Finding Atlas

My senior year at St. Barton's Preparatory Academy began just as I thought it would: not with a fizzle, but a bang. Delphine Savoie, my infamous best friend, was the greatest temptation to walk the halls of St. Bart's since the 1800s, when the halls were roamed by her great-great grandmother Sabine DeBlanc. Known for the wild Mardi Gras-esque parties she threw whenever she could, Delphine shot to the top of the social ladder and had sat on her bejeweled throne since our sophomore year.

Just like any top-of-the-notch girl seen in a cliché movie, Delphine was beautiful, rich, and boy crazy. Unlike those overdone movie girls, Delphine was also the smartest girl I knew, fluent in French, Italian, and slowly progressing with Latin, and was taking five AP classes with a cumulative GPA of 4.09.

"Oh, Cal," Delphine breathed out my name with a light Southern drawl. Everyone called me by my middle name, Calista, or some variation of it because no flattering nickname could come out of a long name like Andromeda. "Did you hear about that new teacher Mr. Comeaux? He can make me come, oh—" And that was when she got run into. Well, more like barreled into, for that matter.

A bulky blonde guy just barreled into her, and they were both lying on the pavement within seconds. The contents of Delphine's bag—her phone, her iPod, her binders and papers and books, her brush, her makeup pouch—and the blonde guy's backpack—books, binders, bulky headphones, a Walkman, a few cassette tapes, and glasses—were scattered around them. Before the other boys swooning over Delphie could act, Blondie quickly scrambled up before reaching a hand down to her, and she got up beside him.

"Oh, god, I-uh, I'm so sorry! Are you okay, a-are you hurt or, uh?" He managed to ask her—with, might I point out, a ridiculously attractive and unplaceable accent—before mumbling under his breath, "Glasses, where are my glasses?" Delphine just smiled and picked up his glasses to give them to him.

"It's all right, I'm okay!" Even after she fell to the ground, she still managed to look pristine and cool and collected. I gnawed on the inside of my lip as I debated whether or not I should envy her. She turned to me and wriggled her eyebrows suggestively, and I could tell she thought he was attractive. As she turned around, she began to say, "Hi, I'm Del-" but he was already gone. "-Phine," she finished disappointedly.

As we walked to band, the first class of our day, I wondered why I didn't find myself too disappointed that Blondie was uninterested in Delphine.