Life Plans

“Right, I want a 400 word essay on your holiday for Thursday please.” Said Mrs Firth. Honestly, as much as I loved Spanish, I didn’t really feel like writing some next long paragraph about information this woman didn’t need. Like I’m going to be telling her about the sexy men I met in Portugal? Please.

“So,” said Chad, as we were leaving Spanish, “I’m having party this weekend, and I better see all of you there, otherwise you’re losing a friend.” I noticed that while he was saying that, he was looking directly at me.

“What?” I asked, raising my eyebrows at him.

“Well, we wouldn’t exactly want a repeat of last week now, would we?”

I rolled my eyes at him. We had all planned to go to Nando’s (didn’t know they had it here :D), but then my mum wanted me to stay behind and do some work. Obviously, these idiots I call fiends chose not to believe me, so I just kept going with my head down.

“Ahh, fine, party, Saturday evening, got it”

“Good,” said Chad. “Now obviously, this little angel here” he said, gesturing at me, “is gonna be too busy at church to help set up” (insert my eye roll here) “so, I’m relying on the rest of you to help me out. Please?” The first person who he aimed his puppy eyes to was, for obvious reasons, Shay. She gave the ‘I can’t believe this may possibly be the father of my kids’ loo, before rolling her eyes and nodding, resulting in Chad grabbing her and feverishly kissing her.”

“Oh gosh guys!” Exclaimed Taylor. “Okay, okay, I’ll help, if you promise to get a room when I’m there?” Everyone began agreeing, until Clive was smart enough to step in.

“Get a room whilst we’re there? You guys honestly want to be setting up this party while these two have mad and passionate sex upstairs?”

Next period was Graphics, which I loved, mostly because our teacher was cooler than Ryan from 90210.Seeriously, lest week, because it was my first day, he gave me tin of Celebrations. I’d never heard of them, but apparently they’re a big deal over here, and after tasting the Malteaser one, I understood why.

“Right class”, began Mr Kenneth, “Well, I had a lesson planned for today, until I realised we’d already covered everything on it, so I let my dog eat it.” He threw his briefcase on his desk, looked up and smiled at us. “So, new lesson plan; does anybody have anything desighn related that they want to do? And I swear, if anybody says that stupid helicopter game, you’re all getting detention.” I knew exactly what game he was talking about. It honestly had to be the most irritating game God had ever cursed humanity with.

Surprisingly, Chad’s hand shot up in the air. Sir raised an eyebrow at his enthusiasm, before asking “Yes, Cooper?”

He cleared his throat before starting. “Well, you see sir, I’m having a party this weekend,” everybody in the room began to cheer, “and I want to make it invitation only.” Everybody began to groan. Sir smiled at this. “And, of course, there won’t be any alcohol at this underage party, yes?”

“Oh, no sir. I would never dream of it.” You could clearly see the twinkle in his eye.

“Well then, the school has no rules against me helping you with this, so why not? Right, everybody, I want you all to design party invites. Chad will choose the best design, and I’m sure that whoever wins, will be granted automatic invitation to this party, correct?” Said sir, looking at the man himself. Chad instantly nodded.

One thing you need to remember, is that Chad is probably the most popular guy at school, along with Clive and Dylan. That’s why these three can click their fingers and their will is obeyed. Don’t get me wrong, they weren’t assholes, otherwise I wouldn’t be friends with them, but everybody wanted to be around them. That would probably be why a fair percentage of the female population here didn’t like me. I hadn’t even been here a month, and already I was with the ‘high society crowd’.

This would also be why, as soon as Chad had given that nod, everybody, apart from me, Tammy and Chad (the only ones from our group who had this class) began to work their computers like mad. Everybody wanted to go to this party.

I looked over at sir, who was eating a Chicken sandwich and walking over in our direction. “Girls,” he began, “don’t you want to be invited to this party?”

“Oh, don’t worry sir,” said Tammy, “I’m pretty sure he values his balls, so we’re going to be invited to the party.”

