The Struggle of the Underdogs

Riona walked towards her last period of the day, history, with Jeff walking beside her, much to her chagrin. She knew that their was no point in trying to walk faster or run, because he would catch up to her within seconds. He was still looking down at her in confusion, wondering why she had frozen in shock.

He asked her "Is it because I forgot to put deodorant on in the locker room? Sorry, this is one of the few days that I don't remember to bring some with me to school."

Riona ignored him, her mind boiling over with fearful questions about her revelation. She kept her face an emotionless mask, not wishing for Jeff to see the terror she was feeling at the moment. She wondered "How did I not detect that vile scent earlier? Bah! I should've kept away from him from the beginning! Now, I'm hopelessly entangled in his affections for me!"

They walked up to the history classroom upstairs, where Jeff stated suddenly "Wait one sec."

Despite herself, Riona halted, and then silently chided herself for doing so. She watched Jeff walk up to the classroom door and open it, bowing and beckoning for her to go in ahead of him.

"Ladies first" he said with a smile, and Riona walked into class, thinking "The gentleman act isn't fooling me. I am all too aware that all though he treats females with absolute respect, he acts quite rude towards any males he doesn't like. He is the definition of fake."

After taking her seat in the corner of the room, the bell rang, and class began. She noted that a few of Cassie's followers were in the same class as her again, and they were still glaring at her. "Ha! Let them look at me in such a malicious way. All they are doing is providing me with endless entertainment!", Riona mused with a sneer.

The teacher, a middle-aged man with graying brown hair, stood in front of the board and announced to everyone that for the first few weeks, they would be studying European history, focusing on the 2 World Wars.

He spontaneously turned to Riona and formally asked her "I was wondering my dear, could you possibly share with the class any knowledge you have pertaining to the history of your ancestral home? I understand that you are purely Irish, and I have always ached to hear a native Irish person describe the past of their country."

Riona shook her head and politely told him "Sir, you're asking the wrong person. I know nothing whatsoever about Ireland, I was born and raised in Ashland, Ohio for much of my life."

He nodded and remarked "Hence your lack of an Irish accent. Very well then, what do your parents know about your homeland?"

"Oh, great. Now I must let the cat out of the bag, as Harriet loves to say", Riona thought miserably.

She curtly replied "I don't know sir, and I most likely will never know what knowledge they own about Ireland. Both of my parents died when I was 7 years old."

Everybody in the room gasped and looked at her in utter shock, to her great annoyance. She did not appreciate the teacher forcing her to reveal such a tender fact about herself. The teacher blinked, apologized, and immediately began describing the causes of World War 1.

"Of course, he's doing that to avoid making this any more awkward than it already is", Riona regarded with bitterness.

Now she would have to deal with several people pitying her, and that would only irritate her to no end.

Sure enough, when the class ended, Jeff came up to her and, albeit sincerely, told her "I'm so sorry Riona. I had no idea you went through a tragedy like that. Is there anything I can do to help ease your pain?"

As they walked towards the front entrance, she looked up at him and snidely replied "Absolutely! Stop talking to me and leave me alone, for the last time!"

She registered hurt in his eyes, but she truly didn't care. She nearly ran out the front door towards her home, thinking "He has wasted plenty of my time already. If I have to be cruel in order to make him stay away from me, so be it. He needs to stop thinking that we could ever be friends."

Later that night, while looking back on the day's events in the comfort of his home, Jeff stripped off his clothes and took a hot shower, sighing in both relaxation and weariness. He was truly upset that Riona was being so rude towards him, after all the effort that he was putting in to get along with her. He was going out of his way to be an angel towards her, and as a reward, she continued to snap at him and verbally push him away. Jeff couldn't understand why she wasn't attracted to him like all the other girls were. As the hot water poured down his body, he checked himself out, trying to reassure himself that he was a stud like so many girls told him daily.

"My arms are bigger than telephone poles", he noted, flexing his biceps with immense satisfaction. While he rubbed his arms, feeling the powerful muscles ripple, he looked down at his torso and continued his self-analysis.

"I have a huge chest that always gets highlighted by whatever shirt I wear, and chicks love to hug me just so they can rest their heads on it. My abs are an eight-pack, and whenever I walk around shirtless, everybody admires how solid they are, and how they always bulge when I bend over."

He looked further down his body and thought with a smug smile "As for the quality of other parts of me...that's for me to know, and Riona to find out. Lucky for her, she's gonna be the first, when I finally make her mine."

Jeff stepped out of the shower, turned off the water and quickly dried himself. Wrapping the towel around his waist, he stood in front of the bathroom mirror to admire his beefy upper body.

He mused, while casually flexing his chest "Riona doesn't seem to care at all about peoples' physical appearances. She loves to hang with Carl, who is nowhere near as handsome as I am."

He paused, and frowned as he realized "That's why she can't stand me...because I'm not nice to Carl. Hmph. Well, the only problem I really have with him is that he won Maggie over so easily, when I've been trying to get her to notice me ever since elementary school. It isn't fair, and I have every right to be mad at him!"

Jeff sauntered into his room, quickly put on a fresh pair of boxers, and crawled under his bed sheets. He turned off the lamp next to his bed, and tried to focus on falling asleep, doing his best to keep himself from getting too worked up over one of the biggest losers in the school having the hottest cheerleader in the squad as his girlfriend.

Riona's sneering face leered at Jeff in his mind while he tried to fall asleep.

He silently wondered "What can I do to make her realize that I really want to be her lover? She's the one and only girl who has ever had the nerve to talk to me like she does, and even though it irks me...it kinda turns me on. Greatly. Not only that, but she's so different from all the bland, identical sluts that follow me around wherever I go. All of them are so tan, they look like carrots. Riona is beyond beautiful, I meant that wholeheartedly when I told her that today." He turned on his side, staring at the wall in frustration. He knew that he was going to have to really work at getting her to fall for him, but he didn't know how to make that happen.

After several minutes of trying to come up with a solution, Jeff decided to sleep on the issue and try to win her over again tomorrow. He closed his eyes and finally drifted off to a deep sleep. That night, he dreamed of Carl preventing him from getting near Riona, the nerd's brown eyes blazing with a deep hatred that Jeff had tried and failed to comprehend over the last 4 years. The overwhelming hatred Carl felt towards Jeff had started in the eighth grade, progressively getting worse with each passing year. Though he currently believed that it was because the loser was a ridiculously sensitive crybaby, Jeff suspected that he was horribly wrong.A