I glanced over to see Jesse waiting for me to lead the way to our next class. Maybe history won’t be so boring after all.
We walked side by side out of the classroom and down the hallway to our next class. As soon as I entered the room, I heard someone shouting my name from the back of the room. I looked up to see two of the girls on my squad, Andrea and Vanessa, waving their hands and pointing to an empty seat in front of them. I smiled and waved back as I started walking toward them.
Remembering that Jesse was still with me, I turned to look at him. “Do you want to sit back there with us?”
He seemed unsure, but he finally nodded. “Sure.”
I watched Andrea’s and Vanessa’s eyes widen as they took Jesse in. I smiled to myself. Leave it to the broke kid to make every girl at Hamrick High turn into a puddle on the floor.
––––––––
This place was everything that I had expected and not in a good way. I had known coming here was a mistake, but my mother hadn’t listened to me when I told her that I wouldn’t be welcome here.
“Nonsense. You snagged that scholarship, and you have just as much right as the rest of them to be there,” she’d said this morning, standing in the kitchen of our single-wide trailer.
I had tried to make one final attempt to make her see reason, but she’d refused to listen to me. It wasn’t that I cared what those stuck-up rich kids thought of me because I didn’t. I just had no desire to attend Hamrick High and pretend to be something I wasn’t. Public school was fine by me, but my mother had all but begged me to apply for the scholarship.
I had agreed, not expecting to even be considered. When I came home from school one day last spring, I had been shocked to see my mother sitting at our kitchen table, holding an acceptance letter in her hand. Since then, I’d tried to find every excuse out there not to attend, but she’d refused to let me get out of it. She thought this was my chance to make it somewhere in life, to escape the mobile home park I’d grown up in.
I hadn’t been able to tell her that I had no desire to attend college. Art was my thing, and I’d found my calling when I picked up a tattoo gun my freshman year in high school. For someone who had no formal training, I was damn good at it, too.
I’d spent the past two years working at a local tattoo shop. I was the slave boy since I obviously wasn’t old enough to do tattoos legally, but I’d learned a lot from my boss, Rick, and his guys. I had hoped that after I turned eighteen and graduated, I could get an internship there, so I could be fully licensed. I knew now that it was never going to happen. This trailer-park kid was going to end up going to college like all the respectable kids.
I knew my mom would be disappointed if she found out all I wanted to do with my life was tattoo. She would see it as staying where I was in life, and she wanted so much more for me. My dad had left when I was only a few years old, and since then, she had worked her ass off to provide for me, so I could go out into the world and prove myself. And in her eyes, that meant going to college. I hated the idea of college, but I knew I would go just to make her happy. I’d worked hard in school, so that maybe, just maybe, I could snag a scholarship. There was no way that I would let her take out loans to put me through school.
I’d finally given up this morning, and I’d driven the twenty minutes to my new school. I was here for her and her alone.
Of course, when I pulled in, the first person I’d seen was her. I didn’t even know her name, but I’d remembered her just like it was yesterday when she had sat in the sandbox and told me I was trash. I should have thanked her really. She had been the first person who showed me what the world was really like.
She still looked the same, only older. Even at six, she was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. Her eyes were a deep shade of green, and her hair was a light strawberry blonde.
On that afternoon, my mom had decided to take me to the really nice park across town to celebrate the end of kindergarten. I had looked up to see her sitting by herself in the sandbox, and I had wanted to go play with her. She had looked so lonely and sad, and I had been determined to cheer her up.