In the Middle of Nowhere (Willow's Journey #1)

by Julie Ann Knudsen

  I zipped up my North Face as I left the warmth of my mom’s car and headed for the ferry. It was frigid outside and I was getting sick and tired of having to take a boat to school everyday. Plus, every time I took a deep breath, it felt as though tiny icicles were forming on the inside of my lungs. Normally I liked spending time outdoors, but I was feeling a little too close to nature and could not imagine spending the rest of my life on the frozen island.

  I grabbed a seat closest to the heater and stuck my hands inside my pockets. I spotted Taylor and Erica across the ferry and as soon as they saw me, they ran over. Taylor sat on one side of me, Erica the other.

  “Hey! Why didn’t you call me yesterday? I texted you like a million times,” Erica demanded.

  “Yeah. Me, too,” Taylor added.

  “I was busy. Plus, I had a ton of homework to do.”

  I turned to Erica. “What was so urgent?”

  Erica looked at Taylor, smiled wryly and then looked back at me. “What the hell happened Saturday night?” she shouted.

  “Shhh,” I said and looked around. “What do you mean, what happened?”

  Erica lowered her voice. “I mean what happened to you? At Rocky’s?”

  I was shocked. How did Erica and Taylor find out about the party when I never ended up telling either of them? I had thought about giving them a detailed report at the beginning of the night, but decided against it once I thought about how stupidly I acted. I was way too embarrassed to tell them how Rocky had fondled me and how I hurled immediately afterward.

  I became defensive. “How did you guys find out?”

  “Josh is my neighbor and I’m friends with him on MyWeb,” Taylor said to me.

  “So?”

  “So!” Erica took over. “Taylor and I looked at the pictures Josh posted from Saturday and saw you, smack dab in the middle of all the fun!”

  I was truly puzzled. “I don’t understand. I checked out the pictures, too, but I didn’t see myself in any.”

  “I’m telling you, you were in them. How else would we have known?” Erica sounded very convincing.

  Taylor tugged on the sleeve of my jacket as if to bring me back to reality. “Do you fully comprehend that you went to a party at a house belonging to Rocky, “The God?” Do you?!”

  Taylor’s normally pale face was turning a shocking shade of red.

  “Details, damn it. We want all the details, don’t we, Tay?”

  Taylor nodded in agreement.

  “Calm down, you two,” I said.

  As much as I considered Erica and Taylor to be my friends, I didn’t fully trust them either. The two of them made gossiping seem like a sport. Regardless, I felt like I had no choice but to tell them what happened, or at least part of it.

  “Well,” I started. “I was home, bored out of my mind, when Tessa called me and asked me if—“

  As expected, Erica stopped me dead in my tracks. “Who called you?”

  “Tessa. Tessa Anderson.”

  “Yeah, I know which Tessa. There’s only one at our school.” Erica was not amused. “Why did she call you?”

  I shrugged. “Don’t know. Just did. Anyway she asked me if I wanted to go to a party over at Rocky’s house and I told her—“

  Taylor interrupted this time. “So Tessa just picked up the phone, dialed a random number and got you on the other end?”

  I closed my eyes. I was running out of patience. “Kind of. Who cares why she called me or how I got there. I just did.”

  I could tell that the girls were not happy with my evasiveness and I understood why. I never told them that I hung out with Tessa in the past. Never. Even so, I continued.

  “We got there, I had too much to drink, don’t remember much and stayed in bed with a hangover all day yesterday.”

  “Yeah, but what about Rocky? He was there, right?”

  Taylor was annoying me. “Yes, he was there, Taylor. The party was at his house.”

  Erica tried to sound casual. “Did you hang with him at all?”

  I shook my head and lied. “Not really. He was busy hangin’ with his usual posse.”

  “So, what’d you do then?” Taylor wanted to know.

  I was forceful. “I told you. I don’t remember!”

  Taylor recoiled from my nastiness. I felt badly and softened. “I should’ve just stayed home that night and avoided the whole situation. That way I wouldn’t have felt like I had been run over by a tractor trailer and wouldn’t have wasted my whole entire Sunday trying to recuperate.”

  I hoped my last answer would stop the two of them from asking any more questions because, this time, it was the absolute truth.

  • • •

  I was never more excited to climb the steep steps and enter the front doors of Portland High. It allowed me to get lost in the hallways and escape from Taylor and Erica and their bombardment of questions.

  As I headed to my locker, I saw Rocky walking toward me in the opposite direction. For once, he was alone. I stopped at my locker, turned around and faced him as he walked by. Our eyes met. I smiled my prettiest smile. I waited for his. Instead he stared at me, quizzically, as if to say, “Do I know you?” Embarrassed, I whipped myself around so my back was to him as he finished waltzing by.

  I was so humiliated! Rocky totally didn’t remember me and basically looked right through me. How could he forget me, I wondered? Aside from the fact that I didn’t leave Tessa’s side all night long, except for when I passed out drunk in one of his hundreds of bedrooms, he tried to feel me up, right before I threw up in his mom’s matching, striped red and gold garbage can.

  It was probably for the best anyway, I decided. I didn’t want to be known as the naïve girl with the pretty eyes who couldn’t hold her liquor.

  I grabbed my books and headed to homeroom and seriously tried to forget that the previous weekend ever happened. It seemed as if Rocky already had.

