Socially Awkward
Stephanie Haddad
Copyright 2012 Stephanie Haddad
Amazon Kindle Edition
This book is also available in a print edition from most online retailers.
Discover other titles by Stephanie Haddad at www.amazon.com.
License Notes
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Discover other titles by Stephanie Haddad.
NOVELS
A Previous Engagement
Love Regifted
Love Unlisted
----
SHORT STORIES
Other Kinds of Love: A Collection
****
For SMC, SPC, & SLC
Sisters are friends forever.
****
PROLOGUE
My name is Olivia Saunders, but my friends just call me Livy. If you happen to stumble upon my Facebook profile, you’ll learn pretty much all there is to know about me. As the daughter of a US Army sergeant, I spent my early years moving all around the world in an exciting blur of activity, new faces, and strange places. I’m an only child, a daddy’s girl, and yet I have no desire to join the military whatsoever. And yes, people ask me that question all the time.
Growing up, I followed my dad and mom from Boston to London, Texas, New York, and even Germany. Thanks to all of the moving around, I’ve acquired a diverse range of skills, which include hunting for quail, repairing a riding lawn mower, and hosting a proper tea time with real English scones I can bake from scratch. I speak three languages fluently, have extensive training in horseback riding, and almost made the Olympic women’s volleyball team just after I graduated high school. My interests are as varied as the places I’ve lived and I always love to try new things, whether it’s knitting or base jumping.
Looking back on my life, now that I’m an adult, I’ve seen so many places and met so many people that it sometimes seems there’s nothing left to explore. My one regret, however, is never growing any real roots anywhere. It’s the one experience I’ve never had: to find somewhere I belong and learn to fit in.
That is, until I moved back to Boston a few years ago to pursue a career in modeling. I know, most people think of New York or Paris as the only runways worth walking. Having been to both cities, I knew neither was the right scene for me. I gave up on my dream of turning on the big catwalks of the world in favor of a calmer, quieter modeling career concentrated on print advertisements and catalogs. Take a look at my profile photos and think really hard about where you’ve seen me. You’ll probably have some distant memory of seeing me somewhere before.
Now that I’ve finally found someplace to call my home city, I’m hoping to settle down. Unfortunately, my modeling contacts aren’t exactly great marriage material, especially since most of the men I know are playing for the other team. That’s why I’ve turned to social networking to meet new people, both close to home and overseas, wherever the web takes me. I’ve made hundreds of virtual new acquaintances, some with similar interests and some with very different ways of looking at the world. Yet they’re all my friends, some with the potential to become more. Maybe one of them is the lucky one I’ve been waiting for.
Currently, that list of friends is more than 800 strong—an impressive feat considering I have never actually met a single one of them in person. Some of them might try to argue that they do know me from their days at school or perhaps met me at that one party that time at that girl’s house. Maybe they think they recognize me from last fall’s catalog, or that billboard ad they drive past every day.
But they’d all be wrong, because Olivia Saunders doesn’t exist.
****
In real life, my name is Jennifer Smith, and I, like my name, am almost the perfect picture of normalcy. In fact, I’m still a little angry with my parents for giving me the Number One most common name for girls during the year I was born. Paired with the Number One most common surname in the United States, I’m as boring and invisible as a name can make a person. I’m the very image of the “girl next door,” American as apple pie. With smooth skin, plain features, and a little too much weight around my middle, I look like almost every other girl I’ve ever met. Except for two tiny details: a pair of “accessories” I wish I didn’t need but cannot live without.
I guess that’s where this idea of Olivia Saunders came from. She’s exotic and special in every way I’m not. She’s unique and distinctive in the right ways… rather than because she wears hearing aids as a result of a birth defect to her hearing nerves. Not like the real me.
CHAPTER ONE
“How could you do this to me?” Gaping at my sister, the very person I’ve called my best friend for basically my entire life, these are the only words I can muster.
Claire stands still, staring back at me, but doesn’t say a word in her own defense. She just freezes, hands on her slender hips, and focuses her blue eyes like laser beams at my skull. As her anger bubbles under the surface of her expression, I can see her little button nose twitching with frustration.
“I trusted you and now…”
Her eyes grow big at my words, her anger spilling over the edge. “It’s this stupid project, Jen! It’s taking over your entire life! You don’t see things right anymore. You don’t get it, do you? Sean doesn’t love you, he’s in love with Olivia. It seems hardly fair that you’re mad at me about this.”
“But I am Olivia, Claire!” I blink, biting back tears. I never thought, in all the years of being the victim of bully after bully, that my own sister could hurt me the deepest. Never.
