Chapter 7 - A Girl's Best Friend - Lydia
"Is there a reason we're not sitting with Allison and Jackson?" Sadie asked, eyeing me over the questionable cafeteria food on her lunch tray. I ignored the question, keeping my eyes glued on my boyfriend. At the moment, he was on the other side of the room, sitting with Allison and looking completely absorbed. He hadn't even looked up from the conversation once—not to see who was around, not to see if we were joining him, nothing. I narrowed my eyes, estimating the distance between them as far too close for me to be comfortable with. Jackson smiled at her.
"Jackson's been acting weird," I informed Sadie, twirling my fork in my hand, though my eyes remained on the target. "Jumpy, snarky…and he's been talking to Allison a lot."
"Okay?" Sadie asked, clearly not getting the gist. "Maybe because they're friends?" I finally moved my eyes away from Jackson, turning to look at the innocent brunette in front of me with a slight glare. Maybe it was because Sadie didn't have a boyfriend—had never had a boyfriend—but she didn't seem to grasp the concept that Jackson talking excessively to other girls was likely a symptom of a much larger, more dangerous problem.
"I don't mean just talking," I explained, trying to keep my voice low in case any passersby decided it would be a good idea to listen in on my relationship troubles. "Like concerned, emotional talking. Ever since Wednesday night." I was sure to specify the specific day, instead of bringing up the actual event of being hunted and cornered by a freaking serial killer. My life had become far too much like a horror film lately. I didn't like horror films. And I wasn't intending on reliving the experience anymore that I had to.
That at least seemed to get Sadie's attention. Her eyebrows arched up in surprise, before she quickly turned around to shoot Jackson and Allison another look. My eyes slid over again, just in time to watch Jackson slide his thumb over her lower lip. Allison raised an eyebrow just as Jackson pulled his hand back, sticking the thumb in his mouth to suck off whatever he'd wiped from her mouth. Allison giggled, and my eyes narrowed.
The little traitor. I wasn't sure if I meant Jackson or Allison at the moment, but it seemed like an appropriate phrase. I mean, neither of them were stupid. Jackson could be thick, and Allison took being an innocent little schoolgirl a bit too seriously, but they had to know that was completely unacceptable. Jackson was my boyfriend, and Allison was one of my best friends. Or she was supposed to be anyway. Invite her over for a deluxe boy-free glamour sleepover and what do I get back? Flirting with my boyfriend. I could feel my composure slipping, teetering on the edge between completely freaking out and completely breaking down.
"He's just trying to get a rise out of you," Sadie consoled. She placed a light, comforting hand on my free one, spotting my weakness and trying to cover it up the way best friends were actually supposed to. "It's not worth it to get upset." I took a deep breath. She was right, obviously. I wasn't going to let Jackson see that he was upsetting me that much, and I certainly wasn't going to show the rest of the school that I wasn't one hundred percent completely confident in the claim on my own boyfriend. So I snapped my eyes away from them, turning back to Sadie and my lunch with a full force, chipper attitude.
"Let's talk about something else," I demanded, stabbing the fork into my meal. "What were you and Stiles talking about?"
"Uh, you know, just plans and whatever," she answered vaguely, fixing her eyes on her own meal. I raised an eyebrow, easily recalling the nervous look on her weirdo friend's face when I'd rescued her from what must have been a borderline painful conversation.
"Plans?" I laughed. "Why do you have plans with Stiles Stilinski?"
"Because he's my date to the winter formal." I promptly dropped my utensils, hair flying as my head snapped up with wide eyes.
"What?!" I demanded. Sadie jumped in her seat, looking at me with huge, brown doe eyes full of alarm. Several other people had turned around at the outburst too, but I was too stunned to care.
No. No, no, no. She had not just what I thought she had just said. I was hallucinating. I was dreaming. I was having a terribly vivid nightmare. She hadn't just used those words. And if she did, she didn't mean them. They were code for something else. She'd slipped up and said a few different words instead. Or I'd completely missed the "it's not like it's" that was supposed to go at the beginning of the sentence. But Sadie was just sitting there and staring at me like a baby deer in the headlights, two seconds from being run over by her extremely on-edge best friend.
