The Beautiful Ones

7- I Am Not A Third Wheel

Alice

“Is it possible to be happy and repulsed at the same time?” Zoey asked with a teasing smile.

I grinned at her. “I suppose.”

“Oh my gosh,” She laughed as we walked down the hallway of the school towards our English class the next day. “You’re like, glowing or something.”

“Maybe.” I giggled. After I kissed Lance, we kissed for a really long time until Zoey interrupted us by knocking on the door and demand that I go into her room and tell her everything, and so I did. After that, we went to my house and spent the night there before coming to school this morning with my driver, Jarrod.

“Are you making your thingy public?” Zoey asked curiously.

“I assume so,” I told her. “I mean, he asked me to go to the garden party with him.” Zoey’s parents were having a “garden party” as a goodbye kind of thing for Lance, and last night, he called me once I was at my house with Zoey to ask me if I wanted to go with him, which is kind of a huge deal because it’s public and the party’s going to be covered by the press. Which means yes, our relationship will be covered by the press.

“Tomorrow?”

I nodded. “Yeah, tomorrow. The one at your house.”

“Our parents are going to have a fit.” Zoey said, rolling her eyes.

I shrugged. “So is my dad, but oh well, right? We’ll deal with it.”

“That’s the spirit.” Zoey laughed as we walked into our English class.

“You should get a date.” I chirped.

“Yeah, right.” Zoey scoffed. “Where?”

“There’s like, fifteen guys in this class.” I told her. “Ask one of them.”

She shook her head like I was crazy, and she had the right to, that idea was pretty ridiculous. “Never.”

I smirked at her. “Well, I have an idea then.”

Zoey sighed heavily right before the bell rang and class started. Mr. Gerald was our English teacher, and he was pretty nice but his homework was intense. At least, that’s what he told us yesterday. Which is fine, I suppose, I don’t really mind homework all too much.

“Today,” Mr. Gerald announced. “We’re going to partner up with somebody that’s not sitting beside you.”

“Oh, that’s just great.” I muttered, looking over at Zoey to see that she also wasn’t too happy about this already.

“Just have a conversation about your thoughts on Hamlet, you should have read that last year.” Mr. Gerald continued. “That’s all you’re doing today, so go ahead and get started, find a partner.”

I knew that me and Zoey could have been partners- being the Bowman and Chase girls, none of the teachers yelled at us for anything, but we didn’t like that. Like I said, getting the same schedule is really the only thing we abuse our power for. So we follow the rules, even if we didn’t have to or particularly want to in this case.

I also knew that we would have to do all the work in finding partners because everyone is too afraid to come up to us and ask to be our partners.

We shared an eye roll before standing up and scanning the room. A lot of people already had partners, since they weren’t sitting by all of their friends, and there were a few awkward people lingering around the room, waiting for somebody to come up to them.

“Oh, him. The guy you bumped into yesterday.” Zoey pointed to a blonde kid who was sitting alone. I didn’t see him yesterday, but I guess he’s in this class too.