The Virgin Bet

4

Day 1 - 12:21 pm

Charlotte had ran away from that bus as fast as she could with her laptop in one arm. All she knew was that the guy who bullied her the first day back was now trying to talk to her, and she wanted no part of that. Why couldn't he just take the hint and leave her alone?

Today already sucked. She got a phone call this morning from her younger sister telling her that her mother just lost her job due to staffing cuts. That's the last thing she wanted to hear early in the morning when she had to work on her Intro To Psychology project. Cole, of course, had to make her day ten time worse by popping up. What the hell did he want anyways?

It made Charlotte shiver remembering what he did to embarrass her that day. Public humiliation wasn't enough to satisfy him, so he had other means of embarrassment planned in his head. Not only did he retaliate by dumping his tea over her head, but he also somehow snapped a picture and posted it on every dorm hall for everyone to see.

For three weeks straight, she was known as Tea Girl, and she was always asked the same stupid question, "Was it sweetened or unsweetened?"

Honestly, it was a stupid joke and a stupid prank, but it still got to her head. It was the verbal harassment, but of course she never spoke out against it because she didn't want to draw more attention to herself. So, she put up with the stupid names her peers called her and the humiliating photo for a few months. After a while, something else embarrassing happened and the spotlight moved on to a new kid.

Charlotte was a bit winded as she entered the towering library on campus. Books stocked all of the shelves from wall to wall. The wall of books was so high that they actually had a ladder on wheels that the students could push around to reach the top. This was her safe space, her happy place. Charlotte could spend hours on end dwelling into stories written from all different genres, from a wide range of authors that were as different as Fitzgerald and King.

She didn't need to read for fun though, although she would love to do that. Charlotte has an Intro to Psychology paper that was due in a couple weeks. Some called her a nerd for being on top of her assignments, but she didn't want to end up procrastinating like the rest of her peers.

Charlotte set down her laptop at a table before she went over to the ladder, rolling it over to the science and medicine wall of the library. She climbed the ladder to the top rung so she could reach the very top shelf. Reaching her arm out as far as she could, she could barely reach the book she needed. It was a book about different kinds of drugs, with all of their information, including side effects.

Her paper has to connect something to Psychology, that something being the student's choice. Charlotte was researching and coming up with a theory for the question: Can certain mental illnesses trace back to the usage or overdosage of drugs? She came up with the topic herself, and the situation intrigued her.

Not many of her peers who were currently taking the class even thought about what kind of connection they would make to Psychology. Half of them hadn't even looked at the assignment again since it was handed out. Not Charlotte though. She had the highest grade in her class, and she was determined to maintain it.

She sat down at the mahogany table she had set her laptop on before she dropped the heavy book down next to it. Charlotte opened up her laptop screen, and her paper immediately popped up. She had only shut the screen earlier on the bus because she worried that the jackass next to her would make her lose her work.

With a couple of clicks, Charlotte's hard work had been saved. She had already started the introduction to her paper, which explained how and why she believed that certain mental illnesses can be traced back to drug usage. It made a small smile come to her lips as she looked at her progress, and she hoped this paper would please her teacher enough so she could receive an A.