"What do you mean he's your date to the winter formal?" I asked quickly, hoping against hope to receive some sort, any sort, of denial.
"I mean he's taking me to the winter formal?" She'd asked it as a question, already shrinking down in her seat in preparation for some sort of reprimand or beating. Which of course, was absolutely what she was going to get.
"Since when is he your date to the winter formal?!" I snapped.
"Uh, since yesterday," she mumbled. "He kinda drunk called me."
Yesterday? She had not just said yesterday. I knew my life was on the verge of spiraling out of control but I didn't think it was going so fast that my best friend had agreed to take an unauthorized lacrosse member to one of the most important social events of the year and then forgotten to tell me. That was just completely out of the question.
"You got a date to the winter formal and you didn't tell me?!" I jabbed. Sadie sighed, sinking even farther down in her seat.
"Lydia, he only asked me like last night. It's still ages away, and it hasn't come up."
"Last night is more than twelve hours ago!" I burst. "What happened to telling your best friend as soon as something interesting happened in your love life?!" Sadie's face fell slightly, morphing from aversion to a twinge of disappointment.
"Lyd, we're just going as friends," she informed me quietly. "It's not an actual date." I had to repress a snort. In my experience, "not an actual date" almost always turned out to be an actual date.
"A date is a date, platonic or not," I hissed, leaning forward over the table. "It is part of your love life and I am outraged that it didn't occur to you that this was pertinent information."
"Sorry," she whispered, running a sheepish hand through her hair. I pursed my lips, closing my eyes for a moment and concentrating on breathing through my nose. It had only been twelve hours. I could work with twelve hours. Sure, she hadn't come sprinting into my room the way I'd expected her to if she managed to get a date on her own, but the sheepishness was probably better than the outright fight that would have occurred trying to get her a proper suitor. Of course, this meant there was the trade off that she certainly did not have a proper suitor to take her to her first important, school-organized social event since moving here.
"Stiles?!" I bemoaned in despair, making Sadie crack a smile. Her eyes flicked over to the boy in question, and I watched in disgust as the twitchy boy shoved a fistful of greasy, undercooked fries into his mouth. After a few attempts at chewing, he seemed to notice he was being watched. He looked up from his deserted table, lips straining awkwardly as he tried to smile at us and hold his poor excuse for food inside his mouth. He lifted one still-greasy hand in a wave. I scrunched up my nose, but Sadie laughed quietly across from me, returning the gesture with at least a little more class. I averted my eyes from the tragedy, turning back to my food. "Why Stiles of all people? If you were going to go with someone platonically why couldn't it be Matt? Ethan? Thomas? Literally anyone else?"
"Because Stiles asked me first," she replied. "Besides, he's a lot of fun."
Her tone of voice made me look up slowly. I knew that tone of voice. It was a very, very dangerous tone of voice. She had her chin sitting in one hand, elbow propped up on the table. Her other hand traced gentle, looping patterns on the table, a clear symptom of her current state of mind. And if that wasn't bad enough, her head was ducked down slightly, hair falling around her face, but not able to conceal the way she was smiling softly at the chipped tabletop, or the way her skin was naturally turning pink under the applied blush. I recognized the early signs of love sickness, all too familiar with the way Allison had been looking at Scott since school started, or how I felt when I was with Jackson. Or at least, how I used to feel with Jackson. But I mentally diverted my attention. There were other problems to be dealt with first.
"You do not like him," I said, breaking the silence and making Sadie's head fly up so fast I was surprised she didn't have whiplash. Her eyes were wide with surprise and poorly masked terror.
"What? No!" she squeaked. "I said we're going as friends!"
"Just because he asked you as friends doesn't mean you have to want to go as friends," I pointed out. Her mouth opened and closed, frantically fighting for something to say. "Oh my God, Sadie, no. You do not like him."
"Fine! Okay! You're right!" she agreed, holding her hands up in submission. "I don't like him!" My jaw dropped.
"Don't lie to me!" I gasped, making Sadie's mouth hang open again.
"I'm not lying!" she protested. "Y-You just told me I don't like him!"
