Walking into school after that damn party… It was the worst and best day of my life. It was the worst day because everyone hated me. Including my own twin brother, Harry. What can I say? I was tired of my little brother always getting everything so easily. But that doesn’t justify what I did.
It was the best day because it was the day I met her.
I had managed to make it through the first half of school only getting angry glares from people but when I got to lunch, things just kind of went downhill. I tried sitting down at my usual table but my chair was ripped out from under me. “Hey, Mar-slut, what makes you think you can sit here?” One of Harry’s friends bark at me and the whole table erupts in laughter. I just look down at the ground and go to an empty table and sit down.
And there I sit, eating the horrible school lunch, occasionally adjusting my glasses. I kind of wanted to cry but I’m a senior boy, I would only get made fun of more. The worst part was I could feel his glare. I didn’t need to turn around to know that Harry was looking at me with just as much hatred as he stared at me that night. I tried to apologize, but he wouldn’t listen to me.
Before I knew it, I could feel my eyes misting up, so I quickly rubbed them with my eyes in a way that made it look like I had just gotten something in it.
When I was finished rubbing I jumped in shock at a girl sitting across from me, eating what looked like a tuna sandwich. I had never seen this girl before, ever. And trust me, I would remember if I’d seen this girl before. She had very dark hair and olive skin, maybe she was italian? Her eyes were brown and were wide, a bit like a deer caught in the headlights, but curved up just the tiniest bit in the corners, maybe she wasn’t Italian. I couldn’t quite tell. But she was beautiful. Her eyes were framed by dark thick lashes and eyeliner brought up into a cats eye. She had on just the tiniest bit of nude colored lip gloss. She appeared to be short in stature and very petite. Her dark, wavy hair was tied back into a ponytail with a yankees baseball cap over top of it, her ears sticking out just the tiniest bit.
She was wearing a white tank top, a black leather jacket and dark blue skinny jeans. I knew she was wearing a pair of white converse because she had her feet up on the table, like she was right at home.
“Umm…” I blink at her and she just continues to munch on her sandwich, her eyes focused her phone, which is in her free hand. She’s tapping wildly. “C-Can I help you?” I stutter a bit as I’m nervous that she’s here to be rude to me in some way.
She looks up as if just realizing that I was there and then looks down at her phone again, when her face distorts in anger, “Damn it, you made me screw up on Flappy Bird! I was about to beat my high score!” The girl groans, shoving her phone angrily into her pocket.
“Sorry?” It comes out more of a question because what the hell is a ‘Flappy Bird’?
The strange girl, who I could clearly tell was american now, as if the baseball cap wasn’t enough before, sets her tuna sandwich down before staring at me, “Why are you looking at me like that?” She asks.
I’m staring at her? Yeah, I guess I am. But she’s just so odd. “Uh, like what?”
“Like you’ve never seen a girl before, genius.” Well, she’s being kind of rude but not in the way I thought she would be so I’ll roll with it.
“Well, I don’t know if you’re aware, but the entire school kind of hates me right now, so I’m surprised that you decided to sit next to me.”
“Shit, the whole school? Damn, you must have done something pretty bad. You kill someone? Or, no, you robbed a bank. No, I’ve got it! You stole all of the student’s cats!” Her eyes get wide and a smirk plants itself on her face.
I can’t help but smile a bit at her comments, “You’re being sarcastic.” I point out.
“There you go, Sherlock. Are all Brits as smart as you?” I just chuckle a bit and shake my head, who is this girl? She continues speaking, “And I’m new here, so why should I give a shit what the rest of the school thinks about you? I don’t give a shit what they think about me.”
So that’s why I had never seen her before. Today must be her first day here. I push my glasses up on the bridge of my nose. “I’m Marcel Styles, by the way.”
The girl mimics me by pushing invisible glasses up her nose and then says in the nerdiest voice she could muster, “The pleasure of meeting you, Mr. Styles, is incalculable. My name is Diana. Diana Rivera.” I can’t help but laugh at her. This girl is just naturally whitty. My day before her had been complete shit but she managed to get me to not only smile but laugh at her somewhat offensive jokes.
“Those names don’t go together.” I point out and she rolls her eyes.
“Yeah well, that’s what happens when you have a filipino father and an American mother who had a thing for Princess Diana.” That answers my question about her heritage. She’s half filipino and half American.
“So why are you here in Holmes Chapel?” I ask, curiosity taking over.
Diana gets very quiet for a minute then speaks, “‘Winds in the East, Mist comin’ in, like something is brewin’, about to begin. Can’t put my finger on what lies in store, but I feel what’s to happen all happened before’.”
I stare at her before saying quietly, “Mary Poppins?”
She looks me in the eyes, “Yes Marshall, please try to keep up.”
Well that felt a lot like a challenge, “My name’s Marcel.”
Diana was about to reply when her eye catches something behind me, “Okay, who the f^ck is that kid who keeps staring at us? Like, what crawled up his ass and died?”
I snort and then look behind us, sure enough, there’s Harry staring over at us, an angry scowl sculptured onto his ‘flawless’ face. Did girls not realize that I had the exact same face as him? “Oh, uh, that’s my twin brother, Harry.” I turn back to her, waiting to see her stand up and go sit next to him, to fall under his spell, like everyone else.