“No, you’re not. There is no Olivia! I just don’t see what the problem is. He cares about me now,” she offers, hands on her hips. Her tone softens, but her words don’t cut me any less deeply. “And I care about him. Can’t you just be happy for us?”
It’s all my fault, of course. Or rather, Olivia’s fault. If only I’d just picked something else to study for my sociology project, things could have been so different. Now it’s far too late. The damage has been done.
“You know damn well what you’re doing and how wrong it is!” I don’t want to yell, but I’m starting to lose both the feeling in my face and all of my vocal control. “You’re stealing Sean because I showed you what kind of person Tom really is! It’s not my fault what he did to you, Claire.”
“This has nothing to do with that,” Claire says, her tone growing icy.
“I said I was sorry, Claire. I had no idea he would…”
“Why can’t you just mind your own business, Jen? Just go be with Noah and leave me the hell out of it!”
It’s my turn to turn icy, as my eyes narrow on my spiteful sister. “Leave Noah out of this, Claire. You know damn well there’s nothing going on between…”
“For the love of God, Jen! You just want them all for yourself, don’t you?”
“I’m not the one of us who’s a selfish bitch!”
As soon as the words explode from my mouth, I want to stuff them back in. Claire is not a bitch, she never has been. But I just don’t have a word to describe what she’s become in these past few weeks. There’s a pause between us, a mutual look of shock that divides us like steel bars down the center of the room. To cover up my embarrassment, I yell even louder. “Just get out!”
“Girls!” When my mother bursts through the side door, Claire and I freeze.
We often forget how t
hin the walls are between my parents’ house and the in-law apartment I live in. It’s just one of the pitfalls of living here, being so exposed all the time. I enjoy the part with low rent and no utilities, the built-in laundry service, and the access to home-cooked meals when I want them, but it’s annoying to have unannounced family visits at any time of the day.
“Great job, Jen. Now the authorities are involved,” Claire’s sarcasm falls flat in the silent apartment. My mother stares us down, each in turn, until Claire throws her hands up into the air. “Forget it. I’m out of here.”
Mom and I watch Claire storm out the front door, leaving it open, without even putting her jacket on. The weather has been warming up lately, but the cold spring air blows briskly into my apartment. Still, what really gives me chills is the memory of Claire’s expression when I mentioned Tom.
What the hell have I done?
Eventually, Mom coaxes me onto the sofa with a cup of tea, wraps a blanket around my shoulders to protect against the chill, and sits down next to me. She gives me a speech about how she’s still our mother, even though her babies are all grown up now, and that we can come to her about anything, anytime. These are all facts I’ve known all along, but confessing to my mother, of all people, the horrible things I’ve done just makes me feel even more despicable.
“I… can’t, Mom,” I manage to say, stirring the spoon in my tea unconsciously. We stare at each other in silence for several moments. Her thin lips pull into a tight line as she observes my expression, distorted with emotional turmoil, and the corners shift downward into a frown. “It’s a really long story and I…”
“Jennifer,” she says, narrowing her eyes—her eyes that are just like Claire’s, only much wiser. And far less judgmental. “Do you have someplace better to be? Because your father fell asleep an hour ago watching golf and I’ve got a free evening to occupy. Humor me.”
I chuckle, despite myself, and try to steel my nerves. “If I tell you, just promise you won’t think any less of me… okay? I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. It’s all gotten out of hand and I’m… I don’t know what to do.”
Mom leans in and kisses my forehead, smoothing a strand of hair behind my hearing aid. It jostles a bit but doesn’t come out of place. I take a deep breath and begin.
****
To effectively tell my story, I should start a little closer to the beginning. Before Sean, Tom, Noah, and even Olivia came into our lives. Before Claire and I ever fought about anything more serious than who got the bigger scoop of ice cream. Before my mother was a frequent interrupter of key conflicts in my apartment. Before I’d ever created that fake Facebook profile.
This whole mess started as a fleeting thought, inspired by a discussion in one of my graduate classes. And now it’s threatening to destroy everything I love… just like Frankenstein’s monster. Why, oh why, didn’t I just get my degree in Literature?
All I needed was an idea for my final paper for my Master of Science in Sociology. Since it was already September of my final year in the program, I was a bit desperate. I wasn’t in one of those Master’s programs where you just read a bunch of books, repackaged some ideas, and made it sound pretty in about 50 pages. Oh no. Instead, I was required to conduct actual field research.
But I’ll admit it: I was completely devoid of ideas. Except for those offered by my sister Claire, which were completely horrible: “Study freshmen at the laundromat and write about how clueless kids are away from their mommies the first time” or, my favorite, “Study the social interactions between police officers and people getting speeding tickets.” In hindsight, either one of those might have been a more practical choice of research project. Even her idea about the social interactions of gardeners and their plants was better than this.
