Falling From Grace (6 page)

“He said that her mother was some illegal immigrant or something, and that she probably died from some disease they have in those third world countries that had been dor-something…I don’t remember what it was he said, but she probably had it when she was pregnant, and now Grace might have it, too.
 
Isn’t that…
sad
?”
 

She pulled out a tube of gloss and started to swipe her lips with it, puckering and pouting, apparently gauging the level of coverage.
 
She smiled, and then frowned.
 
Too much gloss
—
a large amount had landed on her teeth; a nice, hot pink chunk.
 
Despite the rage that was boiling inside of me at the blatant lies that she was telling, I couldn’t help but smile a little at that.

Becca broke in then, her high-pitched voice causing me to grit my teeth.
 
“I thought her mom died in a car accident.
 
Some freakish explosion or something.
 
Hmm.
 
Learn something new every day.
 
Wait
—
she actually said she was in love with him?”

Erica nodded again, quickly wiping away the foreign pink spot on her teeth with some tissue she pulled out of her bag, and smirked.
 
“Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if she tried to attach herself to this new guy.
 
Did you see the way she looked at him?
 
Like a dog in heat; how pathetic.
 
If Graham doesn’t want her, what makes her think that this guy would give her the time of day?
 

“She probably just wants to be his friend, just to be able to say that she was friends with the two hottest guys in school.
 
Of course, from the way he was looking at me this morning, I don’t doubt I could take him away from her, too.
 
Not that she’d even be able to catch his attention.
 
Not in
those
clothes anyway.”

Take who away from me?
 
Was she talking about the gray-eyed god that had somehow gotten my heart beating again without so much as a word?
 
The one who I had absolutely embarrassed myself in front of?
 
The one who made my knees feel like they were made out of water?
 
Ugh…she was right.
 
I am pathetic.

“Did you hear his name, though?” the Becca person asked, leaning forward to inspect her makeup.
 
I saw her then.
 
Her hair was just as blonde as Erica’s, but with dark roots peeking through, and it was cut short in a sloping bob.
 
Her eyes were dark, like mine, and void of any real sincerity.
 
She had berry stained lips, and when she reached up to touch them, as if checking to see if the stain would rub off, I noticed her nails were painted the exact same shade.

“Uh-uh,” Erica responded, shaking her head while still watching me.
 
“I was too busy staring at his eyes when he told Graham.
 
Something about those eyes just makes me want to do whatever he wants.
 
Anyway, he’ll probably tell me in class.
 
I think we have sixth period theater together.
 
I took a peek at his schedule while he was talking to Graham.
 
Did you know he speaks with a British accent?”

“No way!
 
That’s hawt!”

Somewhere deep, under all of the rage and sadness that was pulling me under, I made a mental note to somehow develop a pill that made the word “
hawt
” impossible to utter by vapid blondes… especially the bottled variety.

“I know!
 
I can’t wait to hear his voice again.
 
It was like listening to melted honey,” Erica moaned, licking her gooey pink lips.

The one named Becca cackled.
 
A genuine cackle.
 
I half expected her skin to explode into bright green warts and a pointy black hat to magically appear on her head as she flew around the bathroom on her broomstick.
 
“You’re such a slut!
 
Please tell me, what does ‘
melted honey
’ sound like, Mrs. Shakespeare?”

Erica shrugged.
 
She looked at me once more.
 
“It sounds hot and slow and sweet…a lot like Graham when he’s kissing me.
 
Mmm…I wonder what the new guy kisses like.
 
If his voice gets me all hot, imagine what his lips are like!”
 
She turned her body sideways in the mirror, sucking in her stomach while examining her figure.
 
“I wonder if he’ll be like Graham.
 
Graham’s obsessed with making out—wants to do it all the time.
 
He especially likes kissing
this
.” She slapped her rear end on that last word in emphasis.

With a shrill peal of laughter, the two of them left, the resounding cackles bouncing off the walls long after they had gone and the door had closed.
 

Long after the bell had rung.
 

Long after I had stopped fighting the tears.

I entered my homeroom class five minutes before it was time to head off to first period, my face a puffy, blotchy mess.
 
I didn’t even bother to try and set myself to rights.
 
No one would notice me anyway.

Mr. Frey was, as I expected, asleep at his desk.
 
A piece of paper was perched carelessly on his face, rising and falling with each snore; it had the words “I’ll teach when I’m sober” written on it in red ink.
 
The raucous nature that is every homeroom occupied by Mr. Frey didn’t skip a beat when I walked in.
 
Like some amorphous being, it accepted me without a ripple of distortion.
 
I somehow found an empty desk and proceeded to wait until the bell rang to proceed to first period.
 
All around me, I could hear the laughter of friendship, the stories that were told filled with fond memories, and I felt my spirits grow heavier by the second.

With nothing left to do but wait, the thoughts that I had tried to avoid came barreling through my mind.
 
Graham was here, and he had lied to me.
 
Well, of course he had
lied
to me.
 
But to do it while trying to making it seem as though he was finally being honest was a double lie.
 
And to hear that Erica was now interested in this new guy…
 
Oh Graham.
 
He broke my heart for a girl that was already looking to replace him.
 
I felt the ashes in my chest begin to get soggy…as though I was now crying on the inside.

Just when I was sure that my body would explode from the seemingly endless internal flooding, the bell signaling the end of homeroom rang mercifully.
 
