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Every Friday night, Marcy, Kayti and I would have a sleepover. We always did it alphabetically for who hosted them so I always started first every year after summer break was over. Then it went Kayti and Marcy. Tonight, it was Marcy’s turn to host. Unfortunately, Kayti had called me after my big blow-up with my dad on Thursday night and told us that she was grounded for throwing out her mom’s supply of condoms—which made me squirm rather uncomfortably—and had to stay home on Friday night. She wouldn’t be coming to the sleepover so it was just Marcy and I flying solo.

Well, okay not really. Jared would be there as well, and apparently he had his hot best friend staying over as well. Marcy always swooned over Jared’s friend, Ian, because of the fact that he was tall and muscular and he had dark blond hair sweeping in front of his eyes; which was exactly the kind of look on a guy that Marcy absolutely adored.

Jared was pretty gorgeous; I had to admit it. When I was thirteen, I had the most gigantic crush on him ever that I even wrote his name in a heart on the bottom of my running shoe. Marcy saw it when we were sitting on the floor during a school assembly and questioned my choices in boys because she believed that anyone who liked her brother was clearly insane.

Now, Jared was taller and fitter, which made it that much harder to be around him, because he was still gorgeous. He and I were always friendly to each other whenever I saw him or he saw me, but Marcy claimed it was because he sort of had a crush on me last year before he went into University. Although, that might’ve just been infatuation because he had seen me in a bikini when we were stepping into the hot tub at his house.

Marcy still found it gross that I was interested in her brother before. Now, I still was but not as much as in grade nine. After all, despite the fact that University boys were a major turn on for high school girls, he was three years older than me; not to mention Marcy’s brother. She would probably slaughter me before anything happened between me and Jared. Besides, with Shane coming back into the picture and admitting he had a crush on me when we were younger, along with Blade and I becoming friends and me speaking with Nathaniel enough to have my two girlfriends snatch the phone away and talk to him before calling his voice sexy, I was pretty certain that I had enough boys in my life.

I wasn’t nearly as anxious to get to the sleepover as I usually was on Friday’s. Last semester, I was practically jumping up and down in my seat of every class because my classes were boring and there weren’t many people in those classes that I liked to talk to. However, this semester was a lot more fun and at least I knew more people.

In biology class Friday morning, when I sat down between Blade and Nick—who were both there before I was—Blade smirked.

“So hey, what’d your dad think? Am I parentally approved?” he joked.

Nick’s eyes went wide and he leaned forward so that he was in our eyes view, pointing between Blade and I repeatedly. “Are you two . . .?”

“No,” Blade and I said in unison, shaking our heads. I looked over at him.

“He likes you,” I said. Blade’s eyes widened.

“Seriously? He likes guy friends of yours that insult him?”

“Apparently,” I said, shrugging. Blade chuckled.

“Tell that to your future boyfriends and then you’re golden,” he said.

Mrs. Adams entered the room now, clapping her hands together to draw our attention. Apparently, she had decided to give us a little "reliever experiment" as she called it. It was to make up for causing nearly half of the class nauseous yesterday while we were dissecting pigs. Now, we had a fun assignment. She paired everyone up in groups of three and I was stuck with David—who had already snagged one of the stations at the side of the room and spread his stuff all over the table—and a boy named Ryan, who I recognized from drama but just never talked to. While the class separated and found spots to work at, I sat down on my stool across the David.

After everyone was seated, she explained what we were going to do. Apparently, it was called the “bubblegum experiment”. I really didn’t have any clue about how bubblegum related to biology—unless possibly, it was something like, “well bubblegum is something you chew, and you are a person with biological characteristics” or “bubblegum is made by people who have biological characteristics”—but I didn’t say anything. I guess maybe it might have had a deeper meaning if she was planning on talking about saliva and how it even saliva had chromosomes or anything relating to humans and reproduction but I wasn’t concentrating on that.

I wasn’t even paying attention to Mrs. Adams. Instead, I was staring at David, who was chewing one of the pieces of gum that she had placed in front of us, but he seemed to be having trouble.

I raised my eyebrows at him. “Are you all right?” I asked him.

“Fine,” he grunted, making a screw-face.

“Haven’t you ever chewed gum before?”

“I have but Hubba Bubba is just really difficult to chew," he replied.

“David,” Mrs. Adams scolded, narrowing her eyes at him and crossing her arms over her chest. “I didn’t tell you to chew the gum yet. That wasn’t even your first experiment.”

David’s face became very flushed from being put on the spot while a couple of people chuckled. “Sorry,” he mumbled. Mrs. Adams pointed to the garbage and David stood up, sauntered over to it, and spat out his gum. Mrs. Adams nodded her approval and I bit my lip, holding in my laugh.

As for the other students, they didn’t succeed because it was just too amusing to see David acting like a very obedient and well-trained dog.

When he sat back down, he smirked and shook his head. Mrs. Adams tossed me a pack of Hubba Bubba again and I caught it, placing it down in front of me.

