“I said, you can take a seat now.”
I don’t wait to be told twice (although I literally did before), but as I dart to the back, someone calls out, “Hey, Adeline.”
I nearly trip in shock. That would have been really embarrassing. A girl with soft blonde hair and warm brown eyes smiles at me. She’s beautiful, like everyone else here, but her eyes shine with the type of kindness you rarely see. The genuine type. Pure, not forced.
“Come sit here,” she says, nodding to the empty chair beside her. Stunned, I blink.
“Are you talking to me?” My voice barely leaves my throat.
Oh my god, Adeline. Get it together, please.
Obviously, she’s talking to you, who else would she be talking to?
She laughs, and it’s soft and genuine. “Well, you’re the only Adeline here. I’m Lilia.” She gestures again, and I force my legs to move.
I sit beside her, still a little numb. “Thanks for… inviting me,” I say, fully aware I probably have the biggest grin on my face right now.
“I saw you, in the hallway. You know when you practically bulldozed into Berlin,” she smiles.
So that’s her name.Berlin.A strange name, but a fitting one.
She leans close, lowering her voice. “Ignore Berlin and her entourage. Sometimes I wonder how even they put up with her.” She rolls her eyes. “I guess people get less scary once you get used to
them.”
I want to tell her how untrue that is. How fear of a person never fully goes away.
If only it were that easy.
***
“No seriously, they aren’t nearly as bad as you think.” She beams.
“Well, I don’t know about that. And they’re kind of hard to run in,” I state truthfully. These shoes certainly won’t survive this winter. In fact, they’re already practically falling apart.
“Yeah… maybe not, but then again I run in heels all the time,” she chuckles. “Fashion is subjective anyway.”
Wow. I can’t help but be in complete awe of the confidence Lilia has, the kind that seems to almost radiate off her like beams of light.
She has a point though.
“And who were those girls, the ones sitting around Berlin?” I ask, genuinely curious.
“Oh, them?” She laughs. “The blonde one, as you know, is Berlin Brooks. She thinks she’s all that here just because her family is partnered with Kai’s. Her dad’s some renowned business tycoon, he has an empire spanning like hundreds of industries and her mum’s a lawyer, so they’re pretty high status.” She scoffs.
“The brunette is Ava Grey. Her family are big in the acting industry and her dad’s a film director. One of the best, so they have a hell of a lot of money. And a hell of a lot of popularity. And her brother’s a big thing here, I guess,” she continues, but it looks as if she’s really fighting against herself here, trying not to roll her eyes.
“The one with the freaky glare is Zia Lin,” she says, and I immediately know who she’s talking about. I saw her in the hallway with Berlin.
“She’s like some genius coder or something. Probably why she’s always on that phone. My friend was in her computer science class and told me all about herhackingskills.” She leans in closer, looks around and whispers, “Apparently, a girl in the class said something about Ava that Zia apparently didn’t like, thenbam, in seconds Zia sets some virus on her that they still can’t figure out. And as if that isn’t enough, she hacks into her camera roll and finds a video of her with some other guy and posts it on the school website. Her parents made her pull out of school and everything.”
For a moment I’m stunned, but then I think—really think —about the expression on her face and coldness in her eyes and I’m no longer shocked. In fact, it makes perfect sense.
I shouldn’t be shocked when this is the kind of school I go to.
“Be careful with her though, she may talk less but she’s crafty,” Lilia adds, staring at me with so much intensity I struggle to maintain eye-contact.
Yeah, I can believe that.
