My friends, Anna and Dominic, were already waiting.
We’d been friends for years and had purposefully applied to the same school; even though they were a year older, we were in the same class.
Dominic was here on a football scholarship—tall and built like it.
He wore his blonde hair medium-length.
Anna was tall, thin, and wore glasses; she was dating Connor from the football team.
The two of them had been living together since the beginning of summer.
The guy from the bus walked past me, looking lost.
I stepped over to him, and my friends followed.
“Do you need help?” I asked.
The guy stopped and looked down at me, then glanced at my friends behind me.
“Are you a freshman?” Dom asked.
The guy nodded.
“I’m Dominic,” he added.
The guy just nodded back.
“This is Ginger and Anna.”
“Ginger?” the guy asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes,” I answered.
Anna glanced at the paper in the guy’s hand.
“Come on, we’ll walk you,” Anna said, taking the guy’s arm.
He didn’t seem to mind.
We walked down the hallway, pointing things out to him as we went.
“This is your classroom,” I said.
“You aren’t coming in?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“We’re juniors,” I said.
“But feel free to find us at lunch.”
“Hon,” a voice called out from behind us.
“Care to tell me why you’re cozying up to some clown?”
“Just making sure you don’t forget me,” Anna said, stepping toward black-haired Connor to engage in some quiet banter.
Connor and I weren’t particularly close, but then again, he wasn’t dating me.
Connor was tall too, though not as tall as Dom, and in my opinion, he mostly just loved himself.
“I’m sorry,” I told the guy.
“Anna and Connor like to be dramatic.” I laughed.
“What’s your name?”
“How can you be a junior?” he asked, ignoring the drama and my question.
“I skipped a grade in high school,” I said.
“I didn’t realize that one year was so obvious.”
“It isn’t.
But based on your height and your name, you look seventeen,” the guy grinned.
Dom laughed beside me.
“I can’t help either of those,” I said.
“We have to go.” We left the guy there.
I loved finance; I had a head for numbers, but not for literature or similar subjects.
Fortunately, no one here cared how bad my spelling was.
At lunch, Anna saw the guy sitting alone at a table, so we sat with him so he wouldn’t be lonely.
He just looked up from his food but didn’t say a word.
Anna took her usual start-of-the-year friend selfie.
The guy watched with interest, so we took one with him too, without asking.
“Are you having a good day?” I asked.
“Boring,” he replied.
“It’ll get better.” I smiled at him.
“What’s your name?” Anna asked him.
“Cas,” he replied curtly.
He clearly wasn’t in the mood to talk, so Dom brought up the internship topic, and the three of us started discussing it.
It wouldn’t be easy to be an intern while working and studying, but we all thought working at Barnaby & Sons was a great opportunity and decided to apply.
“Are you trying out for the football team?” Dom asked the guy to include him.
“Tryouts start today.”
“Do I look like someone who plays football?” the guy asked incredulously.
“You have the muscle for it,” Anna replied with a smile.
“If they surgically removed half my brain, I’d still be too smart for football.” The guy’s response was incredibly condescending.
I was speechless.
“Now I see why you’re having a bad day,” I remarked.
“Because you’re a real jerk.”
“I’m having a bad day because Mother Teresa thinks she needs to babysit me just because I handed her a book yesterday and asked her for a bus number today.
On top of that, she feels it’s her mission to save me from loneliness in a dead-boring school where everyone is freaking pathetic,” the guy spat.
“Even Mother Teresa couldn’t help you,” I snapped.
We stood up and left him there.
“I didn’t think he was such a prick,” Anna remarked.
We just nodded.
In the afternoon, as our last class ended, a beautiful, flame-red convertible waited in the parking lot with a pretty, middle-aged brunette in the driver’s seat.
The new guy walked out slowly and, in full view of everyone, got in beside her.
After a smile, she drove off immediately.
“Kept little prick,” Dominic remarked.