"That's like saying you're not allowed to like him," I hissed, waving off her ridiculous interpretation of my words and shaking my head, "which you obviously do."
"Nothing is obvious!" she squealed. I raised my eyebrows pointedly, internally wondering whether or not she realized that she'd just admitted that she had a crush by arguing that it wasn't obvious. Apparently, she didn't notice her own subconscious logic pattern, as she continued with a sigh. "Look, Lyd, even if I did like him, which I do not," she paused to lamely brandish a finger at me, "Stiles and I aren't getting together. He's great, but in case you haven't noticed, he really, really likes you."
I allowed myself to consider that point for about a millisecond. I'd never really bothered to pay much attention to Scott McCall's sidekick. He'd always seemed twitchy, shrill and annoying, though if Sadie's suspicions were true, at least some of the fidgeting could be attributed to his nerves whenever I was around. That was good to know. Not that I was considering him with a snowball's chance in hell, but it was always nice to have a proven, scientific reasoning for something. Maybe he was a little less weird around Sadie. Though I figured it was probably more the case that for some ridiculous and crazy reason, she didn't mind just how weird he was. And if she could put up with him, then maybe there was a shred of hope for him in this world after all. I didn't exactly like the idea of Sadie hooking up with a benchwarmer, but after knowing her for months, it was nice to see a stupid, silly smile on her face because of some guy. So I brushed off her point and held myself back from making any snarky comments about the Stilinski boy.
"Everyone likes me," I decided to declare with a smirk. "Doesn't stop them from dating each other." Sadie rolled her eyes, looking moodily down at her meal again.
"Trust me, we're not getting together. You have nothing to worry about."
"I have everything to worry about!" I replied adamantly, pushing my tray away from me slightly. "Your love life is one hundred and ten percent my business, and while you could do miles better—no—light-years better than Stilinski, I'm happy you finally have something going on in that boring little life of yours." This time the reaction was slightly more positive. Sadie shook her head, but a grin crawled up over her mouth to replace the dejected look she'd been wearing previously.
"Can you please decide if you're happy or upset about this?"
"I'm trying!" I chirped, winking victoriously. "I'll let you know." Sadie rolled her eyes again in her trademark move, but couldn't shake the amused smile that my attitude always seemed to provoke.
"Sometimes I wonder why I'm friends with you," she shot light-heartedly, and I smiled.
A lot of the time, I wondered why I was friends with Sadie too. We were two utterly different people. I thought back to the moment she'd shown up in Beacon Hills at the beginning of the summer. I'd had mixed feelings about having strangers in the house. On the one hand, they were two completely new people that I'd never met in my life, regardless of how close my mother had been with Miss Claire in high school. It was a total invasion of privacy, and if I didn't like them, I knew my life was going to become a living hell. On the other, there was the tiniest chance that I could really like this Bennet girl. Mom had pulled out a couple of their family pictures she'd been sent from whenever. They were a little old, but I figured she didn't look too bad. So long as she'd grown out of that I-wear-denim-every-day phase and put a little bit of product in her hair, we might even get along. And Mom was continually preaching about how they were in a terrible situation and we'd gone through a lot of the same things, blah, blah, blah, support system, blah. Regardless, I had decided to give her a chance.
But when Miss Claire and Sadie Bennet showed up on our doorstep? I decided to drop all my previous expectations and go for "pleasant acquaintances" instead. I'd worn my cutest skirt for the occasion of their arrival, and gotten a face full of unfashionable taste when I'd walked into the room. She'd been wearing a pair of mangled jeans, beat up sneakers with complete tears on the inseam, a way oversized and tattered black band T-shirt and a sweatshirt that looked like it was attempting to swallow her whole. Her hair was piled up on top of her head in a careless, limp-looking bun, and she looked like she hadn't put much effort into her makeup. Apparently, making a good impression on her hosts had not been one of her top priorities. And after I'd caught the look of skeptical disdain she gave me, eyeing my neat skirt and scoop neck green blouse, "pleasant acquaintances" dropped to "hopefully tolerating."
