Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ Girl Politics ❯ There's a first time for everything ( Chapter 1 )

CHAPTER 1

*~~~~~~~~~~~*

I dejectedly dragged my feet along the cheap plastic tile in the hallway while carefully balancing my tray. Who ever thought that lunch detention was a good idea? I groaned. This was to be my first detention of any sort ever. At last, to my utter dismay, I reached the door to Mr. Tinkle….ahem...I mean Finkle's classroom. This could NOT be happening to me. I had merely forgotten a single assignment. I had a perfect record, for crying out loud!

The door squeaked open. My luck ensured that I would have to endure this humiliation in the presence of another AP History class, which made it all the worse. The agony of embarrassment in front of my intellectual peers!

As soon as I stepped in, the barely concealed whispers began.

“I can't believe this! Miss Perfect Shelby Yang got in trouble for once!”

“What did she do? Get a 99%?”

The only kind face that I saw in the room was that of one of my three best friends, Faith. Faith was one of the nicest girls in the grade. She was lean, beautiful, and had the palest blonde hair that I'd ever seen. She always had a ton of boys drooling after her, but loveable Faith always seemed too wrapped up in her own dreamy world to notice. I had thought that I would never say this, but I am extremely thankful for my klutziness sometimes because if I hadn't bumped into her and made her drop all of her books, I would never have met her. She gave me a reassuring smile to which I could only weakly return.

I had known that this jeering would happen. Though I was in essence the same as everyone else, I had somehow gained the reputation of being smarter than everyone else. I have no idea how. I had never bragged really and I was pretty sure that I got worse grades than some people; and yet, I had been branded with this painful label of being a “geek”. Even among these AP students, I was singled-out as being a geek.

Mr. Finkle absentmindedly gestured for me to have seat in the corner. I sighed and sat. I picked at my food and gloomily tried to engross myself in an oh-so-fascinating poster of the branches of government.

Beside it was a sign-up sheet for running for class president. I glanced at it and did a double-take. On the very first line, written in perfect cursive and the `I's dotted with hearts, was signed the name, Samanthia Fitzgerald. I could barely contain a snort of laughter. It was clear that no one else would dare to even try to run if Samanthia was in the race. She was the most popular and prettiest (she still can't compete with Faith though and that ticks her off) girl in school. She was also the captain of the cheerleading squad. She was everything that I was not. This meant that she was also, in my eyes, evil.

Now, don't get me wrong. It wasn't just me tainted with jealousy that thought Samanthia's was evil. No, she WAS in fact, cruel in the most cold-hearted way possible. If a lower ranking girl on the popularity scale say, I don't know, tripped and fell in front of her, she would literally kick the poor girl while she was down. She would then flip her perfect, gorgeous, red hair back and laugh.

I do not exaggerate. Well, okay. Maybe a little bit. But you get the point.

Lost in my thoughts, I hadn't heard the bell ring. I looked up at last and saw that the entire class had already left leaving me stupidly poking at my “beef stew” and Faith staring down at me concernedly. I trashed my foam tray with its disgusting concoction and picked up my heavy bag. “Come on Faith. Let's go,” I sighed, “Ugh. Remind me to wash out the burns that those stares must have put on my head.”

Faith giggled, obviously relieved that my dry sense of humour was still intact. We both had break so we headed across the courtyard to sit under our favorite tree, a beautiful and old weeping willow whose long sweeping branches had helped hide us from the outside world for as long as we had attended Fairmont High School. Along the way, we were nearly accosted by our best guy friend, Drew. He draped his arms around the two of us and said, “Now how are two of my best girls? Where's the third Musketeer?”

I laughed- Drew always called us his best girls. He claimed that the only other girl that he cared about was his mother. But, I seriously doubt that he cares about us all on the same level. I have a strong suspicion that poor Drew with his sandy brown hair and bright green eyes has a crush on beautiful, oblivious Faith.

I was just about to push him towards her when a head popped out of the curtain of willow. “The third Musketeer is present and accounted for!” she chirped.

“There you are Sasha! Oh my god. I just survived my first ever detention! It was awful. Not to mention that it was lunch detention and all I had was beef stew!” I said.

Sasha dragged us all in to the comfort of the willow tree and said to me, “Come on! It couldn't have been that bad! I get detentions all the time!” She looked over at Faith, “Was it that bad?”

Faith nodded. “`Fraid so.” Sasha knew exactly what that meant: the stares and whispers.

Sasha wrapped me in a big hug- she's one of the warmest people I know. “Oh honey. Those people are just missing out because they don't take the time to know the real you!” I was glad for the hug, but I started to gag a bit from the constant smell of paint that emitted from her clothes.

Sasha was a brilliant artist and she was always a mess of charcoal, paint, and who knows what else. We all loved her for it because it was what made Sasha well… Sasha. But, honestly, the fumes could cause some serious damage to a person's brain cells!

She instantly released me. “Oops! I did it again, didn't I?” We all laughed and sat down to talk.

~~

Well, we got to talking, and I brought up Samanthia's ambitions for class president.

“I think that it's stupid! Everyone knows that it's a popularity contest anyway so no one else will even bother to run and we'll be stuck with her as our class president!” I exclaimed.

Drew argued, “I really think that it is not a popularity contest! I think that if you have good ideas and something to say, then people will listen to you, and you would have a chance!”

As always, I felt the need to prove my point. So in an insane rush of excitement, I grabbed Drew, sprinted across the courtyard (which is saying a lot considering my stature) and ran to Mr. Finkle's classroom, which luckily, was empty. I grabbed a pen and scrawled my name directly beneath Samanthia's. I turned around to face Drew, who was currently still in a state of immense confusion, and beamed proudly.

If only I had known what I had just gotten myself into.