A Family Friend
ErinisMagic
Gwen had only been at this school for about a month, but she didn't like it much. It wasn't necessarily any worse than her old school, but it wasn't any better, either. At least at her old school, she still had her friends.
Her new friends weren't bad, though. Well, maybe “friends” was too strong a word; she didn't really know them that well, and she got the feeling that theirs was only a temporary sort of acquaintanceship. They got along fine during school hours, but she couldn't really see them hanging out a couple years down the road.
Take Jen, for example. Gwen had met her in the history class they shared. They got along well enough; they both loved fashion, and gossip magazines, and trashy reality TV shows. But beyond that, there wasn't much. Not enough to form a long lasting friendship. Still, she enjoyed hanging out with her, just chilling at lunch or exchanging snarky comments in class.
This particular class, they were being assigned a project. It was stupidly simple: make a presentation about whatever president you thought was the most influential. The teacher paired them up, to “lighten the load” or whatever. He sat at his desk, reading off the list of names. “Kate and Lisa. Jen and Daniel. Michelle and Gina. Gwen and David...”
Gwen stopped listening after that. David... which one was he again? She twisted around in her seat, scanning the room and trying to find a face to the name. A boy with reddish-brown hair caught her eye, flashing her a big smile. That would be him, her mind supplied. She'd never talked to him before; he seemed nice enough, though. Maybe a bit of a goody-two-shoes, but at least she wasn't getting stuck with one of the idiotic assholes who drew dicks on the desks in the back of the room.
The teacher spent the last fifteen minutes of class explaining what he expected from them in far more detail than necessary, not that Gwen was listening. She stuffed her books into her bag, ready to leave the moment the bell rang. She had lunch next, and damn was she ready for a break. Luckily, this teacher wasn't one of those horrendous “the bell doesn't dismiss you, I do” jerks, so she was out of her seat the second she heard the bell.
“So you got paired with David, huh?” Jen said as they left the room. “Tough luck.”
“Why?” Gwen was confused at the sympathy in her tone, but then a spark of excitement struck up inside her. “Is there something wrong with him?” She always loved a good piece of gossip.
“I don't know about wrong, per se; he's just weird. He doesn't really have any friends.”
So he was an outcast. There could be some drama there. “Why's that?”
Jen shrugged. “Probably because he spends too much time taking care of that kid of his.”
Gwen stopped dead in her tracks. “He has a kid?” She half-twisted around to try to catch a glimpse of him as he left the classroom. He'd always seemed so mild-mannered and polite, definitely not the type to have a baby so young.
Jen nodded, pulling her arm to get her moving again. “It was a whole big thing that happened freshman year. I'm kind of surprised you didn't hear about it already. Totally normal school year, nothing weird, nothing suspicious; we have a couple days off for Thanksgiving, and David comes back to school on Monday with a baby.”
“Whoa.” That was something she didn't see coming. “So who's the mother?”
“No one knows.”
“Seriously?”
“A bunch of kids have asked him, and I think Daniel even tried to steal his phone once to go through his texts, but he won't say. And trust me, we've tried to figure it out ourselves. No dice. There were, like, one or two upper classmen who were pregnant at the time, but they didn't have their kids until way later in the year.”