“Christabelle, make sure David doesn’t eat any more of it,” she said, using my full name instead of making it shorter. I nodded and stuffed it all in my pocket.

When she was finished giving out all of the instructions, she let us get to work, but not before handing out a sheet with more in-depth details and instructions, along with the procedure and the questions to go along with the experiments.

“So, the first thing we have to do is see which brand of gum stretches the farthest across the room,” I said, reading over the sheet and looking up at David when I was finished. He snatched the pack of gum out of my hands the moment I took it out of my pocket. He ripped it opened with his teeth and spat the wrapper into the garbage. Then he popped it into his mouth.

“David!” I exclaimed. “Stop eating all the gum!”

“I’m not,” he objected, taking it out of his mouth again and stretching it a little bit between his fingers. “There’s no way it would be able to stretch without being chewed a little bit first. Here.”

He held out one side of the gum and I scowled in disgust. Ryan chuckled.

“What makes you think I want to touch it now that it’s been in your mouth?” I snapped, shaking my head. David sighed and rolled his eyes. I reached behind him onto the teacher’s desk, grabbing two pairs of plastic gloves. I handed him a pair and he slipped them onto his hands. Then I slowly and hesitantly reaching toward his hand and took one side of the gum. I cringed and squeezed my eyes closed.

“Oh God. This is so gross,” I mumbled, pulling it outwards. David rolled his eyes.

“Okay, walk back,” he said, nodding behind me. I did as I was told and began to slowly walk in the opposite direction of David, making sure to not pull too hard on the gum and make it break. Ryan grabbed the measuring tape and placed one end on the floor by David’s foot and followed me until the gum snapped back and hit David in the chest.

He smirked and rolled the gum up into a ball before placing it back in his mouth. I frowned and turned away, looking down at Ryan as he placed his finger over a number.

“What brand was that?” he asked, standing up and going over to the table, grabbing his pencil and writing something down on the paper we were given.

“Bubblicious,” David replied. “How far did it stretch?”

“One-hundred and seventeen centimeters,” Ryan replied, before turning to look at David and narrowing his eyes. “How many pieces of gum did you use?”

“One,” David replied. I reached into my pocket, searching for the other piece but there was only two pieces of gum left; both of which were Hubba Bubba. I glared at David.

“Liar,” I hissed. He just smirked. “How the hell did you get it without me noticing?”

“You were too concentrated on getting the gloves to pay attention to me reaching into your pocket,” he replied, shrugging. Ryan sighed and shook his head, flipping his pencil and erasing what he had just written.

“David, divide one-hundred and seventeen in half,” he said, crossing his arms on the table and raising his eyebrows. David glared at him.

“Shut up. You know I suck at math,” he said. Ryan smirked.

“That’s exactly why I’m asking you,” he said. David looked up at the ceiling, trying to figure it out in his brain. His mouth moved as he spoke the equation to himself. I rolled my eyes.

“It’s fifty-eight point five,” I said simply, crossing my arms over my chest. David nodded and pointed to me.

“Yeah, that,” he said. Doing the experiments with David was . . . interesting, to say the least. We had to borrow even more gum from Mrs. Adams, who warned us that she’d put gum in our ears if we didn’t stop wasting it; at which point David gave up being silly and just concentrated on passing this lab. The last experiment we had to do was to count how many chews of one piece of gum we could get in thirty seconds. I was the chewer, Ryan was the counter, and David was the timer.

“Ready?” he asked me, raising his eyebrows and looking down at his watch. I nodded and put the Hubba Bubba piece in my mouth.

“Oh, God. This is ridiculous. It’s like rock hard. How are we supposed to put this in our mouth?” I grumbled. Ryan and David exchanged a look before they both smirked in amusement. I went over what I had just said in my head, and heard it how they would of heard it. It didn’t sound very mature.

“Go ahead. You know you want to,” I said, rolling my eyes. David laughed and clapped his hands together.

“That’s what she said.”



Nick had just discovered yesterday that his locker was down the hall from mine so when class ended, we walked out together and headed toward our lockers. That was until someone jumped on my back, nearly knocking me off my feet. Their legs were wrapped around my waist and their arms around my shoulders like they were expecting a piggy-back or something.

Nick smirked.

“Christabelle!”

Ugh, David.

Despite the fact that he was going to be the one to pay for my back surgery after my bones cracked and felt liked they needed to be replaced from the contact, the situation we were in was fairly humorous.

“Hi David,” I said, smiling. “Can you get off me please?”

“I’m eating lunch with you,” he said, ignoring my request to get the feeling in my back returned to me.

“Uhm . . . okay.”

“Nick! You’re eating with us,” David said, pointing an accusing finger at him.

“Oh, all right then,” he said, sounding somewhat confused but the smirk that was still on his face said that confusion wasn’t the only emotion he was portraying right now.

“Well, now that we’ve clarified who’s eating with whom, can you get off me?” I repeated, raising my eyebrows.

