❝I know it's hard for you to be friends with a girl without objectifying her - but lucky me, not everyone's you!❞
❝Oh yeah. 𝙁𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙨. The lady goth protest too much.❞
❝𝘿𝙤𝙩𝙝, Gavin. Doth.❞
→ From Van Zandt family disappointment and Grade 8...
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𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐅𝐈𝐑𝐒𝐓 𝐅𝐄𝐖 𝐃𝐀𝐘𝐒 after being called a stalker were hard, but months later, total strangers were still avoiding me.
Invisible was easy, thinking back on it. Invisible meant flying under the radar. Now I had the added benefit of sometimes being called a psycho and being forced to pair up with people in class who wouldn't say a word to me.
That word though — stalker — was beginning to haunt my nightmares. Dreams which used to feature a shadowy monster in the threshold of my room changed perspective after the first month. Suddenly, I was the monster in the doorway, staring down at a younger, frightened version of me.
The week after the rumors started, I was enlisted by JT's grandma to watch him after school, presumably after a certain incident involving surfing for porn at Toby's house. Bonus? It was for money, and I was not above bribery. The average laptop cost at least a grand and I was tired of sharing the "family" computer in the living room, where my mother could judge everything I was doing — from my terrible poetry to my equally terrible fan videos of my favorite shows.
The first day I came over, and I asked JT if he believed the rumors, he shrugged. "Audrey, you're a lot of things. Annoying. Weird. A terrible liar. A total klepto. A sore loser—"
"JT."
"But I can't picture you having a shrine to Spinner Mason in your closet."
"A what?"
"Oh, you didn't hear that one? Some kid in PE said it was made out of all of Spinner's chewed bubblegum and you dig it out of the trash." He laughed, and I swatted him with my backpack as he ran.
It was at that point JT started giving me daily updates on everything everyone thought I was doing and all the activities I avoided for fear of being perceived.
So, yeah, of course I knew about Sean Cameron coming back to town. It's not like we talked before, why would we have talked now? According to JT and Toby, he was in their year now.
I vaguely heard about the hormones running rampant with Toby's hopeless crush on Emma and whatever weird backstabby triangle was going on with Ashley, Paige, and Jimmy. The latter I was more familiar with because Ms. Kwan cast me as Friar Laurence.
For the most part, though, I was out of the loop and acting like it was fine. Wearing the same clothes, trying to make my mom happy, doing okay in my classes. A ghost walking the halls everyday, taking the same path to JT's house, and checking the lock on my front door before using my key to enter my own home.
Around the first week of December, I waited for JT to show up while at the steps of the school, earphones on and volume turned up as far as it could go.
That way, when I saw people whispering, it was drowned out by the lead singer of Korn screaming in my ears. I grew up with mostly rock music, my mother being a certified hair metal groupie in the 80s and all. She "dated" — and I use the term dated very loosely — musicians most of her life, giving me weird advice like...
