Chapter Six -Shunned

I searched all over the hotel but I couldn't find Eric anywhere. Finally, after about half an hour, I sat down on a couch in the lobby and rested my head on my hand. 'What have I done?' I thought for about the hundredth time. 'No' was such a simple word to say but could be very, VERY hurtful to the person you said it to. Of course, it depended on the question.

I could not help but thinking, WONDERING what Eric was thinking at that very moment. I should have said yes; no one but Eric and I knew what the question had been. Why had I given in to peer-pressure? It was one of those things that I always did but regretted whole-heartedly afterwards. This one hadn't taken that long to sink in.

'Hey Lane, are we still cool? ... But are we still friends, even if you don't want to talk to me?' His words were haunting my every being.

My GOSH! How could I have been so blindingly stupid! Eric was one of the coolest guys I knew – my only guy friend! – and I had just practically told him that I didn't want to be friends any more! I know that I hated it when Eric had pretty much shunned me from talking to him in public at the start of middle school; but now I had done that right back at him. Yet I ... I had been worse. I had actually said to his face that I didn't want to be friends with him any more; not even in private!

Man I felt SO ready to kill myself (not literally to all you dimwits out there)!

"Hey, Lane; are you ok?" Tina asked, sitting down next to me. How she found me I didn't know. Maybe it had something to do with sitting out in the open?

"Yeah, did Eric say something to hurt you?" Hannah asked, sitting down on the other side of me. "We can go beat him up if you want us to."

In spite of the moment, I smiled and almost laughed. But gloom settled right back in again. "Thanks, guys," I said weakly. "But it was more what I said."

"What did you say?" Tina asked, taking my hand up in hers.

"Nothing; you wouldn't understand," I said. I didn't really think that Tina and Hannah would find it logical that I was friends with Eric still – or HAD been friends with him. They thought that we had stopped being friends in middle school, like I had thought at first.

The next morning, we all headed downstairs for our next event – math. Wow, now didn't THAT sound fun. We would be stuck doing stupid equations all day long in a stuffy room. The highlight, I thought, would be when I told Eric I was sorry and that I wanted to stop being friends with him in secret. At least that's what I had planned to do. I didn't know if I would actually have to guts to carry it through. But, hey, it was a noble cause ... wasn't it?

But it turned out that my assumptions about the math stuff were completely off coarse. The big hotel pool had been reserved for us for a couple of hours and they told us all to break into groups of five before they would tell us what we were going to be doing. So we were going to have five groups.

Right away, Tina, Hannah and I grabbed hands. 'Yes!' I thought. 'Maybe I can get Eric to be in our group!' I looked around for him and saw him standing off in the background. He was looking down at the ground and didn't seem to be that interested in the game. "I'll be right back," I told my two best friends.

"You're going to miss the game!" Tina called after me. I chose to ignore her and walked straight up to Eric.

"Hey," I said. He just nodded. "Listen," I began. Yes! I had gotten started! "Umm ... we need two more people for our group and I was wondering if you would like to be one of them. That isn't the only reason I want you to be on our team, honest. I just wanted to say ... to say that I'm sorry about yesterday and that I don't want ..."

Eric turned to me and cut me off by saying: "Don't worry; I won't talk to you anymore." And then he walked off to join a group that was holding up one finger high in the air, clearly saying that they needed one more person for their group.

It felt like my innards were going to spill onto the floor. I knew that I deserved what he had said, but I didn't want to. Tears welled up in my eyes. I thought that maybe I should stand there a little longer than I felt like, just to get my point across and make him feel sorry, but most everyone was already in a group and I figured that I might as well get on back to mine.

It turned out that Tina and Hannah had rounded up two ninth grade boys to be on our team. Now THAT was good. Boys; they would be able to help us win this ... hopefully.

Well, the game didn't turn out to be as fun as I thought it would be. People on the teams took turns diving into the water and retrieving these different colored plastic things. Then you would take it back to your team so that they could figure out the math problem. The team with the most correctly solved coins at the end of the game would win. I noticed that Eric was pointedly not looking at me and of course, his team won because he could do math problems in his head like THAT (snap!)! I don't even think they used their calculator.

Author's Note: I hope this chapter made up for the last one. Please review!