The real nervousness doesn’t come from walking through the double doors of a high school. Like I said, it’s not a women’s book club. Everybody doesn’t know everybody…

The real nervousness comes from walking through the single door of a classroom when you are late, on the first day of school because 1. The whole attention turns to you, 2. Everybody realizes you’re new because obviously they’ve never seen this face in this class before, 3. This is the golden moment they use to sum you up and decide if they want to be your friend, sneer at you whenever you walk by, or pretend you don’t exist until graduation, and finally 4. The teacher gets mad because you’re late.

“Kellerman?” The teacher; Mr. Dobrin asked, glaring at me from under his gigantic nerdy spectacles, with one bushy and overgrown eyebrow raised in question. He wasn’t so keen on me interrupting and being late to his class which had already started.

“Ellie, Sir… I’m sorry I’m late.” I replied respectfully, putting on my most convincing pitiful face, hoping I wouldn’t get a tardy slip on my first day.

Mr. Dobrin sighed. “The next time you get a tardy slip, and detention.” He said, eyeing me seriously.

I heaved an honest sigh of relief and whispered a ‘thank you’, along with a prayer to whichever saving grace had changed his mind. My pitiful face was not at all convincing and most times, it annoyed the teachers into actually giving me a tardy slip. I don’t even know why I still make the face.

“Everyone, this is Ellie Kellerman, our new transfer student.” He announced to the class.

The students eyed me with boredom. A girl on the very front row wearing glasses that looked almost identical to the one on Mr. Dobrin face, eyed me up and down. She glared and looked away when I caught her eye. A fat dude with jiggly rosy cheeks somewhere in the middle row wiggled his eyes suggestively at me and I puked a little in my mouth. A few students halfheartedly answered back “Hi, Ellie…” and went back to their various activities to pass the time.

“Take a seat.” Mr. Dobrin instructed, and I mildly wondered why I didn’t even take a seat soon enough and had to wait for him to tell me.

I weaved through the clustered lab chairs and tables, making sure not to bump any equipment or apparatus because I did that once and had to pay a large amount for it. Sitting in the front was out of option. I never took a seat in the front row… it was just… why did people even sit in the front row? The second row was filled too, along with the third and the fourth. I finally found two empty seats on the second to the last row, and sat there, next to a girl with mermaid blue hair and yellow highlights.

“Did you know that Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is actually an androgynous painting and he morphed his own features together with that of his muse?”

I glanced at the girl with the mermaid hair who just spoke.

“Erm, no actually. That’s weird.” I replied. The ‘weird’ referred to both the fact she shared, and the fact that she shared a fact without a proper introduction. The fact that she shared a fact as a method of introduction.

“Hi, I’m Tamie Choi.” She said, offering her hand for a handshake.

“Ellie.” her hands were unbelievably soft, and I held on for a second longer than necessary, just to feel the baby bum softness achieved probably by the sheer power of black magic.

“Looks like the king of aces wouldn’t be gracing us with his presence today.” She whispered sarcastically, motioning with her head to the empty seat on my left side, and flipping to the next page of her chemistry textbook which was identical to mine, but way more annotated with colorful and glittery pens.

“The king of aces?” I asked, a bit confused.

“Have you watched the movie; Kong: Skull Island?”

I blinked, completely not expecting the question. “Yes, I did…” I replied.

“Well, there’s that moment where one of the characters, I’ve forgotten his name, goes ‘That’s Kong. He’s King around here.’…” she explained, violently removing the cap of a pink pen and scribbling little scraggly words on the page of the textbook.

“Uh huh…” I said, urging her to go on.

“Well, it’s kinda like what I’m about to say regarding the king of aces, aka Carter Dane Hawthorne. Basically, he’s King around here. See? Same energy with Kong.” She finished, looking up at me as if I was supposed to now be enlightened.

I stared back at her blankly.

“Choi, is there something you’d like to share with the class?” Mr. Dobrin asked from the front of the class with his arms crossed.

“I do, Mr. Dobrin, but it would be disrespectful to interrupt your class.”

Some students snorted out in laughter, and Mr. Dobrin took turns to glare at them menacingly, including me who was innocent and only laughed on the inside. He gave an exasperated sigh and got back to the lesson.

I learned 0.9 percent of whatever it was that Mr. Dobrin droned on about in his monotone voice. Most times, chemistry was fun to me, but today, I was hungry and sleepy, and could barely keep myself awake long enough to scribble down a few things.

We got assigned lab partners, and I was hoping to be paired up with Tamie, but instead I got paired up with the absent person aka the king of aces, aka Carter, or whatever. For some reason the students all turned and faced me when Mr. Dobrin read out the names, and I was paired alongside Carter.

The same chick which the glasses who glared at me now sneered at me. Some students had a look that said “poor her” and others had a look that said “lucky her”. I couldn’t wait to meet this Carter guy.

The bell rang, and I gratefully packed my two books. Tamie proposed we eat lunch together with her friends, and I agreed. She seemed like a nice person and would probably have chill friends.

“You are so not going out with Quinn. He’s a douchebag!” Muhammad Ali screamed, throwing a handful of French fries at Tamie, who was sitting across from him.

Joan Summers reached out from next to Tamie, and caught some of the French fries, stuffing them into her mouth and quietly going back to the sketchbook she was mutilating by writing ‘Rock n’ Roll’ on the same spot over and over again until the paper tore.

We were sitting in the cafeteria, together with Tamie’s friends who I thought were ‘chill’. I can’t really say anything about the experience so far. It was uh… well…

“Uh, chill, gasoline. It’s nothing serious…” Tamie said, rolling her eyes and picking the French fries out of her hair. She tossed them into her mouth, eating them.

When she introduced me to them, and I asked why they called Muhammad ‘Gasoline’, Tamie had simply replied “Because he makes every bad situation worse.” And Joan had stared at me for the longest time possible before simply muttering “I dig your vibes.”

Gasoline sat back down with an overdramatic sigh. he gave Tamie the evil eye and set to work on finishing the rest of his burger, which had monstrous large bites all around it.

“Who’s king of… whatever anyway? Carter? My lab partner? Where is he?” I asked, trying to sound uninterested. In actuality, I was dying to know who this person was. The looks I got from the students in Chemistry class still lingered with me and I wondered which was more accurate. “lucky her”, or “poor her”.

“I don’t know… he usually sits at that table.” Tamie replied, pointing at the table in the center of the room where three airheads that looked like a horrible spinoff of mean girls were sitting, along with boys in football jackets.

Carter already sounds like a douchebag if he sits there.

“Ellie, sweetie, if the king of aces doesn’t kill you, can you ask him which shampoo he uses? For me, please?” Gasoline said in a pouty tone.

“Why can’t you ask him yourself.” I replied.

“Because he’d kill me.”

“More importantly, why do you want to know which shampoo he uses?” Joan spoke up, giving up on the poor page of the sketchbook and shutting it.

“His hair smells like the ocean.” Gasoline replied.

“How on earth do you know how his hair smells like?!” Tamie shot out, looking at Gasoline intently and waiting for him to explain.

Joan inched closer to him and I leaned in too, curious to hear the gossip.

Gasoline cleared his throat, breathed in, and paused for dramatic effect.

“Someone told me.”

Tamie smacked the back of his forehead, and Joan leaned back in her chair, murmuring “I should’ve known” to herself, and opening her sketchbook to resume the task of mutilating its pages.

I searched around the cafeteria for familiar faces. Neither Jason who drove me to school, nor potential, and furthermore confirmed asshole who blocked my locker and got showered with a cup of hot coffee were spotted.

The bell rang.