But instead she rolls her eyes and sits back in her seat, “I hope you have a good sized shed at home because he is the biggest tool I have ever seen.” My jaw drops as I stare at her. Okay, seriously, where did this chick come from? No one ever saw Harry that way! Everyone thought he was the best, which is why they all hate me right now.
“Yeah, he’s not much of a brother.”
Her expression darkens a bit, “Hey, just because I dissed him, doesn’t mean you get to. He’s still your brother, and whether you two want to admit it, you need each other.”
“Whatever.” I brush her words off and go back eating my food. And eat food is what the both of us do for a few minutes, Diana pulling her phone back out and playing what I assumed was this ‘Flappy Bird’ game, once more. Though it was quiet, it wasn’t uncomfortable, there was a mutual understanding of ‘food before talk’.
I was almost done with an apple I had been eating when I looked up to see Karen Karlson making her way over to our table. She was here for one of three reasons, to be mean to me, to ‘rescue’ the new girls social life, or both.
“Hi!” She said cheerfully, her white lace top didn’t have anything underneath except a bra which is bright red. Ugh, and they called me Mar-slut. I can’t help the satisfaction I get when Diana doesn’t even look up from her phone. “So um, I noticed that you’re new here.” Still, her thumb tapped away on her phone and it looks like Karen has no idea what to do. “Ew, is that a tuna sandwich? Here, why don’t you come back to our table and Kyle can give you half of his cheese steak? Not to mention it’s much better company over there.” Ouch, that was directed towards me.
Finally, Diana puts her phone and her sandwich down and looks up at Karen. If looks could kill, Karen would have a knife right between her eyes. “For your information, kathy or whatever you name is, I like tuna, and I happen to be pescatarian And at least the company I’m keeping over here doesn’t dress like a complete whore and walk around like they’re Miss Universe or anything. So I suggest, that you scamper back to your brothel, and stay there.” My eyes widened, I had never heard anyone speak such mean things in such a nonchalant kind of way. Especially to Karen Karlson.
Speaking of whom, was standing there with her mouth on the floor. She didn’t even come up with a witty comeback to what Diana had said before slinking back to her table where immediately they began to whisper to one another.
I stare at Diana, who finishes her sandwich and goes back to her phone. “I hope you weren’t planning on having a social life or anything at this school because you can kiss that idea goodbye.” I tell her, almost chastisingly.
Diana only shrugs, “Who’d want to be friends with a girl like her? She might as well be that chick from Mean Girls.”
“What’s that?” I ask, Harry was the one to go watch movies, while I stayed in my room studying.
Diana’s mouth drops, “Oh Micheal, you have much to learn from me.”
“It’s Marcel.” I correct once more, but now I’m starting to see that she does it on purpose. I don’t really know what else to say to that so I change the subject, “So what does your church have to do with what you eat? I’ve never heard of that before.”
Her brows furrow, “What?”
“You said that you’re a pesca- presa-p-p…” I try to remember what the word was, but I was fairly sure it was a church.
To my surprise, Diana starts to laugh, not in a ‘I’m making fun of you’ way but she was just genuinely amused. “You’re thinking of Presbyterian, and yes that is a church but I’m catholic. I’m a pescatarian.” She clarifies then continues, “It means that the only meat I eat is fish and shellfish.”
“Oh.” I say quietly, then a millisecond later I’m laughing right along with her, “Oh!” My eyes squeeze shut with laughter and she just laughs right along with me. I open my eyes while she continues to chuckle and when I do I see people whispering and glancing over at our table, “They’re staring at us.” I state, my voice not masking the shame I felt.
Diana immediately stops laughing and looks around before shrugging, “Who cares?”
“You don’t?” I ask, confused as to how a girl could be this unconcerned about her social status. I know it’s what I thought about a good seventy percent of the time.
“Of coarse not. You think their opinions amount to a hill of beans in this world? There are children starving in Africa, hell, everywhere people are starving. Wars wage on around the planet, billions of pollutants are released into the atmosphere every day. I’ve got 99 problems and a teenagers opinion of me isn’t one of them.” She catches someone’s eye behind me and flips them the bird, then goes back to looking at me, “You shouldn’t care either. How many of these kids are you going to see after High School anyway?”
Holy crap, she’s right. I hadn’t ever thought of it that way. There were much bigger issues and yet here I was concerning myself everyday with what everyone thought about me. People who after this year, I would never see again! I couldn’t help but almost be jealous of Diana. How she could just brush things off so easily. It must be nice to not care what people say about you.
The lunch bell rings and we both stand up, grabbing our book bags, “Hey, um, thanks.” I say awkwardly, not really sure what I was thanking her for.
Diana gives me the softest smile I’ve seen from her and rolls her eyes playfully, “It’s no problem. See you later, Marcel.”
I watch as her ponytail disappears in the crowd and I stand there smiling like a fool. Not because this insanely gorgeous girl had sat across from me, not because she was one of the strangest, in a good way, people ever, and not because she chosen me over the populars.
I was smiling because she had called me Marcel.