The In-Betweeners

Brian McClafferty could be described by many different words. He wasn't necessarily unique, but he wasn't exactly normal either. And while Shane had all the potential in the world and chose to be a wallflower, Brian had probably the potential Shane held in her pinkie, but wanted to be included in the "in crowd" more than anything in the world. He would do anything to get what he wanted, and sometimes could be considered borderline ruthless, I mean as ruthless as a high school student could be. He was talkative, opinionated, bold, impressionable, slightly conceited, and gave into peer pressure so easily it was almost scary; he was all those things and more.

But most of all, Brian McClafferty was an asshole.

If Shane was the person who dragged me away from the conformity of high school , then Brian was the anchor that pulled me right back in (please forgive me for sounding so cliche, Shane was not someone who preached nonconformity, she just happened to not conform).

Brian didn't want to be friends with Shane and I, that much was clear from the very first time we met. He didn't not like us, he just thought that he deserved better, more popular friends. And I agreed with him. He didn't deserve different friends because they would treat him well and be good friends to him, he deserved them because they were pricks just like him.

That's another good word to describe Brian: a prick.

But despite all his flaws, Brian became my best friend.

The first day he moved to Wilmington, he tried desperately to fit in with the kids like Abby Turner, Mike Howard, George Ross, and Megan Burke; I realize that you don't know these names, but they were the popular kids in my grade. On the first day Brian arrived, he knew intuitively, like most high school students do, that these students were the ones he wanted to be friends with. He tried to strike up a conversation with Mike during our Spanish class, where I watched from the corner, but Mike ignored him. He tried in the lunch-line to flirt with Megan, the prettiest girl in the school, right in front of me but was horribly denied.

And I watched him with interest as he walked slowly around the cafeteria on that first day of sophomore year, while he desperately scanned for a table to sit at. His eyes eventually fell on me and Shane, the only two sitting at our round table in the back of the room, and he walked over to us.

"Can I sit here?" he asked.

At the time, there was no hint of the asshole that he truly was in his voice. He just sounded like some kid who had no place else to go and who only wanted to fit in. Shane barely looked at him, but I knew how he felt.

"Yeah," I replied.

"Thanks."

He sat down across from me, closer to Shane, and introduced himself.

"I'm Brian," he said. "I just moved here a few weeks ago from North Carolina."

"I'm James, and this is Shane," I said.

Shane looked up, nodded in greeting, and then looked back down at her math homework that she needed to finish for the next period. There was a moment of awkward silence before Shane stood up and grabbed her garbage.

"I'll be right back."

She walked away towards the garbage can in the middle of the cafeteria, and I watched as Brian's eyes followed her like a hawk's.

"She's hot, dude." he said. "She your girl?"

I just looked at him for a moment. My girl? What the fuck was that supposed to mean? She wasn't my girlfriend, but even if she was I would never call her my girl. That seemed stupid to me.

"No, she's just a friend." I murmured.

"What?" he whispered incredulously. "Dude...she's literally the hottest girl I've ever seen. Does she have a boyfriend? If I were you I woulda snatched that up by now."

"No, she doesn't have a boyfriend. And I don't know, she's just a friend. I've never thought of her any other way." I said slowly.

"Why? You gay?" he grunted.

Maybe I'm just terrible at choosing friends. I mean my two best friends consisted of a girl who literally didn't care about anything, and a boy who cared too much about all the wrong things. Maybe I should have tried to branch out to friends who were more normal, more like me. But I didn't.

And even though I knew Brian was an asshole from the very minute he opened his mouth to introduce himself, he somehow became my best friend.