Better Off Dead : A Lucy Hart, Deathdealer Novel (Book One)
Page 26
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Life at Four Corners High School became much more interesting. With Lucy’s far superior and sexier wardrobe, and the return of her well-coifed and manicured beauty, what also returned to Lucy was the attention of her fellow man… and, unfortunately, her fellow women.
Guys followed her around between classes, swarmed around her at her locker like flies. Some would do all sorts of wild things to get her attention. Mock grappling matches, cursing—belittling each other’s characters, athletic prowess, and manhoods. This she kind of enjoyed. She’d missed having constant male attention.
In contrast, she disliked the attention she now received from the female populace at Four Corners High. Back at her old school, she’d been the queen bee of every aspect of her high school society. Cheer Squad Captain, Student Body President (which she’d won by a landslide—apparently a landslide of fearful, sycophantic, and rather hateful subjects) she was dating the captain of the football and wrestling squad (same guy,) and she’d been crowned Homecoming Queen only a few days before her father had been arrested for tax evasion and immigrant slave trafficking. All the popular girls had groveled at her Jimmy Choos—though she now knew they’d both feared and hated her—and all other girls had fled at the sight of her—more fear and hatred.
But at Four Corners, her sudden appearance upgrade had caused an aftershock of overtly hateful girls, in all social brackets. The Goth chicks made nasty hissing sounds, and threw little wads of paper at Lucy’s head. The art chicks and the brain-trust girls joined forces and filled the girl’s restrooms with derogatory artwork (resplendent with nasty remarks scrolled underneath) and some rather clever math equations slandering Lucy with statistics of her obvious whoredome, and estimates of how buoyant her “Fake Tits” were.
The cheerleaders were more subtle. They leered and sneered, made mean little quips whenever Lucy passed by, and even tried slamming her against a bank of lockers once. They’d tried, but Lucy was well versed (to her now reluctant horror) in cheerleader war strategies.
There had been two of them—the rest of the squad was watching from a safe distance. Their first mistake was they stalked behind Lucy for far too long. By the time they decided to make their move, Lucy had made them and had her counter attack all ready. A fake toward the lockers and a quick side step, then a well-practiced “accidental bump” maneuver she’d mastered her freshman year, and the two pompom shakers crash landed into their own trap with two incredibly loud crashes. One got a sprained ankle, the other a bloody nose. And Lucy flitted to safety without a scratch, and without anyone but the now seething cheer squad any the wiser.
Seething or not, the little incident made the pompom mafia keep their distance, and even though the rest of the feminine cliques in school still trash talked her, they didn’t bother her physically.
Lucy had gone from non-existent to infamous in just a matter of days. And she’d been especially taken aback by the reason. She’d overheard, while obscured in a stall in the girl’s restroom, that “That new Lucy girl is such a bitch! I mean, where the hell did she even come from?”
Lucy sat there confused for a moment as the two verbally degraded her. Lucy wasn’t new. She’d been going to Four Corners for almost seven months. And then it hit her.
No one had even noticed me before, she cringed. And I mean no one.
When the trash talking cheerleaders left Lucy emerged from the stall and gave herself a long look in the mirror. Her old self was back in place as if she’d never left, making Lucy wonder where the Lucy she’d been for the last six months had gone. Were they the same person, or should she be mourning her loss?
Meet the once invisible, now bright and shiny and hated me.
How did I ever get through high school like this?