Pretty, Ugly Girl

Abi was introduced to the group of people in the skate park after she struck the deal with the guy. And for the first time in her life, she met a lesbian couple. At first she didn't know what to think because she hadn't met anyone who was gay or lesbian before so really, she couldn't form an opinion of them. But when she did, she couldn't form an opinion at first look.

There were five people in the group – six if you included the guy who was introducing her to them – and she could actually remember their names when each one was introduced to her. The two lesbians were Emma and Georgia, the guy who had curly black hair was Matty, the girl who had her nose pierced twice was Katie and the only blonde girl was Sam.

The guy who she had struck the deal with was called Tommy.

They were all aged between seventeen and twenty one. Neither cared that she was only fifteen because age was only a number that could be faked if needed. Abi found herself liking the way they thought.

Now Abi wasn't a stupid girl although her exam results may say differently. She knew certain things that others didn't and she knew how to use other things to her advantage. The only thing is she never pushed herself in her lessons which meant that she went into the bottom sets in school. It was on purpose though because she didn't want any coursework to take home like the top sets would do. So in order to make sure she didn't, she answered dumbly to every exam and got in the bottom sets.

So obviously Abi knew that getting into a deal with a nineteen year old guy might not be the smartest thing for her to do. But she didn't care because he knew what she wanted and as long as she kept giving him what he wanted, he'd help her get what she wanted.

The question of how floated in her mind but she shrugged it off. For some reason, Abi found herself trusting Tommy within the short period of time she had known him in. Obviously not enough to trust her life in his hands but a fair amount of trust. A trust that none of her friends at school would ever achieve.

Maybe it was simply because she didn't care about the friends she had in her school. They weren't anything of importance and she was thinking of ditching them next time she went back to school. Of course, she didn't know when she would next go to school because to be quite frank, she never wanted to go again. In fact she would prefer to get not one single GCSE if it meant she never had to go back.

After the introductions were been and gone, each of the people she was introduced to dived into a conversation with someone else which left Abi to strike one up with Tommy. Just before she was about to start one, he grabbed her arm lightly and pulled her off to the side. She complied quietly and waited for him to talk to her. She gathered that he might want to talk to her about something that he didn't want the others to know about. After all why else would he move them both away from the others?

“Do you know what this deal entails, right Abi?” Tommy asked a sly tone in his voice that Abi failed to pick up on.

She nodded. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“First I have to ask you some questions. Okay?” Abi nodded. “How much do you value your education?”

She didn't even skip a beat with her answer, “I don't.”

“I'm going to set rules that you're going to have you follow. Before I do I have to make sure you're going to listen to them and not object to any. Will you?”

Abi paused for a moment. He's going to be setting rules for her to follow and by what he just said, some might not be the best rules to follow. Why else would he need to know whether she'll object to them or not? Could she trust him that much?

The answer was yes, she could. “I'll listen to them.”

Tommy smiled in almost agreement with what she said. “So tomorrow you have to meet me here at half eight dead on in the morning. From here we'll go to mine and I'll tell you the rules then set things in motion.”

She nodded at what he was saying. “I'll need the days in which you want the weed so that I can tell my provider, if you wish, and sort out the payment for it.”

He seemed to be thinking for a moment. “Okay... I'll tell you every Sunday night the day that I want it in that week. Though if I wanted it on the Monday I'll tell you on the Friday. Okay?”

“Yeah, that's okay.”

“Good.”

And like that the conversation seemed to finish just as fast as it had started. Glancing at her phone Abi saw that she had been out for near enough the whole day and decided that she should head home right now. It was amazing that the time had actually flown right on by because for the whole day Abi hadn't been doing jack all and yet suddenly it was six pm.

She didn't realise that she had been hanging out with this group for the past hour. It seemed to have flown right on by and felt to her like only twenty minutes had been.

Abi bid goodbye to everyone and reassured Tommy that she would be there at half eight tomorrow. Well she convinced herself that she was reassuring Tommy when in fact she was reassuring herself. After that she slipped out of the gate of the skate park and jumped off the little wall that it was sat on. Instead of walking back towards the park so she could get to her road she opted to take the longer way of walking past the local secondary school and down three different slip roads before finally emerging on her road.

Just as she put her key in the lock the door swung open and Mel was standing at the door looking a bit worried. However when she saw Abi the worried look vanished. “Where have you been Abi? You've been gone all day. We haven't had a single phone call and you weren't even home for lunch!” Mel fussed, stepping aside to let the girl pass her.

All Abi did was roll her eyes. “I'm here now, happy? Jeez, if I knew you would be like this I would never come back. Can you ever stop nagging for once? Because seriously, no one cares.”

Despite the fact that Mel knew that was true she didn't like thinking about it all the time. But it was hard not to when she had Abi keep telling her it, James blanking her most of the time, Jade barely even noticing her and Hannah picking up each of the other three's habits at the same time.

She knew that as they grew older they might grow a dislike for her – it was something she expected because their mother was dead and she was who their father remarried – but she never expected something like this. And most certainly she didn't expect all four to be like it.

If anything Mel had almost expected Hannah to like her the most seeing as she was the youngest when their father married her. But it didn't turn out how she expected.

When Abi went in the sitting room she sneered at the fact that James' girlfriend was sat on the sofa next to him. It made James look up from the newspaper he was reading but roll his eyes when he saw it was only Abi. “And here I thought you had died,” he said before looking back down at the newspaper.

Abi just scoffed. “And here I thought dogs weren't allowed on the sofa.” Everyone in the room knew that she was referring to James' girlfriend but James didn't even look up from what he was reading when she said it. Mel decided to try and step in.

“Abi,” she said in a warning tone that the girl took no notice of. However James just scoffed at Mel's attempt, “Don't even try it Mel.”

She just let out a sigh before going back into the kitchen to continue with the dinner. If anything, her cooking was the one thing that they didn't criticise about. It could be the fact that they each had their mother's trait of having a love for food, but whenever Mel cooked dinner for them they never complained about it and always ate without having too much of an argument with each other.

Too bad that she rarely ever had the person she wanted most home for dinner. Even though she rarely ever saw their father, the idea of a divorce never once crossed her mind. It was mostly because even though each of John's kids acted like they didn't like her, they needed her there for them, whether they knew it or not. Because they needed someone to actually care about them and try and get them to try their hardest.

And no matter what Jade ever said about her, Mel was the one who was there for when she miscarried her child at the age of fifteen. Even though she could have gloated that she knew that Jade was physically and emotionally too young to carry a child, she didn't.

She was there for her much like a mother would be.

And in a way, that was what made Jade hate her.