Avoid All Entanglements

I am the girl whose sister died.

“Spencer, nice to meet you again, I’m Natalie. I think we met at Tyler’s party? I’ll be your student guide for today.”

I stared at her with a sinking feeling in my stomach. Out of all the possible student guides in Rosewood High, I had to be assigned to the one girl who possibly knew something about me and running. Though she was wearing a friendly grin on her face, one hand smoothening her short red hair and the other holding a file, carrying out every day, causal gestures; she wasn’t fooled by me.

Realising that I was letting the silence become way too long and uncomfortable, I said, “Oh, um, yeah. I remember you.”

She nodded once, her smile never wavering. “Well, let’s see what subjects you’re taking. Okay...you have English with Mr Stan at the English Lab and so do I, so let’s go together.”

Something lurched in my stomach and I worried it might be my breakfast. I hoped I wasn’t going to throw up.

We walked quickly, later on I would learn that Natalie did everything quickly (‘Speed is everything, Spencer, especially when you run short distance like I do’), and she continued talking to me. “So well, I see you’re taking a lot of AP classes, you must be pretty smart huh? Rosewood has a pretty good academic track record so you’ll be in good hands. By the way, do you do anything aside from studying? I mean, not to be rude and all, but colleges like well-rounded students and even if your SATs are good, don’t you think you need something else to give you the edge?”

“...you mean something like track.”

“You are pretty smart.” She stopped and pulled the door open, waiting politely for me to enter first. The teacher barely glanced at me before Natalie pulled me to a seat next to her somewhere near the middle of the class. “There’s one thing about me that you should know. I don’t forget people’s faces easily and especially not people who run the mile in six minutes.”

I flushed, both pleased and embarrassed that I wasn’t the only one who had remembered it. It had been my best timing and barely enough to get first for the state finals. I had been ridiculously proud of it but I kept it to myself; only Cora knew how happy I had been.

“What I don’t get is why you’re not running anymore. And why is Tyler lying for you?”

Glancing at her expression, her eyebrows drawn together and her pursed lips, I felt my heartbeat grow faster. It was a look I’d grown accustomed to, I’d seen the same expression whenever I passed by Cora and my track friends, only that then it was an expression of hurt while Natalie’s was one of confusion. But both were unwelcomed.

Struggling to keep my voice low and my tone measured, I whispered, “I just don’t like running anymore, okay? And I don’t know why Tyler did that; maybe he was just trying to be nice.”

“I don’t discount that. Tyler’s a nice guy. But I don’t believe that you can just wake up one day and not like running anymore. You ran the mile in six minutes, to do that you must’ve been pretty dedicated. You wouldn’t have trained that hard if you didn’t like it.”

I looked away from her, trying to swallow the rising panic. Nobody had confronted me like this about stopping track. Not Dad, who’d been the very first person to send me for morning trainings. Not Mom, who’d been to my every race. Not even Cora, who refused to back off until I started ignoring her. Back home, nobody had dared. And here was Natalie, whose last name I didn’t even know, in my face arguing with me about it.

“Well I did. I just woke up one day and everything changed. I don’t like running anymore and I’ll appreciate it if you stop talking to me about it.”

Natalie stared at me for a second, and a flicker of hurt passed through her eyes before she shrugged and turned away from me.

I ran a hand through my hair, wondering why I was feeling guilty. After all, what I wanted was for everyone to leave me alone...

...wasn’t it?



Lunch time, aside from English which had passed painfully thanks to the redheaded girl next to me, it was something I was seriously worried about. Natalie had said that I was welcomed to sit with her and her track friends; I knew that I wasn’t going to take up the offer for obvious reasons. But because of that, I didn’t know where else to go.

I’d been trying to avoid thinking about this, right up to the point where I had gotten food on my lunch tray and stood in the middle of the cafeteria, faced with tables full of kids. Then I almost lost it.

“Hey, Spencer! You want to sit here?” An unfamiliar male voice called out to me.

Peering in the direction where the voice had came from, I saw a puzzled Tyler gazing at a smirking Riley. I was pretty confused myself, wondering why Riley was asking me to sit with them. When he saw I wasn’t moving, he actually got up and directed me towards their table.

