Cattie Get Your Gun

Chapter 1

I held my arms out to balance myself as I walked in a perfectly straight line along the bleacher while my best friend, Naomi Howard, continued to ramble about how we had gotten loaded up with so much homework that morning. I was almost sad when I reached the end of the bleacher because it meant I could no longer be preoccupied with something enough to not actually listen to her endless babbling. I spun around on one leg and fell into a sitting position on the bleacher before lying down and turning my head to face Naomi on the bleacher lower than me.

"We don't have that much," I told her, absently playing with a strand of my curly brown hair as I looked up at the sky. "Smithers gave us, like, nothing."

"Which is a shocker," Naomi mumbled under her breath, and then quickly looked at me as if she was afraid she had insulted me.

"He's my co-guardian, not biologically related to me."

My parents died in an explosion in our kitchen while I was at school when I was eleven, and my guardianship had been handed over to my Aunt Nora, a nurse, and a very good friend of the family, Leo Smithers. Leo also happened to be one of the English teachers at FoscoHigh School, where I attended school, so a frequent activity my classmates enjoyed participating in was "how much can we annoy Cattie until she gets Smithers to lay off on the homework"? It never worked, and my aunt always said it had something to do with being "stubborn" or some crazy thing like that.

"I know, I know," Naomi said with a dramatic sigh, clearly forgetting she was not, in fact, on stage at that very moment.

"If you're that stressed, take a mental health da-" I was beginning to say before a French fry suddenly fell from the sky to hit my cheek. "What the…?"

I sat up quickly and wiped the little bit of grease off my face left by the fry. I glanced up to the higher bleachers, spotting a group of a few junior boys giggling like freaking middle school girls who just got asked to a dance. One had bright red hair and he seemed to find hitting someone with a French fry the size of a golf pencil so hysterical that his face was now the color of his hair. "Something funny, Weasley?" I yelled up the bleachers before I realized, directing my comment at the redhead, who quickly pulled himself together. Naomi hissed my name behind me to try to quiet me, but I ignored her as I began climbing up the bleachers. Normally if something like this happened with someone I knew or even a stranger, I would laugh it off, because it was no big deal. There was something about those boys, though…

"I'm surprised the caf's staff even gave you guys food," I said once I had reached them, crossing my arms and leveling a glare with all three of them. "Didn't know we had opened up campus to apes."

"It was a French fry," a boy with blond hair and a beat up leather jacket said as he stood up, matching my pose and facial expression. "Unless you're so deathly allergic to potatoes that you're about to drop dead, I see no problem."

"We weren't even bothering you, that's the problem."

"The fry slipped out of our hands."

"And traveled twenty feet through the air on its own?"

"Hey, I don't know what they put in these things."

"Babe!" Everyone turned their heads to face the girl making her way carefully up the steps of the bleacher in her heels. Once she finally reached the group of boys, she looped her arm around the one trying to get smart with me. It seemed to take her a while to realize I was even standing there just a few feet in front of her. "Oh! Is she bothering you?"

The boy faked a smile that looked more like a grimace. "We were just having a lovely, civil conversation."

The blond girl looked me over with pursed lips, her heavily lined eyes practically screaming with jealousy. Jealous? Of me? Why? I mean I did have more comfortable shoes than she did, I suppose…"What was the conversation about?"