OTHERBORN: GRANITE HIGH

EPISODE ONE

TABITHA

I was never sure if I liked girls or boys more. I guess I just have trouble deciding, not that I've experienced enough in my life yet to know for certain. But one thing I can say with confidence is that boys are riskier to date, especially when it comes to sex.

Take Donny Falko for instance. He thinks he deserves to be a big shot, and that's all he wants to be.

Now I'm convinced he's just big trouble.

And I ought to know. I've been in it plenty.

I hate how kids my age babble constantly about nonsense, always obsessed with who's the best looking or who is the top player on the team, as if that should count. And sometimes "player" has a whole other vibe, if you know what I mean.

The kind of player like Donny, who gets all the girls and loves himself for it. Maybe I'm not much different from him, all things considered, but I'm more of a jock than he is.

The Jock and the Jerk. Makes me chuckle.

And I know I'm an outcast round here, but it's ironic that the whole school thinks of me as the hick girl, the serious, straight-faced nerd from way out of Crestville.

And it's more than frustrating that I can't tell the truth.

But that's what I get for coming to town.

"You'll be at the zoo next week, won't you Tabitha?" Gracie and her sidekick stand in front of me, taunting, watching me fade.

"We all want you there," one whispers.

"I'm sure JJ would like it if you tagged along!" another shouts.

"I know your exquisite sense of balance will have him saving your ass, yet again," says Gracie with a sarcastic twitch of her eyebrow. "I'm sure he'll take pity on you." She's referring to when I dangled over the snake pit at the zoo, last week, a dumb shenanigan I'd had to be rescued from. Did I already say I was mostly naked during the event? No, I guess I didn't get to that part yet.

But to be clear, the whole dilemma started as me rescuing Donny, not him rescuing me! I had to swim.

And in the end we both had to be saved by real muscle men in their SAR uniforms. These guys were buff as Olympians, nothing like Donny, I'll say. Of course, that's not what he thinks. He still swears he'd beat the crap out of everyone from the navy to the marines.

Some people are just too rude to know what to do with. I mean Gracie right now—the rudest girl I know. I repeat, so rude that she has her own tier list of who she believes is the coolest in town and who is the lamest, bottom of the barrel, boring as hell.

When Gracie asks people to do things, they usually listen.

But the last thing I want is to go back to the zoo.

I guess she doesn't know Donny got fired.

The zoo is where Jonathan is. Jonathan Jones. JJ. Dreamboat and continuous topic of the cheerleading squad. He works there—has Donny's job. Donny, on the other hand, is not an employee at that facility anymore.

And you can trust me on this: I'll never go back, because I'd wind up volunteering for JJ next. I know how they work.

If I told Gracie why I must avoid the zoo at all costs, then I would be served on a platter as ridicule bait.

Plus, the whole squad would be involved in engineering my next catastrophe at that place, purely for laughs over my embarrassment when they trick me into some humiliating situation with Jonathan, like they did to stick me with Donny that day when the muscle men had to save our butts.