Falling From Grace (Grace Series)

by S. L. Naeole

  No. Her eyes were focused somewhere else. She was staring…

  At me.

  She could see me, knew I was there. She pulled up her lips into a very cruel smile and spoke, “Graham and Grace aren’t friends anymore, Becca. He ended their friendship a couple of weeks ago when I told him it was her or me.” She began messing with her hair. The long, blonde strands shimmered like spun gold, even under the fluorescent lights of the bathroom; the type of hair that Graham always said he hated, but the exact same hair that he had been playing with just a few moments ago.

  A snickering-snorting sound followed. “He chose you over his best friend? Girl, he must love you. Those two have been tight since diapers!”

  Erica nodded, still staring at me, the cruel, warped smile distorting the beauty of her face. “Of course he loves me. He told me that there’s no one else who makes him feel the way that I do, that he trusts more than me. He said there’s no competition when it comes to me and how he feels. And really, why would there be? I mean, look at me! I at least look like I have girl parts!” she cracked, pushing her breasts together and making a moue with her lips, winking—whether at her own reflection or at me I didn’t know.

  Girl parts—apparently another reason why I wasn’t quite fit to play the part of Graham’s girlfriend and Erica was. I knew that I wasn’t curvaceous. In truth, I was more like the rectangle to her oval; corners where there should be curves. I had breasts, but they just weren’t made of quite enough of the stuff that guys liked to gawk at. I’m fairly certain that I look passable in a bathing suit, but I’d never grace the cover of some swimsuit magazine. I didn’t really think that that had any bearing on Graham and me, but looking at Erica’s body, how her little pink top and her brown corduroy skirt hugged her shape, I understood that I wasn’t physically attractive to Graham either. It just kept piling on, didn’t it?

  Erica put her hands down and started digging through her bag. “Did you know that she told him she was in love with him the day he ended it? He told me about it afterwards and we laughed at how pathetic that was. God, she’s desperate. He even told me how he always felt sorry for her because her mom had died and everything—but that just proves what a good guy he is doesn’t it? So goddamn charitable.

  “He said that her mother was some illegal immigrant or something, and that she probably died from some disease they have in those third world countries that had been dor-something…I don’t remember what it was he said, but she probably had it when she was pregnant, and now Grace might have it, too. Isn’t that…sad?”

  She pulled out a tube of gloss and started to swipe her lips with it, puckering and pouting, apparently gauging the level of coverage. She smiled, and then frowned. Too much gloss—a large amount had landed on her teeth; a nice, hot pink chunk. Despite the rage that was boiling inside of me at the blatant lies that she was telling, I couldn’t help but smile a little at that.

  Becca broke in then, her high-pitched voice causing me to grit my teeth. “I thought her mom died in a car accident. Some freakish explosion or something. Hmm. Learn something new every day. Wait—she actually said she was in love with him?”

  Erica nodded again, quickly wiping away the foreign pink spot on her teeth with some tissue she pulled out of her bag, and smirked. “Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if she tried to attach herself to this new guy. Did you see the way she looked at him? Like a dog in heat; how pathetic. If Graham doesn’t want her, what makes her think that this guy would give her the time of day?

  “She probably just wants to be his friend, just to be able to say that she was friends with the two hottest guys in school. Of course, from the way he was looking at me this morning, I don’t doubt I could take him away from her, too. Not that she’d even be able to catch his attention. Not in those clothes anyway.”

  Take who away from me? Was she talking about the gray-eyed god that had somehow gotten my heart beating again without so much as a word? The one who I had absolutely embarrassed myself in front of? The one who made my knees feel like they were made out of water? Ugh…she was right. I am pathetic.

  “Did you hear his name, though?” the Becca person asked, leaning forward to inspect her makeup. I saw her then. Her hair was just as blonde as Erica’s, but with dark roots peeking through, and it was cut short in a sloping bob. Her eyes were dark, like mine, and void of any real sincerity. She had berry stained lips, and when she reached up to touch them, as if checking to see if the stain would rub off, I noticed her nails were painted the exact same shade.

  “Uh-uh,” Erica responded, shaking her head while still watching me. “I was too busy staring at his eyes when he told Graham. Something about those eyes just makes me want to do whatever he wants. Anyway, he’ll probably tell me in class. I think we have sixth period theater together. I took a peek at his schedule while he was talking to Graham. Did you know he speaks with a British accent?”

  “No way! That’s hawt!”

  Somewhere deep, under all of the rage and sadness that was pulling me under, I made a mental note to somehow develop a pill that made the word “hawt” impossible to utter by vapid blondes… especially the bottled variety.

  “I know! I can’t wait to hear his voice again. It was like listening to melted honey,” Erica moaned, licking her gooey pink lips.

  The one named Becca cackled. A genuine cackle. I half expected her skin to explode into bright green warts and a pointy black hat to magically appear on her head as she flew around the bathroom on her broomstick. “You’re such a slut! Please tell me, what does ‘melted honey’ sound like, Mrs. Shakespeare?”

  Erica shrugged. She looked at me once more. “It sounds hot and slow and sweet…a lot like Graham when he’s kissing me. Mmm…I wonder what the new guy kisses like. If his voice gets me all hot, imagine what his lips are like!” She turned her body sideways in the mirror, sucking in her stomach while examining her figure. “I wonder if he’ll be like Graham. Graham’s obsessed with making out—wants to do it all the time. He especially likes kissing this.” She slapped her rear end on that last word in emphasis.

  With a shrill peal of laughter, the two of them left, the resounding cackles bouncing off the walls long after they had gone and the door had closed.

  Long after the bell had rung.

  Long after I had stopped fighting the tears.

  SO WE MEET AGAIN

  I entered my homeroom class five minutes before it was time to head off to first period, my face a puffy, blotchy mess. I didn’t even bother to try and set myself to rights. No one would notice me anyway.

  Mr. Frey was, as I expected, asleep at his desk. A piece of paper was perched carelessly on his face, rising and falling with each snore; it had the words “I’ll teach when I’m sober” written on it in red ink. The raucous nature that is every homeroom occupied by Mr. Frey didn’t skip a beat when I walked in. Like some amorphous being, it accepted me without a ripple of distortion. I somehow found an empty desk and proceeded to wait until the bell rang to proceed to first period. All around me, I could hear the laughter of friendship, the stories that were told filled with fond memories, and I felt my spirits grow heavier by the second.

  With nothing left to do but wait, the thoughts that I had tried to avoid came barreling through my mind. Graham was here, and he had lied to me. Well, of course he had lied to me. But to do it while trying to making it seem as though he was finally being honest was a double lie. And to hear that Erica was now interested in this new guy… Oh Graham. He broke my heart for a girl that was already looking to replace him. I felt the ashes in my chest begin to get soggy…as though I was now crying on the inside.

  Just when I was sure that my body would explode from the seemingly endless internal flooding, the bell signaling the end of homeroom rang mercifully. I was off to French class. Madame Hidani would provide a respite from the tortuous reminiscing. She knew how to keep a class in hand and focus our attention onto more important things. Like vowels.

  I walked into th
e familiar classroom, feeling a bit better as I saw the long list of tasks we had to complete by the end of today’s lesson. No small talk allowed here. It was straight business with Madame Hidani. There would be no time to think. No time to listen. No time to feel. It sounded like heaven.

  A group of girls were gathered around a central figure at the front of the classroom, near the poster of Manet’s famous print, “Le déjeuner sur l'herbe”. I didn’t spend any time paying attention to their giggling and chattering and took a seat in the back of the class; the same seat I had occupied last year; the same seat where I had helped Graham pass each and every single French test we had. I shook my head again, forcing the thoughts about him out of my mind. I wouldn’t be thinking about him for the next hour, I vowed to myself.

  The bell rang, and the gaggle of girls at the front started to disperse. I reached into my book bag and pulled out my binder. A writing assignment had been placed up on the board, and Madame Hidani was doing her best to calm down the chatter so that we could focus and begin. Well…so that everyone else could focus and begin. I was ready. More than ready to not have to think about Graham, my summer vacation, or blondes with perfect bodies and pink lip gloss on their teeth.

  Or, at least I thought I was.

  There on the blackboard, in clear chalky words was our assignment. In French, we had to give a two page description of our summer break.

  Even Madame Hidani had turned on me!

  I groaned and quickly looked around to see if anyone had heard me. I swallowed down a gulp of shock. Rows and rows of heads were turned, facing me. Was there not a single soul in the school who didn’t know what had happened? I counted eighteen pairs of eyes all looking in my direction. Eighteen female eyes.

  Of course they were all female. French was a romantic language, and no seventeen or eighteen-year-old boys were interested in romance. They were interested in cars, and breasts, and breasts on cars. And it was because of this bit of knowledge that I could say, quite honestly to myself, that it was no wonder that they were all staring…those eighteen pairs of eyes weren’t staring at me. Of course not. They were staring at HIM.

  A warm, pulling sensation in my solar plexus forced me to turn my head towards my right. The only seat next to me, the one that Graham had filled just one year ago—the one that had been empty when I walked in—was now occupied.

  It was the gray-eyed god, and he was staring, his silver eyes locked on me. I felt just as uncomfortable then as I had in the bathroom with Erica staring at me in the mirror. Moreover, I felt embarrassed. Could it be possible that I was feeling more self-conscious than I had when I thought that all of the eyes were on me? I blushed just then, and knew that the answer was yes, I was.

  “So we meet again,” his said to me softly, a hint of wry humor tingeing the bass in his voice. His accent was something you’d only hear on television or the radio: clean, smooth, very English. And he smiled—an earth stopping, breath stopping, universe stopping smile.

  I swallowed—it sounded loud enough to wake the dead. It was definitely loud enough to startle me. “Are you talking to me?” I croaked, another rush of heat flooding my cheeks as I heard the nervousness in my voice.

  He nodded. And then, impossibly, his smile grew. “I don’t recall anyone else bumping into me and leaving before I could offer assistance. Or, at the very least, introduce myself.”

  I didn’t think that I was capable of blushing so often, in such a short period of time. My heart wasn’t exactly in the best shape to be sending any unnecessary blood anywhere else but to my brain and my limbs—it already felt as though that was putting an extreme strain on my entire body—yet the blush came so easily, as if from some magical spring of embarrassment. “I apologized for that.” I said quickly. Too quickly.

  “You sure did, Grace,” a girl I knew as Lacey Greene who was sitting directly in front of me snickered. “But it was more like the sound that comes out of a constipated cow.”

  As quickly as my cheeks had warmed by the rush of blood, they turned to ice by the loss. I turned to look at her but she had eyes only for our new classmate, seizing the opportunity afforded to her by my reaction to her flippant comment. I turned back to look at him. Gone was his smile, replaced by a grim line and a disgusted glint in his eyes; it appeared that he agreed. I had sounded like a constipated cow.

  I turned my attention back to my paper. I wrote my name down in the upper right hand corner, the date, and the period with some antiquated pencil that I found in the bottom of my bag. I titled the assignment and started thinking of a way to tell Madame Hidani that my summer had been one big practical joke on me, and that the only friend I had in the world had been pitying me this whole time.

  After a few minutes, I couldn’t see my paper anymore. Tears—heavy and thick with grief—were blurring my view of just about everything. But they did not fall. Remarkably, they remained contained, merely teasing me with their weighted sting. Surely they would not fall before a roomful of catty girls, most of whom had always hated my close friendship with Graham, would they? Of course, it wasn’t really as close a friendship as everyone thought it was, so they couldn’t have wanted that, could they? No. I was sure that no one would have wanted to be made to look as foolish and gullible as I had.

  But then again, this was Graham Hasselbeck. It didn’t matter if he forgot your name; it was enough that he had at least acknowledged that you even existed. And he had always seemed to look beyond the fact that I lacked any outer beauty, still finding me wanting in some way, even if only in friendship. To them, that was him being charitable; an admirable trait in any guy, much less the most popular guy in school. And still I wondered…would he still be in my life had I chosen to keep my feelings to myself?

  No. Erica had been quite clear on that. He would have done it sooner or later. I just gave him the opening he needed.

  The bell rang—the tone shrill and piercing—wrenching me from my thoughts. Had the hour gone by already? The clock perched on the wall certainly seemed to think so. I heard Madame Hidani call for our papers to be brought forward to her desk…all two pages. All around me groans and complaints were being uttered—apparently I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t done the class assignment.

  I looked down at my blank sheet of paper, having written just my name and title. Only…it was filled with writing—my writing. When did I write this? I skimmed it over quickly and recognized bits about working at the library, saving money for school… How?

  Seeking some kind of obvious answer, I looked at the seat in front of me, knowing that it would be empty. I turned to the seat next to me. It, too, was empty.

  Perplexed, I began gathering up my things. With shaky hands I grabbed my paper and handed it to Madame Hidani who smiled at me upon seeing my lazy scrawl. “Fantastique!” she cheered in her lilting French. “You’re only the second person to turn this assignment in, Mademoiselle Shelley.”

  “Who else turned in the assignment?” I asked, hoping that the curious tone in my voice masked my nervousness. I didn’t believe for a second that I wrote what she was holding in her hand, but there wasn’t a single other person in the room who had put any effort into the assignment, from my understanding, so…

  “Oh, the new student, Monsieur Bellegarde also turned his paper in. Five pages, if you can believe it!” she crowed. She held it up so I could see. The neat and elegant handwriting was beautiful, and completely unlike anything I had ever seen with its loops and curls that looked more like something that came out of an eighteenth century history book. He had written five pages of that? As if she read my mind, she nodded. “He spent some time in France while abroad—his mother is a native of France—and so this was child’s play for him. I think I’ll have to come up with much more difficult classroom assignments if I’m going to keep him interested, eh?” She seemed giddy at the prospect. I cringed.

  Excusing myself, I lugged my book bag over my shoulder and headed off to Mrs. Hoppbaker’s class, saying a quick “Adieu” to Ma
dame Hidani while pondering what exactly had transpired while I was lost in my thoughts. I knew that I didn’t write that paper. At least…I think I didn’t. It was my handwriting; I couldn’t doubt that. The Ls were tilted to the right, and the Xs were crooked, just like they always were. I remembered seeing that. But why didn’t I remember writing those Ls and Xs?

  ***

  Mrs. Hoppbaker’s class was half full by the time I got there. Of course, it being an elective math class, it was filled with those who should be more comfortable with someone like me, but my friendship with Graham had alienated that crowd just as surely as it had alienated the popular kids—I was no man’s land when it came to friendship.

  Sighing, I took yet another backroom seat and started copying the year’s syllabus down on a sheet of paper pulled from my binder. I took no notice of the absence of a very large presence until the bell rang.

  “Good morning, class. My name is Mrs. Hoppbaker, and I am so skinny, you could blindfold me with dental floss,” said a very familiar voice from a very unfamiliar body.

  “Mrs. Hoppbaker?” a boy I remembered as Ian asked incredulously, his mouth hanging open with the same shock that the rest of the class was buzzing with.

  The thin woman with the beautiful chestnut hair and glowing skin the color of a summer peach smiled at him. “Yes sir, Mr. Thompson. It’s me, Mrs. Hoppbaker. Over one-hundred pounds lighter, healthier, and just as funny as ever if I do say so myself, although modesty isn’t one of my virtues, so I hope none of you were expecting that.”

  My jaw was touching my desk. I could feel it. She was beautiful! Not that she hadn’t been so before she lost the weight, but the amount of confidence she exuded, coupled with the loss of a whole person in body fat looked incredible on her!

  She spent the first fifteen minutes of class time answering questions about her weight loss, which came thanks to the gastric bypass surgery she had done the day school was let out three months ago. How in the world does someone lose over a hundred pounds in three months someone asked. Exercise, eating right, and lots and lots of extracurricular activities came her reply—I didn’t want to guess as to what those activities could mean.