Let's Play a Game

Let's Play a Game (4)

"Did you hear about that Maxynn Chase girl?”

At the sound of this whispering voice, I nearly froze. I didn’t turn toward the voice; I continued to stare into my locker, pretending that I was still looking for a paper that I had found a few minutes before.

“Of course I heard about her,” another whispering voice said, and I still didn’t look away from the inside of my locker. “Who hasn’t? Everyone’s been talking about it.”

I nearly dropped my textbook, not expecting anyone to say something like this about me. Even though I had been at the school for a year, barely anyone knew who I was because I wanted to keep a low profile. Nothing ever went around school about me because barely anyone knew who I was.

“So do you think she actually did it?” one of the girls now asked the other, confusing me greatly.

“Totally,” the other girl answered now, and I felt my stomach lurch and I didn’t even know what they were talking about anymore. “It said on the news that they didn’t know what caused the fire. She totally had to set it herself. She probably got in a fight with her mom or something and decided to kill her.”

I did drop my text book now, causing the two girls that were talking about me to snap their heads in my direction. I tried to look tough, but I didn’t know if that was working out so well. I expected the girls to look scared for being caught talking about me, but scared was the last thing they were.

The two girls sneered at me, and I almost took a step back in surprise. One of them shouted, “Killer!” before both of them turned around and ran down the hall.

I stood there, in complete shock over what had just happened. Someone had just called me a killer. Someone had just accused me of killing my own mother. How could anyone be heartless enough to kill their own mother?

“You… alright?” I heard a new voice now ask, and I slowly turned to see Kate looking at me, her eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “Maxynn, are you alright? You look like you’re going to throw up.”

There was a huge possibility that I would. I seriously felt like I was going to cry over what those girls had said. There was no way I could have set that fire to our house. There was no way that I killed my mother.

“Did you hear?” I found myself asking my best friend, finding it hard to force the words to come out.

“Did I hear what?” she asked, her eyebrows furrowing at me even more.

“The rumors,” I swallowed, hoping to keep the bile that threatened to come up down my throat. “The rumors that I… I…”

Kate’s guilty face suddenly made its way on her face, so I knew the answer to my question. I knew that she had heard the rumors like everyone else had. Everyone really thought that I had set the fire and killed my mother.

“Aveline was talking about it in class today,” Kate answered me truthfully, and I couldn’t help but make a face at the mention of the horrible Aveline Rake. She had been out to get me ever since I had entered the school the year before, all because of my name. Before I had come to Corvus, she had been the only one in the school with a strange name that no one seemed to know how to pronounce at first.

She had also been one of the many girls that Zach had hooked up with, so she didn’t like me because he barely ever gave her the time of day while he continued to chase after me. She probably had the biggest crush on him out of everyone in the school, so it was obvious she had really bad taste.

“My name is pronounced like Adeline with a V instead of a D,” she would tell people whenever they got her name wrong, and she tried to act annoyed, but it was obvious that she was enjoying the attention she was getting for having such an unusual name.