. “We get new people from there all the time.”
Mom wanted to send Diana there… if it was that bad, where would she be better off? Maybe she could go to a different district? She would take a different bus and all.
I didn’t want Diana to suffer. I didn’t… hate her. I was mostly mad at my parents. We all were. But they wanted us all to ‘get along’, like we could just go back to normal. It wasn’t fair. Amy wasn’t a lost book or phone that could be replaced. Or a dead pet that could be replaced with a different one. She was a person. She was my baby sister.
When the period ended, everyone returned their desks to the way they were and left. I dropped my phone as I put on my bag. Mildred picked it up and gave it to me.
“Thanks.” I took the phone.
“You know, you looked familiar… are you on my bus, by any chance?” she asked.
“I… might be. I take the bus. I thought I saw you before.”
“Nice to meet you.” She flashed a smile.
“You too.” We started towards the door. “Hey, about Lawson… is it really that bad?”
She only nodded and laughed.
“How so?” I asked.
“The teachers are jerks, the people are worse. I can’t believe you haven’t heard of it. People send their ‘problematic kids’ to that school. I went there because it was closer and I could walk, but in the end, I was begging my parents to transfer me. I don’t have any friends to miss.”
“That’s crazy.” So, not a good place for Diana.
“Hopefully this school’s better?”
“It’s not Lawson.” I chuckled.
She giggled, her smile flashing again. She was really cute.