“Make some room everyone. This is Spencer. She’s new.” Riley glared at some guys. They awkwardly shifted until I had a seat next to Tyler, opposite Sasha McKinley.

Riley slipped into the seat next to Sasha and put his arm around her, in that alpha male trying to make it clear that the girl was his way. Sasha’s eyes passed over me quickly, giving no indication that she remembered meeting me at Tyler’s party before going back to her salad. Today she was wearing a white tank top and a short skirt, somehow still looking every bit as gorgeous as she had at the party.

Tyler nodded at me, his expression somewhat less friendly than it usually was. But I had a feeling it had something to with the still smirking Riley than with me. “Hey so I heard that Nat’s your student guide. I hope she hasn’t been giving you any problems?”

I shook my head, not wanting to get into what had happened during English. “Nope, she’s been really nice to me.”

“Are you sure about that?” Riley’s tone was casual, playing with Sasha’s hair. “I thought she’d been ridiculously jealous seeing how she’s had a crush on Ty here since last year. It must’ve hurt when she saw him paying more attention to you than she's ever had from him.”

Tyler shot him a warning look and Sasha shifted in her seat, seemingly aware that the atmosphere had become strangely tense.

“Um, no, she’s really been nice.”

“Well I’m sure it wouldn’t last.”

“Riley, shut up,” said Sasha, nonchalantly.

Riley shot Sasha a dirty look. She rolled her eyes and got up, so did the other girls in the table. I gathered that the girls were her friends, she was the head of their group and they were leaving for the washroom. But I was completely confused as to what was actually happening.

“You should go after her,” offered Tyler, when the girls were all gone. It surprised me that his tone was even, not at all like he was pissed off with Riley. “You know she’ll get over it.”

Riley seemed to mull over this for a while before getting up too. But he left me with a parting shot, “See you real soon, Spencer. Hopefully we can talk more next time.”

Feeling extremely awkward that it was just Tyler, some bunch of guys at the other end of the table and me, I ate quickly, trying to avoid conversation. Tyler didn’t seem to notice; instead he seemed absentminded, barely even taking part in the guys' conversation.

I excused myself, he shot me a quick smile, and I went to the washroom since I didn’t know where else to go. I nearly left the washroom when I found Sasha primping inside.

She gave me a cursory glance and then said, “Look, Spencer, you shouldn’t take anything that Riley says personally.”

I washed my hands, buying time to reply her. But she didn’t need a reply, instead she continued, “Riley and Tyler have been best friends for years. But lately, things have been getting a little...rough.” She pulled out a tube of lip gloss and smeared some onto her lips, her eyes focused on her reflection the whole time. “It takes a lot out of Riley to not do things a certain way, a way which he thinks is right. The only way he can make himself do what Tyler wants is to annoy Tyler, to take it out on him somehow. It might not seem fair looking at it from the outside but relationships are always different when you’re in them. And they’re both coping with their problems in the only way they know how.”

“...but what does this have to do with me?” I watched, slightly fascinated with the way the meticulous way she was fixing her hair. She had poured some white cream into her hands, rubbed them and was rubbing it into her hair. I had never seen someone so girly. “I’m just the new girl.”

“You’re not just the new girl. Tyler has something for lost causes, maybe it’s got something to do with him or maybe it’s just genetic. Whatever it is, Tyler sees it better than any of us do, he can tell who needs help and he’s always interested in helping them. That’s why he’s gotten a reputation as a nice guy and that’s why Riley’s acting like such an immature asshole whenever he sees the two of you together. Because, no offence or anything, but it’s pretty much obvious to anyone that you’re lost. And Tyler’s drawn to you like a moth to fire. Riley just doesn’t want him to get hurt.”

She was finally done and she looked at me, her eyes softer than I expected them to be. “So don’t take anything personally.”

Then Sasha glanced at her reflection one last time and left the washroom.

I struggled to absorb everything that she had said, but mostly, she left me wondering who knew that I was lost and how obvious it was to everyone. But more importantly, I wanted to know how exactly Riley thought I was going to hurt Tyler.

I knew better than anyone that in order to hurt someone, that person needed to care about you and, maybe even, love you. And as far as I knew, I was never going to let anyone close enough to me to do that to me again.