New Girl in Town ('Nama Beach High Series #1)

First Chapter

I, Laura Duffy, made a decision on October 20th of my junior year. It was a decision that rocked my world.
After three days at Panama Beach High, it was obvious that I was essentially the biggest loser in Panama City, if not on the planet, and that nobody was ever going to speak to me. Period.
My decision: I couldn't spend another lunch period pretending I didn't CARE that I was being ignored. I knew kids believed being a loser was contagious; I believed it too. I wouldn't want to be friends with me either.
Decision: I was going to go to my locker, get a book, and eat my peanut-butter-and-sweet-pickle sandwich oblivious to all because what I was reading was so utterly stimulating...
Okay, so it was still pretending, but at least with a book in my face nobody would see my awkward expression. You know the one people get when they feel like a large second thumb? Eyes darting all over, looking for a place to light. Skin the color of your mother's nail polish. Smile plastered on in an attempt to look perfectly fine with this get-me-OUT-of here situation.
Minus the smile, in my case. I wasn't willing to show the entire student body of Panama Beach my mouth full of sparkling orthodontia. I think I was the only sixteen-year-old girl on record who was still in braces. And who didn't have significant breasts to speak of. And who took obsessive care of her contact lenses because she lived in fear that she'd lose them and have to wear her glasses. Glasses as thick as headlight covers.
I made the decision after I walked into the cafeteria that day and dawdled near the doorway, pretending to adjust my backpack — I was becoming the master pretender — and watching groups form at various tables. Granted, these were the people who didn't have cars or weren't friends with people who had cars or didn't have the guts to leave campus even though they weren't juniors or seniors and thus weren't allowed to. Otherwise, they'd be screaming up Highway 231 right now, headed for the mall so they could choke down a Wendy's hamburger while breathing in the delicious aroma of acrylic that wafted out of the nail salon. I'd have given anything to be exposing myself to that kind of damage.
Let's face it. I'd have given anything to be one of the FRESHMEN currently carrying their trays of nasty pizza to a table where obnoxious friends were waiting to snatch bites, be called retards, and laugh as if that were actually funny.
Isn't that what friendship is all about? I thought.
I couldn't really answer myself. Not that I hadn't had friends at one time. In Missouri, I'd had plenty. I mean, good grief, I'd been in six clubs and was an officer in every one of them. When anybody mentioned 'school choir,' my name usually came up in the next breath, because what DIDN'T I do in the choir program? And I was pretty much known for my grades. They were sort of legendary, actually. Before me, nobody had ever gotten an 'A' in Mr. Polk's Honors Junior English course. Not the first six weeks, anyway..
Yeah, people knew me back at Harry Truman High School. I always had somebody to sit with in the cafeteria. Until my parents ripped me away from it all and brought me here, where I could only WATCH a group of girls lean their heads together over a table until you couldn't tell one streaming mane of long, some-shade-ofblonde hair from the other, and then rear back whinnying in unison over some private — precious — popularity-provoking joke.
That was the actual instant when I made the decision. I couldn't do it another day, another minute. The only thing worse than looking like you were alone and awkward was crying over it for all to see.
I turned so fast my Skechers squealed on the linoleum as I headed for the lockers at a trot. I knew the SROs — those were the security officers but I hadn't figured out what those initials stood for yet; I just knew it wasn't 'Standing Room Only' — would write you up for running in the halls, and I personally didn't care at the moment. What I didn't know was that the locker area was strictly off-limits during the lunch period.
You'd think I would have figured it out the minute I rounded the corner and found myself in a completely deserted section of the school. The banks of lockers were eerily silent of the usual clanging doors and muffled swearing and tumbling-out books and subsequent swearing that was NOT so muffled. I was used to having to shove my way through gaps-between-people that your average mouse couldn't maneuver, but there was absolutely nobody there.
As relieved as I was to be out of the judging eyesight of people who were wondering who the outcast was, I felt a little creeped-out as I went for the next bank of lockers over, where mine was conveniently situated on the bottom of four. You get the leftovers when you don't check in until the second six weeks is already under way.
I should have gotten a clue from that creeped-out feeling and let the sudden attack of heebie-jeebies I was experiencing turn me right around and take me back.
To what? To the slap-in-the-face evidence that I was so lonely, I felt like I was physically dying?
I zoomed around the corner, as fast as the butterflies in my stomach would let me go, and almost ran head-on into two girls who obviously couldn't have cared less about the lockers-during-lunch taboo.
They were standing facing each other, bodies taut as if they were dueling marble statues. One of them was a white girl, the other an African-American. From there, all differences ended. They had the same hard bony frames, identical venomous looks in their eyes, and angry frozen faces. 'Let go, bitch! ' said one.
'You let go!' said the other. The white girl had the black girl by the ponytail. And the black girl had a vice grip on the white girl's loop earrings and was yanking off her ear lobes. I gasped audibly, which was the last thing I wanted to do because then they both whipped their faces around and looked at me.
I was witnessing my first cat fight; and I was so scared, I was sure my next move would be to pee on the floor.
'What are you lookin' at?' White Girl said. Her voice was reminiscent of gravel going through an aluminum funnel. An image of her smoking her second pack of the day flipped through my mind.
Before I could answer, Black Girl said, 'Don't you know you ain't supposed to be back here durin' lunch?'
The appropriate answer would have been, 'Don't you?'
But I simply shook my head. I was already hating myself for being such a wimp, but these two were at least a head taller than I was and looked as if they'd had a lot of practice at this fighting thing. Then, of course, there was the operative word, 'two': two of them and one of me. I didn't know how to fight ONE girl, much less a pair of them.
'No, I didn't know,' I said. 'I just moved here.'
'Well move on OUT,' African Girl said.
I was planning to. But the fear of going back to the cafeteria was carved more deeply into me than I'd thought, because these words came out of my mouth, all by themselves: 'I will. But I need to get into my locker first.'
'So do it,' Black Girl said. She gave me a sneer that should have sent me scurrying around the corner like the chicken-slash-rabbit I was.
But I shook my head and said, 'You're standing in front of my locker.'
Up until then, the only sound that had come out of White Girl was a lot of heavy breathing steaming from flared nostrils. But the second I took a timid step toward my locker, she let go of African Girl and grabbed ME by the front of my shirt. From someplace far away, I heard my peasant blouse rip, followed by the retreating footsteps of African Girl.
White Girl didn't appear to miss her. She was too busy slamming me up against the lockers and pinning me to them with her bony hands.