Her look was hopeful. My heart lifted.
I wasn’t having trouble in either Harris’s or Cooke’s classes. I didn’t need a study group for that. But these girls were inviting me to study with them. They weren’t being sarcastic. They sincerely wanted to hang out with me.
A heavy weight I hadn’t noticed I’d been carrying in my tense shoulders eased.
“I’d like that,” I told them.
“Awesome!” the girl with black hair exclaimed, then gave a furtive look around to make sure there were no librarians around to shush her. “We get together twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
Thursdays was when Seth and I had spent time together when he had an evening free. My heart ached painfully. I had no reason to say no to the schedule. Not anymore.
“Sure,” I said. “Sounds fun.”
“See, I told you it was a good idea to ask her,” she said to the blonde. “She didn’t bite.”
“I didn’t say she would!” her friend protested, flushing. She turned to me. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just, you’ve sort of got a reputation.”
The nausea returned full force.
“Some guys were saying you’re only focused on school and studying,” she continued. “You’re so smart and you’re doing so much better than everyone. I was worried you might be a little stuck up or something. Like you might think you’re too good for the rest of us dummies.”
She looked ashamed at herself. I was hit with shocked disbelief, like a bullet to my gut.
“That’s what you’ve heard?” I asked.
“Well…” her friend shrugged. “There’s been some other things but it’s mostly trash. We don’t pay attention to nasty stuff like that.”
I was overcome with such a wave of relief it made tears sting the back of my eyes. I pressed my lips together to stop them from trembling.
“Give me your phone number and I’ll text you the rest of the study group details,” the blonde said.
I wrote down my number with numb fingers. She immediately sent me a text.
“We’ll see you Thursday?” she asked.
“I’ll be there,” I told her and her friend.
With a grin, the two of them went back to studying.
I sat in my chair, unseeing eyes focused on nothing.
Had I gotten it all wrong? Was it really that most people didn’t care? It was true I’d only encountered a handful of people who’d been mean about it. There were thousands of students on campus. It wasn’t possible that everyone had heard, or paid attention to, frat party gossip. Just like those two girls, most students were too focused on passing classes to think about other people.
I looked down at my phone where the blond girl had sent me the text. I opened it to put it in my calendar.
I saw Seth’s texts.
Maybe… Maybe I had been oversensitive. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so upset at his words.
After all, those guys at the party had pinpointed the one thing that would hurt me the most, but most other people probably would have been angry for a few days, and then laughed it off or ignored it.
I’d spent the semester feeling miserable and alone because I had let my insecurities get the better of me.
I couldn’t let that happen again. I couldn’t let myself be so susceptible to other people’s opinions of me.
And I needed to stop having such a low opinion of myself.
“Abby?”
I lifted my head at the soft voice calling my name. Seth stood a few feet away, hands in his pockets, looking abashed.
“Can we talk?”