I was off to French class.
 
Madame Hidani would provide a respite from the tortuous reminiscing.
 
She knew how to keep a class in hand and focus our attention onto more important things.
 
Like vowels.

I walked into the familiar classroom, feeling a bit better as I saw the long list of tasks we had to complete by the end of today’s lesson.
 
No small talk allowed here.
 
It was straight business with Madame Hidani.
 
There would be no time to think.
 
No time to listen.
 
No time to feel.
 
It sounded like heaven.

A group of girls were gathered around a central figure at the front of the classroom, near the poster of Manet’s famous print, “
Le déjeuner sur l'herbe
”.
 
I didn’t spend any time paying attention to their giggling and chattering and took a seat in the back of the class; the same seat I had occupied last year; the same seat where I had helped Graham pass each and every single French test we had.
 
I shook my head again, forcing the thoughts about him out of my mind.
 
I wouldn’t be thinking about him for the next hour, I vowed to myself.

The bell rang, and the gaggle of girls at the front started to disperse.
 
I reached into my book bag and pulled out my binder.
 
A writing assignment had been placed up on the board, and Madame Hidani was doing her best to calm down the chatter so that we could focus and begin.
 
Well…so that everyone else could focus and begin.
 
I was ready.
 
More than ready to not have to think about Graham, my summer vacation, or blondes with perfect bodies and pink lip gloss on their teeth.

Or, at least I thought I was.

There on the blackboard, in clear chalky words was our assignment.
 
In French, we had to give a two page description of our summer break.

Even Madame Hidani had turned on me!

I groaned and quickly looked around to see if anyone had heard me.
 
I swallowed down a gulp of shock.
 
Rows and rows of heads were turned, facing me.
 
Was there not a single soul in the school who didn’t know what had happened?
 
I counted eighteen pairs of eyes all looking in my direction.
 
Eighteen
female
eyes.
 

Of course they were all female.
 
French was a romantic language, and no seventeen or eighteen-year-old boys were interested in romance.
 
They were interested in cars, and breasts, and breasts on cars.
 
And it was because of this bit of knowledge that I could say, quite honestly to myself, that it was no wonder that they were all staring…those eighteen pairs of eyes weren’t staring at me.
 
Of course not.
 
They were staring at
HIM
.

A warm, pulling sensation in my solar plexus forced me to turn my head towards my right.
 
The only seat next to me, the one that Graham had filled just one year ago
—
the one that had been empty when I walked in
—
was now occupied.
 

It was the gray-eyed god, and he was staring, his silver eyes locked on me.
 
I felt just as uncomfortable then as I had in the bathroom with Erica staring at me in the mirror.
 
Moreover, I felt embarrassed.
 
Could it be possible that I was feeling more self-conscious than I had when I thought that all of the eyes were on me?
 
I blushed just then, and knew that the answer was yes, I was.

“So we meet again,” his said to me softly, a hint of wry humor tingeing the bass in his voice.
 
His accent was something you’d only hear on television or the radio:
 
clean, smooth, very English.
 
And he smiled
—
an earth stopping, breath stopping, universe stopping smile.

I swallowed
—
it sounded loud enough to wake the dead.
 
It was definitely loud enough to startle me.
 
“Are you talking to me?” I croaked, another rush of heat flooding my cheeks as I heard the nervousness in my voice.

He nodded.
 
And then, impossibly, his smile grew.
 
“I don’t recall anyone else bumping into me and leaving before I could offer assistance.
 
Or, at the very least, introduce myself.”

I didn’t think that I was capable of blushing so often, in such a short period of time.
 
My heart wasn’t exactly in the best shape to be sending any unnecessary blood anywhere else but to my brain and my limbs
—
it already felt as though that was putting an extreme strain on my entire body
—
yet the blush came so easily, as if from some magical spring of embarrassment.
 
“I apologized for that.” I said quickly.
 
Too quickly.

“You sure did, Grace,” a girl I knew as Lacey Greene who was sitting directly in front of me snickered.
 
“But it was more like the sound that comes out of a constipated cow.”

As quickly as my cheeks had warmed by the rush of blood, they turned to ice by the loss.
 
I turned to look at her but she had eyes only for our new classmate, seizing the opportunity afforded to her by my reaction to her flippant comment.
 
I turned back to look at him.
 
Gone was his smile, replaced by a grim line and a disgusted glint in his eyes; it appeared that he agreed.
 
I
had
sounded like a constipated cow.

I turned my attention back to my paper.
 
I wrote my name down in the upper right hand corner, the date, and the period with some antiquated pencil that I found in the bottom of my bag.
 
I titled the assignment and started thinking of a way to tell Madame Hidani that my summer had been one big practical joke on me, and that the only friend I had in the world had been pitying me this whole time.
 

After a few minutes, I couldn’t see my paper anymore.
 
Tears
—
heavy and thick with grief
—
were blurring my view of just about everything.
 
But they did not fall.
 
Remarkably, they remained contained, merely teasing me with their weighted sting.
 
Surely they would not fall before a roomful of catty girls, most of whom had always hated my close friendship with Graham
,
would they?
 
Of course, it wasn’t really as close a friendship as everyone thought it was, so they couldn’t have wanted that, could they?
 
No.
 
I was sure that no one would have wanted to be made to look as foolish and gullible as I had.