That hope was quickly dashed when the three boys, sophomores I was pretty sure, stepped in front of me.
“You might consider a salad the next time,” one of the boys said.
“Or at least a fucking piece of fruit,” another snorted.
“Hey, you three dipshits got a problem with me?”
I turned around when I heard the familiar voice, but I couldn’t believe it was actually him. Garrett Pine. My lifelong crush. Well, my crush for as long as I had known what a crush was.
“No, Garrett. No problem with you,” said the boy who had told me to eat fruit.
“Well, it sounds like you’ve got a problem with Brin. People who have a problem with Brin have a problem with me. Get it?”
Uh, yeah, they got it. Garrett was a senior. The quarterback of the football team. The most popular guy in school. And right now he was here, sticking up for me. But that’s what he always did.
The three sophomores looked like they were going to poop themselves.
I thought I might faint.
“Yeah, sure, Garrett. Sorry,” one of them mumbled to me. Then they were gone.
I sat down at the empty table and Garrett sat next to me. So…fainting was still an option.
I picked at my fries and he opened up a lunch bag and pulled out a sandwich. That’s right. Technically, I was having lunch with Garrett Pine. Me, fat Sabrina King, and Garrett. I could barely contain myself I was so nervous.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said, feeling like I should have done a better job sticking up for myself.
“Yes, I did. I’m so sick of it. People being assholes to each other. What do they get out of that?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Don’t let it get inside your head. Be confident in who you are.”
Was he joking? I was a fat freshman. That was nothing to be confident about.
“Okay,” I said. Because it wasn’t like I was going to defy him.
After a few man-sized bites, he finished his sandwich and packed up his stuff. I wish I had said more. Been funny. Anything. I was too busy having a near heart attack to manage actual words.
“I mean it, Brin. Shake off the haters. Own your shit. No matter what it is.”
“Right. Thanks, Garrett.”
“See you around.”
Well, I would be seeing him, I thought. Because the one advantage of being a freshman was that for the whole year I got to go to school with my lifelong crush.
SABRINA
Freshman Year—Winter
It was between classes and I was coming back from the bathroom. I was walking down the school hall, minding my own business, which is how I had decided to navigate high school. Head down, keep my nose in my books (my romance novels, not my textbooks), and just avoid the people around me. It wasn’t exactlyowning my own shit, as Garrett had once told me to do, but I found if I didn’t bother them, they mostly didn’t bother me. Mostly.
I was still a King and that meant people thought they knew things about me. So the idea that I didn’t fit in the King family still made me a target for some. But I was dealing.
What I was dealing with less well was the fact that Dylan was officially gone. Hank told us he’d enlisted in the army as soon as he turned eighteen. It wasn’t like we had seen him much. Still, it felt like there was this person who had been in my life who was now suddenly gone from it.
The army might has well have been Mars.
