kisses

°2°

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SHEHNAAZ

THE MOMENT the double doors clang shut behind me, I'm glancing over my shoulder, trying to spot Sidharth Shukla through the opaque glass. But all I can make out is his dark blond head, plus the heads of his other friends. Malcolm and Ezra.

They don't intimidate me like Sidharth does. Malcolm is a giant flirt with a distinctly wicked edge. Ezra is always looking for a laugh.

While Sidharth stands there and broods. It's his thing.

I don't like his thing.

I frown at my thoughts-that last one in particular seemed vaguely inappropriate, and I do not have thoughts like that

"Shehnaaz, will you sit with us today at lunch?" one of the girls asks me.

Oh. I get to thinking about Sidharth and I forget what's going on around

me. Like the fact that I have four freshmen currently following me everywhere I go.

Smiling faintly at the girl who asked me about lunch, I say, "I'm so sorry, but I have a meeting to attend today during lunch. Maybe another time?"

The disappointment they feel at my rejection is palpable, yet I smile through it. They all reluctantly nod their heads at the same time, before they send each other a look and slink away, never saying a word to me.

It's odd, having a fan club when I do nothing but simply...exist.

A shuddery exhale leaves me, and I head down the corridor. The pressure these girls unknowingly put on my shoulders to be perfect sometimes feels insurmountable. They have me up on such a high pedestal, it would take nothing to send me tumbling. I'd end up a disappointment to all, and that's the last thing I want. The last thing they'd want.

I have an image to uphold, and sometimes it feels...

Impossible.

It's a lot of responsibility, being a role model for so many females like me. Lost girls who come from rich families. Girls who just want to fit in and belong. To feel normal and have a typical high school experience.

Granted, we're at an exclusive private school that only the echelon of society attends so there's nothing normal about our life, upper but still. We try to make it as normal as we possibly can, because some of us suffer, just like everyone else. With self-esteem issues, our studies, the expectations put upon us by family and friends and teachers. We feel unseen, unknown.

I know I did.

Sometimes I still do.

That's my goal in life currently-to help others feel comfortable and maybe even find themselves. When I was younger, I used to think I might want to be a nurse, but my father talked me out of that profession by ranting on and on how nurses do a lot of hard work for nominal pay.

Nominal according to him. Harvey Gillis rich-he took over his father's real estate business when he was barely thirty and made it thrive, and now he's a billionaire. His only daughter becoming a nurse would be so beneath him and the Gill name.

It's something I can't even consider. It doesn't matter what I want. Whatever move I want to make, I need his permission first. I'm his only child, his only daughter, and I can't be trusted to always make the right decision.

I make my way toward my first period class, Honours English. Only twenty people are allowed in the class our senior year and, of course, Sidharth is in there. I've had a few classes with him since I started at Shukla Prep, but I've never had to sit by him or talk directly to him, which I prefer.