Page 198 of Handsome Devil
Or maybe it was the fact that she insta-hated me and ignored me in equal measure.
From that moment on, I tried to ignore her, too, believe me.
But then we got paired up as lab partners in Chemistry. I had way too many classes with her, and in every single one of them she probably thought she was better than me. Until we got our first Chem test back and she saw my mark. I wasn’t the top student in the class, but close.
She got an unremarkable B. Which was why we got paired up. It hit her in that moment; that I was the stronger lab partner, meant to help her pull her grade up—not the other way around.
We looked at each other from the pre-assigned seats of our shared lab table, and her dark eyes narrowed at me. I knew that look. It was the moment she realized I wasn’t the dumb jock she probably took me for.
It only seemed to make her hate me more.
She also hated chinos (she wrote an essay about it in English), had an inexplicable love affair with Diet Sprite (she didn’t need diet anything), and always wore high heels that made her sound like a teacher clipping down the hallway. She dressed like a teacher, too—a fashionable one—and always wore at least one nauseatingly vibrant color. She was in drama club and debate club, seemed to live for getting into arguments with people—and winning them—and looked down her nose at the most popular kids on a pretty regular basis.
She didn’t hang out with the cheerleaders, or anyone else you might think she would if you saw her in a short skirt.
I did. They rode up regularly underneath our Chem lab table.
She ate lunch with the debate nerds, of all people. And unlike so many other girls in senior class, she rarely came out to hockey games, and she definitely didn’t fangirl over the home team.
Then I heard she’d made the girls’ soccer team.
And, yeah. And I went to every one of those games. Practices, too.
Not because of her. Or at least, notjustbecause of her. There were other girls with nice legs on the soccer team. Really. And what the hell else was I gonna do on a Wednesday night but get stoned on the bleachers while Lex talked my ear off, and watch girls slide across the wet grass in shorts?
As it turned out, Devi Sereda fucking glowed on that soccer field. She was a born competitor. She loved the game. She loved to win. She was even a gracious loser. Much more gracious than me. Dripping with sweat and bending it like Beckham, she had a winning smile for the competition. She definitely never smiled at me like that.
What the hell did I care?
It was girls’ soccer, not guys’ hockey. There were like, a few exuberant soccer moms and maybe a few friends of the players on the bleachers, at the best of times.
And me and my boys, smoking up. Shane, Lex and Johnny always had my back, even if all I wanted to do was watch chicks play soccer in the rain for some indiscernible reason.
That was just how things rolled when you were king of the school.
Honestly, I never set out to be king of anything. I didn’t know, when I was young, that I already wore the crown. But over time, I’d made peace with my role in life. I played by the rules, and everything worked out for me.
I could’ve had anything I wanted.
It should’ve made me happy.
It didn’t.
Especially when I found something I wanted and it didn’t want me back.
Devi Sereda was not on the agenda, and she did not fit.
She broke all the rules.
She wasn’t rich. At least, not by my family’s standards.
She wasn’t even gorgeous. Back then, most of her was a solid eight or a nine, objectively, and granted, she might’ve even been a ten. But it was hard to tell with the whole hideous-face-wound situation kinda ruining the view. It took her down to a subjective six.
Yeah, so, we had a ranking system. And between Johnny deeming her a “fugly” two on account of the scar and Lex awarding her a nine on account of her ass, my boys compromised on the soft six.
I stayed right out of that conversation.
She wasn’t exactly phenomenal at school, either. Mainly because her heart really wasn’t in that fight. I even heard her tell our History teacher she wasn’t planning to go to college.