I hadn't had to deal with her too much the first few weeks. Sadie spent most of her time locked in her room, playing music in an attempt to cover her crying. I usually only saw her at meals, which was ridiculously awkward. Miss Claire was nice enough, but she and my mother kept trying to make Sadie and I talk, like they were trying to recreate their high school friendship through us or something. I had to stay completely alert, as I usually spent dinner coming up with one reason or another why Sadie couldn't come out with my friends. I wasn't going to subject myself to snide remarks of a bitter, unpopular girl just because she was being forced to live with me. Furthermore, I wasn't going to let anyone else see me with her.
Luckily, Sadie didn't seem too keen on spending time with me either. Presumably, her mother was nagging her to try and get out of the depression-funk she was working. She did her part lying about unpacking, wanting to paint in her room, or not feeling well. She was a perfect actress, I had to give her that. A few times, she even fabricated memories of times we had spent together. Small things like, "Oh I was showing Lydia my movie collection today," or, "Lydia was letting me look through her wardrobe. It's really nice." Of course, I had no interest in her nerd movies, and she seemed to have little to no interest in learning reasonable fashion sense. But the lies did earn my respect, slightly. It was always interesting to hear what faux-interactions Sadie and I had been having during the day, when I was really out with Jackson or some of my other acquaintances. The most intriguing part was that, despite having spent almost no time with me, Sadie always seemed to come up with reasonable stories as to what I was doing. It was like she knew me, without ever really having to take the time to get to know me. And eventually, I found myself looking forward to the stories, playing along, even actually considering spending time with her.
And then we'd had our big heart to heart and everything started to change. I found her crying in her room, and even though I knew she'd been crying for weeks, it was so startlingly different from the composed actress I'd been seeing at the dinner table that something struck me. And I surprised both of us by staying. We ended up talking for hours, not about our problems really, but everything around our problems. The depressing heart to hearts came later, after we actually started watching movies together, going out to lunch, etcetera. But Sadie had taken me by surprise in just how real she was. I'd been mentally stereotyping her since she'd shown up. I hadn't taken the time to look past the nerdy movies in her collection to see that she also had a worn out copy of Pearl Harbor, or that her favorite mix CD was actually full of songs I really liked. We weren't the same by a long shot, but we had enough in common to get along. What I didn't share with Sadie, I at least understood and accepted. She was interesting, a look at something I had previously never gotten to examine. And maybe being so different was really why we got along so well.
By the end of the summer, I had come to the realization that I was closer with Sadie Bennet than I had been with anyone else in my life. She was witty and intuitive, understanding me on a level none of my other friends seemed to have reached. But she also stood up to me. If she thought that I was being mean or shallow, she called me out on it. It was a rude, uncomfortable wake up call, of course, but I found that I actually enjoyed being challenged. We fought and clashed occasionally, but fighting and then making up with Sadie was a lot better than the uncomfortable, submissive giggles of all the girls I knew who were too intimidated to tell me what they really thought of me, because I was the smartest and most popular girl in school. Sadie and I constantly called each other out and accepted each other's flaws. She let me give her a total makeover and introduce her to the popular crowd of Beacon Hills, and I respected that she was still Sadie, with all her little nerdy and insecure quirks that I would never really understand.
I obviously wasn't happy about the situations that Sadie and I had been put in. She'd lost her father and been completely uprooted from the place she grew up. I was still struggling more that I cared to admit with my parents' separation, with the fact that I'd basically had to tell them that I loved my mother more, and that my dad didn't care enough about us to stay. But I didn't have to admit it to Sadie. She just knew. Just like I knew about how much she missed her dad, and how she felt responsible for her mom and how insecure she was being the new girl for the first time. I wasn't happy about all the shit life had decided to put us through. But I was happy to have a best friend.
"You live with me," I reminded her with a bright smile. "You have to be."
A/N: Aw! Besties! So, I had a little trouble with this chapter, and writing Lydia is kind of hard. I don't imagine her having much of a filter when it comes to more lighthearted conversations, so there wasn't much insight you needed to have. But someone had asked for Lydia's musings of how she and Sadie became friends, so I felt this was necessary. I'm not sure I really captured Lydia's sass and brains, but there you are.
Let me know what you think!
-Brittney
