Amanda did pass, but she didn’t help with my v-card issue. No, she taped our conversation and let everyone know that there wasn’t a possibility that I was a virgin. It was a sure thing, coming from the horse’s mouth! As she politely wrote it on the blog.
A book shut suddenly with a sound like a shot in front of my face. “Daydreaming about fucking Seamus are you, Nikki? I mean, Nicolette.”
Amanda stood right in front of me with the cliché bad-girl curl to her lip. Her face was a mask of derision as she looked me over. She always did that, every time she saw me. The thing was, that look didn’t exactly make me feel small anymore.
“Not at all, Amanda. I was just wondering what STD you possibly picked up this time. I’ve heard you’ve had a few now.” I pushed the cart out of the way as she feigned a horrified ignorance that there was any kind of STD she might have caught. I wasn’t the timid girl that started the first year at uni. No more could she talk to me as if I was beneath her.
She’d done away with the feigned affront a long time ago because she knew she didn’t really have a leg to stand on in that department. She did, however, want to keep that case of chlamydia she’d caught a secret. Too bad everyone on campus knew it about it by the time she’d left the health clinic.
“Well,” Amanda said as she snatched up Seamus’s hand, “at least I can get fucked. I tell you what, next time you can watch, Nicolette. It’s the closest you’ll ever get to a dick.”
I rolled my eyes as she walked off in a huff. She pulled the rather dazed-looking Seamus with her. He didn’t even seem to register that I’d just insulted him as much as her. I shook my head with disbelief but knew that the boy was there to bring in money from the sports fans, not to get an education.
She’d made her way out the door, her middle finger lifted in the air as the door swung open. She was such a bitch.
I wished there was some way to make her feel, for just a moment, the way she made me feel. I doubted a girl like her would ever know that kind of embarrassment, shame, or any of the other emotions she’d subjected me to. I had no idea how to stop her. She was popular, her father was important, and she was beautiful.
I was plain, poor, and had no kind of influence at all. On anyone.
Well, maybe on my best friend, I thought, as I finished up at work and headed back to the dorm. She listened to me, she’d tried to help me with Amanda and that awful blog Amanda wrote, but Brooklyn wasn’t any more powerful than I was.
For now, all I could do was not rise to the bait and hope that I could get through the last few weeks of my last term. That’s all I had to do. Well, that and lose my virginity.
That had been an ongoing quest from the day I stepped onto campus. I’ve never had a boyfriend, or a hookup, of any kind. I’d always been too busy. Now, I wanted to make sure I got rid of that little sign of so-called purity. I didn’t want to be pure anymore. I wanted to be grown, experienced, and knowledgeable. Those were my two goals, and someone like Amanda wasn’t really important in the long run. That’s what I told myself every day now if only my head and heart would listen.Chapter Two“I never understood why you wanted her to make you over and find you a man anyway,” my best friend forever, Brooklyn, said as I told her about what had happened at the library. Brooklyn was exasperated with me. “She’s a mean little bitch that is living the best years of her life right now. In a couple of years, she’ll marry some asshole, knock out a few babies, and have a drinking problem as hubby comes home later and later.”
She was sitting on the steps of our building with me, dressed in dark blue jeans, a white turtleneck sweater that skimmed halfway down her thighs, and black boots. Her sable hair was in neat braids down her back, and she barely wore makeup, other than a maroon shade of lipstick that made her entire face become, somehow, more beautiful. I looked at her and wished I could be that beautiful without makeup on. I just looked like that nasty bit of water left in the sink after you wash dishes when I tried to go out without the bare minimum.
“I wanted a chance to lose my you-know-what,” I muttered between my teeth as her boyfriend, Stuart, came up to greet her with a hug. I didn’t really want to talk about the arrangement I’d made with Amanda all those months ago in the last semester. It had come back to bite me in the ass in more ways than one.