“Oh! Right, sorry.” He hopped off my back and patted me on the shoulder and I stood up straight again instead of looking like a little cripple of a person. I could imagine that David was going to get along well with Marcy and Kayti judging by his personality compared to theirs, so lunch was definitely going to be interesting.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

“All right, guys. We’ve got visitors today,” I said, sitting down in the cafeteria across the table from Kayti and Marcy. They looked up from their lunches and smiled at me, before looking at Nick and David.

“Well hello there, nameless people,” Marcy joked, raising a hand at them in a sad attempt at a wave. Nick sat on my right side and David on my left.

“Right, sorry. This is Marcy and Kayti, and this is Nick and David,” I said, pointing to each other them as I said their names.

“How long have you guys known each other?” Marcy asked, crossing her arms over the table.

“Like . . . five days,” Nick replied, glancing at me and shrugging.

“Hey, aren’t you in my hospitality class?” Kayti asked, pointing to David. He nodded and smiled.

“Yeah, you’re the girl that got pushed in the garbage, right?”

Marcy burst out laughing and I looked at Kayti with wide eyes.

“You got pushed in the garbage?” I asked, gaping at her. She blushed and cleared her throat, glaring at David.

“You couldn’t be cool,” she mumbled, making him laugh. My phone rang in my pocket and I took it out, looking down to see [Nathaniel] flash across the screen since I had programmed it so it didn’t appear with the message from the website.

Marcy frowned when she noticed me smiling. “Who’s that?” she asked.

“Shh,” I hissed, waving a hand in front of my face as my way of telling her not to say anything right now.

Kayti smirked. “Just tell him you’re busy,” she said. I glared.

“I can’t do that,” I objected while my ringtone music continued to play. “And how did you even know he was calling me?”

“Lucky guess,” she replied, shrugging. “But also because you just confirmed it. I honestly had no idea so you just gave it away.”

I scowled and looked down at my phone, debating answering it and having to talk to Nathaniel while Kayti, Marcy, David and Nick hovered—listening in on the whole conversation—or just ignore it and call him back later but either way, I was going to get interrogated by the four people sitting with me.

I decided on not letting them eavesdrop on my conversation with Nathan and put my cell phone back in my pocket, letting it ring until it eventually just stopped.

“Who was that?” David asked, raising his eyebrows at me.

“Oh, you two haven’t heard about Nathaniel?” Marcy asked, smirking in satisfaction and leaning toward them.

“Marcy, shut up,” I snapped through gritted teeth. It was bad enough that Marcy and Kayti teased me about my “secret relationship” with Nathaniel, but when it all came back to how long David teased me about screaming at Mrs. Adams, than if he knew about this he was most likely never going to give this up.

“No, but we’d love to learn,” Nick replied, smirking at me as I groaned and slammed my head down on the table.

One thing I’d learned about Marcy over the years was that she never left out details when she was explaining things. Nick and David now knew just as much as she did; if not more because they began asking me questions Marcy hadn’t yet asked, and since I was too honest for my own damn good, I answered them.

“So this Nathaniel guy . . . do you like him?” David asked, surprisingly not cracking any jokes or making fun of me for forming a friendship with a guy I’ve never seen in person and met over the internet. I raised my head and leaned back on my chair.

“I don’t know. It’s been too short a period of time to determine that,” I said. “I mean, he’s nice and everything but Blade seems to be under the impression that he’s lying about some stuff and it’s kind of rubbing off on me and getting me all paranoid.”

Nick shrugged. “Well so what if he is? Almost everyone in the world lies on the internet. They’ll say anything to please who they’re talking to.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled sarcastically.

“He’s right, though,” Marcy said, nodding.

Suddenly, I felt a tug on my ponytail and looked up, seeing Blade walking by with a smile on his face. Shane followed slightly behind him, raising his hand in an almost imperceptible wave. I waved back and looked at Marcy and Kayti, who both raised their eyebrows at me.

“What?” I asked.

“What was that?” Kayti asked, nodding over her shoulder.

“That was two boys walking by,” I deadpanned, arching my brows in confusion.

“No. The ponytail-tugging,” Nick put in, yanking lightly on his own hair as demonstration like I didn’t understand the simple words he was speaking. I shrugged.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He was just yanking my hair. What’s the big deal?”

“Blade doesn’t just pull any random girls hair,” David explained, smirking. “Are you sure you two aren’t a couple?”

“Who’d you hear that from?”

David pointed to my right at Nick. I turned my attention on him and he whistled “Mary Had A Little Lamb”, looking everywhere but at me. I glared.

“Why would you tell him that?” I hissed.

“Oh, come on,” he said, rolling his eyes and setting them on me finally. “David and I both agree that you two would be a good couple—despite the fact that he’d probably get bruised a lot.”

“Why?” Marcy asked.

“Christabelle’s violent,” Nick replied.

I slapped him on the arm. “I am not.”

“Ow,” he said obviously. I scowled and crossed my arms over my chest.

“I don’t think he’d mind,” David pointed out, beginning to laugh at whatever he was thinking of saying next. “Some guys like the girlfriend to be the dominating one.”