Sir just laughed at her spirit. He stayed to talk to us for a bit, before he had to go and help a student with his font or something like that.

“Right,” Said Tammy, “We and the girls to go shopping tomorrow. Party clothes and all. You in?” No way I was going to give up an excuse to shop.

We began talking about how desperate the people in this school were, what time we’re meeting tomorrow, what to eat for lunch and all that, until Mr K called end of the lesson and let Chad go around and choose his favourite design. This guy called Thomas won, and I was quite happy for him. He was one of those socially awkward people, but I sat next to him in history, and he was a pretty nice guy, so I figured this would be good for him.

On our way out, our good friend decided to ask us for a favour.

“Girls, you realise you two are probably the most gorgeous girls I know, right?” I raised my eyebrows at him. “So, Shay wouldn’t mind me repeating that very sentence to her, will she?”

He glared at me, before deciding it would be better to get straight to the point than to argue with me.

“Alright, look, I’m going to get all the invites printed and a copy of the guest list. All I need you to do is hand out the invites.” We both stopped in our tracks and turned to look at him. It was like we could read each other’s minds, the way we spoke.

“Well, the thing is,” Said Tammy,

“We don’t exactly work for free” I said

“And so, for us to be able to grant you this little request,”

“We’re going to need to work out our price,”

“So, we’re going to need a rough idea on just how many invites we need to give out,”

“And we’ll get back to you.”

He looked at us with such a confused and scared face, internally, I was pissing myself laughing.

Then he started to do one of those nervous chuckles. “This is a joke, right?”

“Oh no, Chad Cooper (yeah, that’s actually his name), I’m afraid we don’t kid.” Tammy said that with such a look in her eyes, it would have made the people from Dragon’s Den nervous.

He continued to look at us, before sighing and saying “Alright, 70 quid each enough?”

We looked at each other, before turning back to him and gave him an agreeing nod. Then he walked off, muttering about how expensive friendship was nowadays.

The second he was out of sight, we burst out laughing, only to be found by a very confused-looking Dylan and Clive.

‘Mom! We’re home!” shouted Derrek as we walked through the door. My mom made sure we did it individually so she knew we all arrived safely after she watched Lovely Bones. That movie honestly freaked out my whole family. We all had to be home at exactly whatever time we said we would be home. Any after-school clubs were up on a chart on our fridge, and going to a friend’s house after school would mean calling home with an exact time of home arrival. My mom didn’t even like us catching the bus, but her and dad were always at work in the morning, and considering Derrek has to wait another few more months before he can go and re-take his driving test, there wasn’t any other way for us to get to school.

“Alright guys, dinner’s on the table.” She called to us. This would be why I loved Wednesday’s and Friday’s. One of my parents was always home in time to cook for us, so that Derrek and me didn’t have to.

We were all enjoying a typically loud family meal with everyone talking about everything, when there was a knock on the door. Derrek shot up out of his seat as fast as anything, and ran to it, shouting something about him going to answer it. I found this really strange. As special as my brother is, he never got this excited about someone at the door, but the rest of the family seemed to just brush it off as nothing important.

He was gone for about 5 minutes, before coming back.

“Who was it, son?” asked my dad, whilst he was attacking his chicken in a dignified manner.

“What?” said Derrek, looking slightly confused as he sat back onto the table.

“The door?” my dad said, more quizzically now.

“Oh!” Derrek said, seeming to come back to his senses. “Just some saleswoman trying to sell me something. I tried getting rid of her, but she was talking for ages, and I’m too polite to slam the door in her face.”

My father seemed to see this as a completely valid excuse, but I had great difficulty believing it. I don’t see exactly why an overly-talkative saleswoman would have made my brother’s hands shake the way I saw them doing just before he hid them under the table. I looked at him with a questioning look, but he didn’t seem to want to look at me, concentrating instead on steadying his hands so he could get back to his meal.

I didn’t know what to think, but one thing was for sure; I needed to find out what was going on, and hope to God that I may just be over-analysing. However, I had a depressing feeling that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t.