  • • •

  The first part of Monday flew by in a blur. I still didn’t feel one hundred percent. I wasn’t sure if I was coming down with something or if I was still hungover. Could a person suffer from a hangover for two straight days, I wondered?

  Besides suffering physically, I was preoccupied mentally. I couldn’t get Michael out of my head. Why did he always inconveniently pop back into my life right after I successfully forgot about him?

  I tried to visualize Michael and his facial expressions when we had spoken on the phone Sunday. I had barely ever been with him in person. I was beginning to forget what he even looked like. Michael’s face was fading fast from my memory the same way my dad’s did soon after he died. It was an overwhelmingly sad feeling.

  I had a tough decision to make. I could bring Michael’s face back into my mind by meeting him at his house on Saturday, or I could tell him “no” and let it continue to fade forever.

  I was so confused. Michael had said that he would tell me all about himself if we met up. Did that include his mysterious illness and lack of school attendance? I was sick of playing games with him and wanted the truth, once and for all, even if I ended up walking away and saying good-bye to him for good.

  I unloaded my books, grabbed my student ID card and slammed my locker shut. I had to think long and hard about what I was going to do. I was hoping that I’d be able to think straight during lunch and that Taylor and Erica would be done grilling me about my infamous night at Rocky’s. The two of them didn’t even know the half of it. I could just imagine how quickly their tongues would start wagging if they knew I had spent the entire night there. As I walked toward the lunchroom, I said a quick, silent prayer, hoping they’d never find out.

  • • •

  I slid my slice of cheese pizza onto the table and took a seat next to Taylor. I couldn’t wait to eat. All of a sudden, I was starving.

  “Hi guys,” I said to them both as I unscrewed the top to my water bottle.

  “Hey,” Erica replied, so unenthusiastically, as if she had just lost her best friend. I knew tha
t wasn’t the case because Taylor was sitting right across from her. At least Erica said something. Taylor barely gave me a nod.

  I motioned with my head over to Taylor. “What’s with her,” I asked Erica, not caring that Taylor was right next to me.

  Erica looked at Taylor. Taylor gave a slight nod and Erica went for it. “Taylor and I discussed it and we don’t think it’s right for you to hang out with Tessa. She is our arch enemy after all.”

  “She’s whose arch enemy?” I wanted to know.

  “Ours. Mine and Taylor?”

  “And why is that, by the way?” I was pissed. “What has she ever done to you two?”

  Erica looked at me as if I had two heads. “She’s a stuck-up bitch, a slut and has the worst reputation in the whole damn school.”

  “That’s not what I asked,” I replied calmly. I looked at Taylor, then across at Erica and pointed to them both. “What has she ever done to either of you?”

  “It doesn’t matter whether she’s done anything to us personally or not. We just don’t like her and cannot understand how you can associate with someone like her.”

  “I like her and she’s not as bad as you think she is,” I said as I leaned back and took a bite of my pizza.

  Erica actually pointed her nose up in the air. “Well, neither Taylor nor I would ever lower our standards and hang out with Tessa Anderson.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said smugly as I took a sip of my water. “I highly doubt you’d ever have the chance, even if you wanted to.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Erica asked indignantly, “and why is that?”

  I started to seethe and couldn’t control the words that were going to come out of me. I looked across the table and stared into Erica’s equally hostile eyes. “She probably doesn’t even know you two exist.”

  As Erica’s face turned beet red and her eyes began to bulge, Taylor abruptly pushed back her chair and stood up. Erica thought better of it and followed suit. Without another word, they both grabbed their lunch trays and stormed away from the table, leaving me alone in the big, noisy cafeteria with my half-eaten piece of pizza.

  • • •

  As soon as I said it, I knew I had hit below the belt. But I was upset with Taylor and Erica and wanted to say the meanest thing I could think of. They were the one’s who started it, I thought to myself, as I tried to justify my nastiness.

  Taylor and Erica had it out for Tessa no matter what she did and I couldn’t understand why. Maybe they were just jealous of her, especially because of all the male attention she always got. They also probably knew she would never give either of them the time of day and were mad about that. The more I thought about it, I still couldn’t understand why Tessa befriended me. Probably because I was the new girl, had no friends and, therefore, no extra baggage.

  As I finished my lunch, I tried to look at it from Erica and Taylor’s perspective. Maybe they were just upset because they were afraid that Tessa was going to steal me away from them. Well, that wasn’t going to happen and I would make it a point to tell the two of them as soon as possible, if they ever decided to talk to me again.

  I picked up my cell to see if I had any new messages. I was sitting alone after all. I wanted it to look like I had some sort of communication going on with another human being, even if it was somewhere out in cyberspace.

  Just then Tessa brushed by me with her lunch tray, stopped and backed up.

  “Hey, there.” Tessa looked around. “You look like a loser sitting there all by yourself.”

  I put my phone down and looked up at her. “Thanks.”

  She pushed her shiny, blonde hair away from her face. “Why don’t you come and sit with me and the boys.”

  I was about to object, but figured why not. What did I have to lose, although I was nervous about hanging out with all the guys, especially because Rocky was there, too. I quickly thought back to the morning and concluded that either Rocky didn’t recognize me from his party or didn’t remember me at all. I was hoping it was both.

  Impatiently, Tessa chomped on her gum. “So what’s it gonna be?”

  “Sure,” I said, as I stood up, shocked by my newfound braveness. I grabbed my tray, joined Tessa, the boys and “The God” and never looked back.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO