Sophomoric by Rebecca Paine Lucas Page A

reason, rubbing the back of his neck. “Because you haven’t. And we’re not dating. And you’re my friend. And Cleo would kick my ass if I screw up.”
    Great. Just great. He couldn’t even come up with a good excuse. We’re not dating? Like he cared. I may have been the kid that checked whether “gullible” was actually in the dictionary, but I’d learned my lesson since middle school. I didn’t need anyone protecting me from my own decisions, not even Cleo.
    “Oh, so I’m too good to have sex with, but not too good to blow you.”
    I really hoped nobody heard that.
    The fingers he was running through his hair clenched into a fist. “What the hell, Bizza? What is wrong with you?”
    I threw my hands up, the classic gesture of surrender, ignoring that it was me sending seven kinds of mixed signals. “I give up. Find someone else’s reputation to screw up, Dev, because I am so damn sick of this.” Stupid cocky jackass.
    The air felt heavy as I ran the twenty-odd yards back to my dorm. Of course it was going to rain, because wasn’t life just flipping perfect. At least it was a kind of cover for the fact that I was crying. As if the rumors could get any worse.
    Drama on Thursday sounded like hell on earth. So I did what any high school student would: I cut. Whoop-dee-freaking-doo. I thought that since drama wasn’t exactly high-caliber academics, my teacher would let it slide. My mistake. Unfortunately for me, he was one of those arts teachers who take great offense at the fact that his students see his class as any less important than AP Calculus.
    Slightly delusional. It worried me.
    I had to sit through an hour-long rant from him, before being handed off to my counselor for a lecture. Then my parents called. It would have been easier explaining to a five-year-old that Santa and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy don’t exist than explaining to them why I’d cut a class. Their minds could not wrap around the concept. For some strange reason, that kind of made me want to cry.
    Denial is a beautiful thing. It is also the root of all evil, but at least there would be some time-delay.
    This was going to be a very long weekend.

13.
    Times have changed, I guess, since girls wanted to be princesses. Now the freshman girls were all begging to be dead. Maybe they hoped that senior guys had a severe case of necrophilia. As three of them surrounded Dev-as-Harker at center stage, though, I realized that my apparently oblivious acting teacher might just have been typecasting. The other two senior guys in our class had been joking that Vampy Succubi 1, 2 and 3 definitely wanted to suck something the entire time our teacher had been attempting to stage this scene. It would have been funnier if Dev wasn’t so likely to be the something in question.
    Dev looked anything but the “confused and terrified” directed by the script: hand in his pocket, lines in his hand, slouching as always in his own personal spotlight. His role was hardly typecasting—except maybe regarding idiocy. A tiny red-haired freshman with freckles that, according to the guys behind me, did actually go everywhere, tossed her hair. It gleamed under the stage lights. I tried not to laugh. The stare that I think was supposed to be predatory was more petulant than anything. Pouts do not generally convey superiority.
    I probably shouldn’t have been talking. Smoldering wasn’t exactly my strong point.
    Neither were student-teacher relations. My drama teacher was giving me a colder shoulder than usual, insulted at my apparent disdain for his art. The man had been waiting for Godot just a little bit too long.
    Vamp 2, a curvy Indian girl, was speaking her lines now. “Go on.” She had now inspired a conversation among the guys behind me about the Kama Sutra. She was also staring at Dev and not at his jugular, where the script said she was supposed to be looking. “You’re first and we’ll follow.”
    The redhead straightened up, stuck out her