He walked into the cafeteria with a smirk on his face and a girl on his arm and she hated him. Sure, he was the Oxford Dictionarydefinition of charming and charismatic, but it didn't stop the bubbling hatred from forming in her gut. Neither did it prevent her fingers from wrapping themselves too tightly around her fork in a way that made her friends gawk nervously. The boy was just too good, in that can't be true way, and she wanted to be the one armed with 'I told you so' when the truth came to light.
She just wished it would hurry up and happen, for she was tiring of her holding pattern. She was the only one in school who saw his smirk as an insult and his devil may care attitude as a direct challenge. She wanted to make him care, but she didn't dare. He was the kind of boy that everyone liked. He traversed click boarders like one broke a spiders web loose and she had more sense than to incur the malice of her collected school. She was never one for popularity, but she had no desire to be ostracized like a leper.
He kissed the girl lingeringly on the lips, with none of the gentleness that lingering seems to demand by the sound of the word, and then they separated, him to his friends and her to her own. His friends… another of the many reasons to detest him. They were all like him, loved and handsome, egotistic and laughing. They were always laughing, and it always felt like it was directed at her. There were five of them in that unofficial group, and they were a mixture of the school's social definitions… a jock, a bookworm, a prep, a geek and… him. He was all of them and none of them. He just was, and the school, for once, had not bothered with a label.
She remembered when their one-sided feud had began, way back in junior high. She loathed him, had for 4 years, and he probably had no clue what her name was. She felt angry at him for that, for not knowing who she was when she had such deep rooted and negative feelings towards him. He had sat next to her in Chemistry and made her do all the work while he laughed with Mr. Jock. It wasn't even that he wasn't smart or something forgivable like that, in which case she wouldn't want him touching a Bunsen burner anyways. No, he had to be intelligent too. He had to bastardize her name and take credit for work he had no hand in. Whoever said that being hated was the worst feeling in the world was obviously never ignored.
I looked around the room, at the people around him all vying for his attention and wondered how no one saw what I did. How no one ever caught a glimpse of the self-important, immature little boy who sat beneath the black floppy hair, she could never fathom. How they translated the pestilence shining in those exotic green eyes into mirth. How those dancing eyes could fool you into a conviction of importance.
She knew if any of the teachers ever found a door into her thoughts, she'd have to plead her soul not to get sent to the counsellor's office. She knew her friends thought her seven types of insane for hating him for so long for so little. If she ever bothered to get introspective, she would probably discover that she had to force herself to even dislike him, but damn it if she was ever going to be one of those puddle girls, melting to his feet for a smile. If she ever bothered to mull it all over, she had nothing but air holding her reasons together, but that was all the more reason. He'd never know, anyways, so she would pretend to abhor him in her little cocoon of fabrication, and pretend it wasn't the only thing that was keeping her from being one of those swooning girls she had sworn never to be… pretend, and she was safe…