Page 7 of Enemies to Prom Dates
Ms. Hardgrove smiled. “Welcome everyone to your first day of junior year. Let’s make it a good one.”
Or at least an interesting one, I thought.
What was that saying? Something about being careful what you wished for.
2
Lunchroom
Fitz
Ilooked across the crowded lunchroom to where Beth and her friends were laughing hysterically about…something. Her mouth was open as she laughed, and her eyes did that squinting thing whenever she smiled.
It couldn’t be me, could it?
Spanish. So that had been her excuse for why she’d been bussing tables. Except, I wasn’t sure I bought it. No doubt when I’d first seen her at The Club in the typical white shirt, black pants, black tie uniform typical of the wait staff, it had stunned me.
She’d been lifting a tub of dirty plates that had clearly been too heavy for her to carry. She’d nearly dropped them all as she pushed through the kitchen door.
I remember craning my neck to see beyond the kitchen door, wondering if she’d actually managed it. Only to see her being shouted at by another bus boy. In Spanish. He’d been loud and angry enough that I’d felt the urge to get up and…help her?
That couldn’t have been right.
Then a manager had stepped in to break it up and I’d taken my seat without another thought about it.
How the hell was she going to fit in another class? There were only so many hours in a day. It’s not like she could take two languages at the same time. But if she took her free period and somehow moved that…
“You need to get over it.”
I glanced up and saw Ed, who was sitting across from me at the lunch table, frowning. It was just past one in the afternoon and I’d already finished the lunch our maid had packed for me hours ago. Now I was eating really bad school pizza, but there were no other options.
Only seniors were allowed to go off campus for lunch.
“What?” I asked, playing dumb.
“You’re obsessing and you know it. So Beth’s taking another language course? That has absolutely nothing to do with you.”
Ed Rochester was one of my best friends, yet he was utterly ignorant of the turmoil that lived inside of me. Beth taking another language course, which could possibly put her GPA over 4.0, had absolutelyeverythingto do with me.
Second best was simply not an option for me. Second best to Beth Bennet? Not happening.
“What if her GPA goes above a 4.0? I don’t know if I can get there,” I said. “I have zero room left in my schedule.”
“Oh God,” Heath, another member of my inner circle, moaned, sliding on the bench next to me with his own tray of crappy pizza. “Please tell me you’re not going to spend another year whining about Beth’s grade point average.”
I cuffed him on the back of the head. “You’ve got nerve. You complain about everything.”
“Yes,” Heath agreed. “Like this fucking shitty food. I swear to God this pizza has been sitting in the freezer since last year. But that’s the thing about me. I’m an equal opportunity whiner, while as you get singularly focused. It’s boring.”
“Sorry if my goal of earning Top Academic, thereby securing my admittance to an Ivy League college of my choice, is boring to you, Health.”
He sniffed. “You could bomb and you’re still going to get into Princeton, and you know it. While us Havenots have to count on scholarships. So please take your concern over getting into a good school and…shove it.”
“Stop calling yourself a Havenot, I hate that fucking name,” I said. “And you already have a scholarship waiting for you, so spare me.”
Although when it came to Heath Cliff, Havenot was technically true. Heath literally had nothing. He’d been raised by his junkie mother until she died of an overdose when he was ten. Then he spent some time in Thornfield Home, a foster home for kids that had been located on the edge of town until it was shut down a few years ago.
Something my mother made happen after a government study determined that foster kids were more apt to thrive when placed with individual families. Now he was living with the Earnshaws, an older wealthy couple, who my mother had reached out to to consider fostering.
