“Darn it, Jacky,” Drew told me as she was mingling hands with Thompson, “I won,”
Almost everyone in our school had been talking about me, even in the faculty. Students had been looking at me. I couldn’t read their faces. I don’t like it. It made feel awful, or am I paranoid?
“You’re just paranoid,” Lia told me after I narrated it, “Don’t think about it too much. Just ponder this: You, married--”
“I’m not yet married,” I insisted.
“Fine,” she said, “Engaged. There. You, engaged by a man--”
“He’s too young to be a man and too old to be a child,”
“By a guy with a lot of cash,” she finished in triumph.
Those made me feel worse and almost gave her a good punch. It looked like I’m a gold-digger. I heard one of my classmates, Abrina Harding, together with her friends Danica and Fritzie, giggled, then began whispering between each other, then more giggles, now pointing at me.
“How dare you … Lia!” Alice Drouft scowled, and then turned to me nicely. “I think you’re a hero.”
“You’re family’s hero,” Lilly agreed, so did everybody else. Well, some of them to be precise.
“OKAY, CLAASS!” our class adviser, Mrs. Saguire, declared. And that’s how our abrupt conversation ended. I waited for that subject to come back, but it didn’t. Instead, they started talking about what if they were on my place, on who could be my fiancé, on how he looks. My teacher warned us and vowed that what happened to me would be one of our deepest darkest secrets. Somehow, those made me feel lighter, like someone took the heavy burden inside me, but not on Abrina.
Three days after that …
“Miss Booke,” Mrs. Saguire called me, “You have been summoned,”
I stood, wondering who it would be.
My mind was still wandering from the lesson that was taught, words, numbers, chemical formulas and such. I keep on wondering which is which, but decided to push it all from my head. My hand reached the knob, when suddenly it banged open. Two dwarfish bodies dove on me. Both of their arms pinned my neck and chest down, my back slammed on the hard tiled floor.
“JACQUELINE!” the two squealed.
My breath huffed from my lungs. I could feel the whole classroom staring at me.
“Excuse me, kids,” I said with strands of hair on my mouth.
They both stood up. I regained my breath, rising as my hand brushed the hair on my face.
They were twins, boys. Both have faint coloured hair and deep green eyes. One of them had an earring on his left ear. I have never seen twins before, so I was fascinated.
“I’m Ray,” said one.
“I’m Rain,” the kid with an earring said.
“Are you really Jacqueline Booke?” Asked Ray.
“It’s the seventh door we’ve asked,” said Rain.
Does that mean I’m the seventh person they dove on?
“Why aren’t you wearing the ring?”
“What does it look like?”
“Have you met Atty. Frazier?”
“What kind of clothes did he wear?”
“Where do you live?”
“Why do you study here?”
