The Happiest Day

Prologue

Valentine's Day, 2002

Jasmine Hanson was an obligation—an inconvenient one, it seemed—to her mother. The woman had taken off when Jasmine was just two, and saw her sparsely throughout the year, when she felt she was obligated to.

"Some birthday outing. You couldn't even be bothered to be on time, Andrea, let alone call and let me know you were going to be late. And it's Thursday, I can't be out late, I have school tomorrow, unfortunately," she griped, glaring at the woman's framed portrait, before turning it face down.

It was the just the perfect icing on what had been another horrible day. Jessica Tanner, the most popular girl in the freshman class at Jasmine's high school, had publicly ridiculed her again for the birthday party her father had insisted she have a month ago, when it was actually relevant to Jasmine's life.

"Like I can help that nobody showed up except Allison. She's my only friend, and I tried to tell Dad that, but he wouldn't hear it. I knew this is what would happen," Jasmine sighed, flopping down on her bed.

Jessica and her crew made a habit of making Jasmine's school life hell; she'd been laughed at by the entire student body a week ago because she was not only a social pariah, but because her clothing had violated the dress code. Jasmine wrinkled her nose in memory of the incident, biting back a snarl.

"I wouldn't have violated the dress code if someone hadn't taken the shirt I had layered over my tank top. My shirt was missing, they stacked my gym locker, and then they rigged my real locker to spray me down with that nasty perfume Mrs. Delbecchio uses," she recounted, as glanced over at her desk.

Her poetry notebooks, the full ones, lay at the top right corner in a neat stack. They were full of terrible rhyming schemes and dark lines, but they were her salvation. It was the only way she could vent her frustrations privately. The one she was currently filling had taken up residence in her backpack, inside her Civics book, waiting on tonight's entry. The last one was one she'd written today, after she'd finished the Civics assignment—Civics was her class, the one thing she felt like she excelled at—and it was an uncharacteristically sappy one, about her crush, Trent Risika.

Trent was the epitome of what Jasmine considered her dream guy; with raven locks that fell just past his shoulders, intense blue eyes, and the brooding, mysterious, devil may care attitude, he seemed like he might know exactly what it felt like to be in her shoes. Jasmine had met Trent on her first day in Civics, when he'd been assigned the seat in front of hers. He was the only sophomore in the class, having opted for a geography course during his own Freshman year. Despite being an obvious loner, everyone seemed to like Trent. It was almost as though he fancied himself too good to hang with the rest of the school, unlike Jasmine, who was lucky that the one person who had befriended her upon her entrance into Savant High still wanted to associate with her.

It hadn't always been this way; during the first months of her high school career, Jasmine had been happy, she'd had friends, she'd been normal. She had no idea what she'd done to slight Jessica, but Jessica had gotten her revenge, by paying a popular senior boy to ask Jasmine out. Not knowing what was about to happen, she'd accepted his offer, and they had caught a movie before going to get coffee after. Jasmine thought the date had went well, and was surprised that she'd been so at ease on her very first outing with a boy; the next day, however, by the time she arrived at school, the halls had been wallpapered with posters bearing her eighth grade yearbook picture, along with the words "Jasmine Hanson puts out on the first date". And, of course, since Jessica's father was Dr. Tanner, the superintendent of their school district, nothing had been done about it. Naturally, Jasmine's friends, what few she had, were afraid of suffering the same fate by proxy. All of them, except Allison, had put plenty of distance between themselves and her.