The Sister Of Popular

Chapter Two

I walked out of my mum's car, still angry with her. I hadn't talked to her pretty much all summer. I only even interacted with her for necessary sentences that were forced to exit my mouth. It wasn't even difficult - all I had to do was avoid her all the time and not get into any chatty conversations. This whole...school....thing was ridiculous. I was perfectly content at home in a lovely pleasant village, but no; I was forced into a busy city in a brand new place and expected to cope. I had proven to learn well at home – I didn’t want detentions ruining my life now.

"Thanks, Mum," Levi grinned confidently, stepping out of the car. Waiting for my brother to finish kissing my mum on the cheek, I rolled my eyes. Why didn't Levi get vaguely annoyed?! Sure, I was the twin that inherited the bad temper, but he should have at least contradicted what was going to happen! Didn’t he like home-school? Of course, he just always went with the flow.

"You nervous?" Levi grinned as we took a curved path towards the school.

"Tell me about it," I replied in a flat tone. "It's not exactly anxiety - it's more of...I don't know how to explain. It's just like, I don't know what to do here."

Levi nodded, understanding. Twin talk. I smiled back at him. Maybe it would be alright, I thought. We had each other. Nothing could go wrong when I had my twin brother, and I knew that Levi was thinking the same. His perfect, clean face was staring into the distance, slightly tanned. Golden streaks in his hair burst out, sunlight glimmering over the surface. Every girl would like him, that was for sure. He didn’t even need to worry about friends. Self-conscious of my own appearance, my fingers run through my sandy-blonde hair, repositioning a hair pin.

We turned a corner together, and saw an oversized and worn-down sign wedged between two overhanging trees. Pausing in our steps, we both looked up.

Dowerling Secondary School.

We stared at the gold engraved words for a moment, nervous. Would we be lost or find it easy to get around? Would we be clever or dumb? Would we be bored or having fun? Would we be popular or friendless? 

I reached into my schoolbag that hung over my shoulder, and dug out a map that had come in my school information pack. My form room was in 10E, one of the furthest away classrooms in the large school grounds. Dowerling Secondary admitted around five hundred students each year, which meant that the school was enormous. Even I knew that the grounds would be huge to accommodate over three thousand students. It would take you at least five minutes to walk from one end to the other, I guessed. The size of it was sort of...intimidating. Where we lived, there were only a good few amount of people our age, probably about a hundred or so.

"You're in 10E?" Levi asked, leaning over my shoulder and taking out his own map from his backpack.

"Yep," I said. "You?"

"10G," Levi groaned, and my smile faded. They put us in different forms?

"What?" I said in disbelief. "They can't split up siblings!”

Levi shrugged, while we walked closer and closer to the school, and took out the school prospectus, which he handily put in his backpack (unlike me, who threw it in the bin after ripping it up). "It seems that's what they're trying to do. Look: 'We strive to not only teach our students educational skills, we teach them social skills. We make an effort to place your child into a form where they can make unlimited friends, therefore people from the same school will often be split up.'"

I frowned and rolled my eyes. "So not fair."

"Yeah, but at least we'll see each other at breaks and stuff, and we probably will have a few lessons together because of GCSE options and stuff. So we won't be completely alone. And anyway, like they're saying, we'll probably make new friends." 

"Hey, look, there's our form-rooms." I pointed towards two adjacent doors. "We're, like, two seconds away from each other."

"Exactly." We walked into Levi's classroom first and saw a large crowd of teenagers sitting on tables, gossiping, laughing and vandalising the furniture.