s e v e n t e e n ; here comes unexpected things

I could spot my best friend anywhere in the crowd.

When you spend time with someone for the majority of your life, you memorize the length of their back, their walk from a distance, or the blurry way they look in your peripheral vision. Your ears immediately register the sound of their laughter even if the background noise drowns the intensity of it. If you’ve meet someone where you just sense that they’re in the room and their presence calms the tenseness that you didn’t realize you were harboring, it should be the rarest, most cherished relationship you could have.

The thing about about meeting new people is that you’ll start to recognize their faces everywhere. Before meeting the girls from detention, they felt like unfamiliar faces that I have never crossed path with during my three years of high school. Though there is a high possibility that we might have been in the same space before, but meeting people and vaguely remembering the details on their faces definitely make it quicker to spot them in the crowd.

So it isn’t that surprising when I bump into the tall girl with the ponytail getting in line for lunch a week later. She hovers at least a head above me, but that could be because I’m fairly shorter than the average height. Her legs look even longer wearing her black track pants with the school’s basketball jacket. Now standing next to her, the broadness of her shoulders stand out even more. Perhaps she’s on our basketball team? Or her boyfriend’s jacket?

She turns around to grab a bottle of ketchup. Her face conveys a look of recognition. “Oh hey.” She offers a wide smile, displaying the rows of her teeth. “We meet again.”

“Hey, have you been back to the devil’s spawn?” I say, referring to the strict woman who was in charge of our detention the previous week. For some unknown reasons, I instinctively scan around the cafeteria just in case she shows up. Speak of the devil and he shall appear. In this case, she shall appear. Thankfully and logically, the woman is nowhere in sight.

She laughs and offers me the ketchup bottle. I shake it before squeezing a good amount on my tray. “Oh god, no. I’ve been quiet during my trigonometry class to stay out of trouble.”

“Have you caused trouble in that class?”

She scoffs, though it doesn’t appear like it is directed toward my question. “Once, only because I was on a rant about my brother to my friend, and my teacher was in a really bad mood so my talking probably irritated her. I wasn’t even disrupting her lecture. It was during independence work time, and everyone else was talking, too. I guess my loudness was an easy target? The room turned dead silence right after she publicly gave me a slip to detention.”

“Oh no,” I sympathize. “You got unlucky that day.”

“Tell me about it. Why were in you detention?”

“Tardiness.”

She groans. “You also got unlucky that day.”

I give her a knowing smile. “Tell me about it.”

Her lips stretch to a wide grin at me using her earlier response. “Where do you sit at lunch?”

I don’t know how to answer that without sounding like a loner when in fact, I am the epitome of a loner at lunch. Ever since Kai and I are split into lunch A and lunch B this year, I’ve been sitting alone and communicating with him through texts. I decide to just go with the truth because there’s no point of hiding what’s true. “In the corner over there.”

She cranes her neck to where my finger is aiming. “With those girls? Are they your friends?”

“Oh, not with them. I sit in that empty space at the edge,” I explain.

Upon hearing this, she starts walking toward the area where I usually station at. “Let’s go then.”

“Huh?”

“Let’s sit together. I usually sit in a classroom with a club but I’m not really close with any of the members.”

I don’t try to correct that she isn’t really close to me either, but my excitement of having someone to talk to at lunch overpowers everything else.

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i think i made a friend :)))

Imaginary friends don’t count, Skye.

first of all, you are RUDE. second of all, she is real ok??

I’m kidding. Tell me about her.

I send him a series of four texts. All of them are continuously followed by another without a single halt.

i met her in detention actually and we bumped into each other again as i was getting lunch today

she’s super tal