Bad idea after bad idea, Dr. Chase, my advisor and the professor of my Contemporary Issues in Sociology course, just kept telling me not to panic. In part, I blame her for not putting the kibosh on this thing right away. If she had just assigned me a topic, maybe I wouldn’t have jumped on the first “decent” idea I came across. Maybe.
I start my story for Mom on the day this mess really began. The planets were all aligned and the moon was full… or something. But still, I was late for my morning lecture.
Dr. Chase was already talking at rapid pace when I slid into the back of the small room and joined the rest of the class. It was one of my last course requirements, with just two semesters left to create the perfect research study.
My professor glanced up from her lecture notes on the podium and nodded at me. A few students swiveled in their chairs to see who had just cut into the middle of their class, but most of them probably assumed it was me and didn’t even flinch. Two weeks into the semester, they should all be used to my tardiness by now. Call it bad luck or just poor planning, but something always delayed me.
“You’ll be late for your own funeral, Jen,” my mother chuckles, interrupting my story. I groan and continue.
I took my usual seat in the back, pulled out my trusty iPad and started jotting some notes. Dr. Chase was talking about the relationships between friends and how they have been altered in our present day, thanks to advances in technology. Advances like the one I was definitely not using to surf the web in the middle of her class time. Still… if I was Googling “modern sociology” for a research project topic, was that really a waste of said class time?
“How do you communicate with your closest friends today?” she asked the class, breaking the fast clip of her own lecture. “Has it changed in the past few years? Your generation has experienced a huge shift in the way people keep in touch, so how has that affected your lives?”
I lifted my head to acknowledge that I heard the question but didn’t have a response. Dr. Chase looked around the room, eyebrows raised, waiting for the first hands to go up.
“Anyone?” she asked again.
A few people raised their hands, and Chris Tuckerman gave some response about text messaging and how he could instantly get responses from his friends, instead of wasting time with a game of phone tag. This, apparently, made the process of making plans to “hang out” go much more smoothly. Lyla Crosby offered her own response next, diving head-first into a conversation about how much American Online’s instant messaging changed American speech. AIM, she claimed, was responsible for the first short form communication with abbreviations like LOL and BRB. I didn’t want to embarrass her in front of the class by explaining that secretaries actually used short-hand notations like that for faster dictation over fifty years ago, and just went back to my web browsing.
I could study secretarial sociology, perhaps, I thought, scanning down the list of links presented to me by Google. Ooh! Over socialization—that could be an interesting topic, right? I clicked on the link and waited for the page to load. Take. For. Ever. Why don’t you?
I knew I should be listening, but most of the class discussion bounced off of me like tennis balls on a court. It was hard to come up with something meaningful to say when your closest friend in the world was the big sister who used to steal your dessert, listen in on your phone calls (when you got them), and frame you for every broken lamp in the house. I love Claire more than anyone in the world, but seriously, what could I have contributed to that conversation? Technology might have made it easier for Claire to nag me about getting a new inspection sticker for my car, but that was about it. Had it really done anything to alter our relationship?
Let’s not even discuss the fact that sisters don’t really count as friends. Do they? I thought they were kind of a given. You know, you’re born to the same parents, so you almost have to have something in common. Or at least a reason to care whether the other one is still breathing or not.
“Jennifer? Anything to add?” said Dr. Chase suddenly.
I froze with my pen hanging out of my mouth, and shifted my irises to the front of the room. Dr. Chase stared at me, looking rather stately behind her wooden podium. I could feel my temperature risi
ng, the blood pooling in my cheeks. All eyes were riveted to my reddening face. I had no idea where the conversation had traveled while I’d been lamenting my poor, lonely existence. And web-surfing, too, but mostly lamenting.
Think, Jen. Think, think!
“Um, I…” Not good enough. Luckily, Dr. Chase saw my struggle, took pity, and decided to throw me a bone.
“Regarding communication via the web?” she said, folding her hands together and watching me patiently.
“Well, I guess it provides us with a certain amount of anonymity,” I ventured, giving my professor a cautious look. She nodded, urging me onward. “Sure, we can talk to our friends online, but it also opens up a whole new world of strangers to converse with. People we might never attempt to speak to in real life, like at the grocery store or in a college class.”
I tried really hard not to look at the couple of football players sitting together in the front of the class, but my ridiculous, wandering eyes betrayed me. One of them even winked at me, because he’s a huge jerk who thinks he’s hot enough to rattle a quiet, nerdy girl like myself. I guess some of us haven’t actually graduated from high school yet. I shook it off like a champ and looked back at Dr. Chase.
Socially Awkward Page 1