Chapter One
“Mom! I can’t find my shoes!” My step-brother Aaron yells, leaning from the banister.
As I walk down the hallway towards the stairs, I glance into his room. Under his bed, I see the heel of his red converse sticking out from a pile of dirty laundry.
“Maybe if you weren’t such a slob, your things wouldn’t be so hard to find. Try cleaning under your bed, first,” I joke, in a condescending tone, spinning around the railing and trotting down the steps.
“Oh screw off, Stef!” He remarks, stomping to his room as I close the front door behind me.
I walk down the cobblestone steps and through the front lawn, trying to unclasp my car keys from the hook on my backpack at the same time. Parked in front of my house is my Mom’s old Volvo Wagon. She gave it to me as an early graduation gift, right before she moved to Oregon. The car is around 12 years old, and there’s a large piece of its navy blue paint chipped off near the gas tank, revealing the silver metal underneath. Most people my age would probably complain, but it’s a good car, and it gets me where I need to go. It’s also one of the only things I have left that still feels like home - aside from my dog, Starlight.
I unlock the doors and sit down, placing my backpack in the passenger seat to my right. The tan leather is scuffed from my shoes, a daily reminder of when my Mom would take me on her morning coffee drives before dropping me off at school. Bellbrook hasn’t felt the same since my parents got divorced; my Mom moved a few months after everything was finalized, and my Dad married his girlfriend, Dana Hearth, a year later. So, all I have left are tiny moments, memories of when things seemed to be okay and the world was a little brighter. I suppose the silver lining in all of this, though, is that this is my last year in Bellbrook. It’s my senior year, and once I graduate, I won’t be coming back.
As I pull into the school parking lot, I see a bright yellow banner strung across the school’s brick entryway. It reads:
WELCOME BACK, BEARS! WE CAN’T WAIT TO CLAW OUR WAY INTO THE NEW SCHOOL YEAR WITH YOU AT BELLBROOK HIGH!
“Claw our way out sounds more fitting,” I scoff quietly to myself, as I turn off the engine and pull my key from the ignition.
I grab my blue and green backpack from its seat and walk towards the large paneled doors. As I push through them, I’m met with a two-way corridor. The halls are lined corner-to-corner with tall, dark green lockers that connect to speckled tile floors that glimmer under the blinding fluorescent lights.
I make my way over to my locker, number 341, and enter the combination.
27-43-12
I spin the dial to the last number and the door springs open, revealing the cold metal shelving inside. As I go to unzip my backpack, my eyes meet with three pairs of shoes underneath my locker door. I peer through the rusty hinges that hold the metal door to the wall to see three girls standing there. One girl snickers to another before placing her hands on her hips and tapping her foot impatiently. I instantly recognize her as Megan Reynolds and realize that I know her friends, too. To Megan’s left is Nina Wright, and standing next to Nina is Kristen Hull. The three of them have made it their mission to make my life a living hell ever since freshman year, and now that summer break is over, they’ve returned for their reign of terror.
“Gee, someone sure is impolite. Haven’t you seen us standing here?” Megan asks harshly.
My silence is returned with the piercing sound of laughter from Nina and Kristen. Their high-pitched screeches are loud enough that they could be mistaken for the school’s fire alarm, and they know it too. I finish placing my textbooks on their respective shelves and close my locker door, facing away from Megan and her friends. Once it slams shut, I sling my bag over my right shoulder and begin walking to my first class.
As I retreat down the hall, I hear Megan yell out, “See you later, Sappho-Stef!” as another round of laughter erupts from her minions.
I hunch my shoulders back and roll my neck, continuing down the corridor at a faster pace this time. I hate that nickname, I always have. Ever since Megan coined it our freshman year, she’s used it at every opportunity she gets. Megan and I met in our 7th grade science class when the teacher assigned us as lab partners for a frog dissection. Back then, Megan was timid and quiet. When she did speak, the sound of her voice amounted to a mere whisper. It was during that class that we became friends, though. People even considered us best friends.
It was that same year that I also realized that I was a lesbian. I had known that my attraction differed from the other girls in my class before that point, of course, but I also thought that maybe I just needed to find the perfect guy in order to feel attraction. But, as time went on, I started to notice that it was easy to feel attracted to girls and that, oppositely, there was always something about a guy that would turn me away. By 7th grade, my efforts to feel attraction towards boys became futile, and I finally accepted that it would never happen. I was fine with this fact, but I worried that telling people would cause them to reject me. So, I kept it a secret. It wasn’t until 9th grade that I finally told someone, and that someone was Megan. After I told her, she started becoming distant. She wouldn’t text me back, she stopped coming over, and she eventually ditched me to become friends with Nina and Kristen. When I asked her why, she told me that she knew that I told her because I had a crush on her. I tried to tell her that that wasn’t true, but she was convinced that it was. It wasn’t long after that her nickname for me appeared, effectively ruining any hope I had at rekindling our friendship.
I haven’t made many friends since then, and the friends I did make would always faze themselves into a new crowd of people soon after meeting me. So, I’ve learned to be content on my own. It’s better, in a way, since I won’t have to miss anyone when I leave for college next fall.
