The Backup Girlfriend (Grove Valley High #2) - Emma Doherty Page 0,19

can’t believe I told her I wasn’t going to graduate.

That was the stupidest thing I could have done, and she’s wasted no time at all in seemingly aligning herself with different people—people who don’t like me, people who will laugh at me as I fall. We’ve always had a stupid thing about popularity and rivalry; we both care about it far too much, and I handed her enough ammunition to use on me for the rest of the school year. I have absolutely no doubt she will have used yesterday to plot how she’s going to use my current completely pathetic state to figure out how to destroy me in the social standings at this school.

Today is not going to be a good day.

Not at all.

The bell rings for lunch, and I gather up my belongings and stand slowly, letting everyone else file out of English ahead of me, keeping my head down so I don’t have to face anyone. I haven’t spoken to anyone all day, and if it’s up to me, I plan to keep it that way for the rest of the day.

I haven’t seen Sasha, and while Jennifer tried talking to me in homeroom, I was too mortified to do anything but sit there in silence.

I’m dreading seeing Aaron and Brendon too.

Seriously, what the hell was I thinking?

Jesus Christ. I actually stripped in front of Brendon.

Brendon!

And practically begged him to have sex with me.

Right after Aaron had rejected me.

What the actual hell is wrong with me?

I try to push those thoughts from my head as I step out into the hallway, but I can immediately feel eyes on me and hear a couple of snide snickers behind me. I turn and see a group of junior girls grouped together, looking over at me with smirks on their faces. The prettiest one, the redhead Chase dated when we were on one of our many breaks, is watching me with an amused expression. I definitely didn’t make life easy for her back when she was into Chase, made it clear that I took her dating him as a personal insult and relished when she’d slink away from me uncomfortably whenever I was near. The way I used my power in this school, or whatever that means, against her until Chase came back to me…

I deserve the way she’s looking at me.

But it still makes me feel like shit.

I turn away and start walking down the hallway, and that’s when I spot Sarah at the end, surrounded by people as she laughs loudly and flips her hair.

The center of attention.

She looks up and sees me in the distance, locking her eyes with mine, but she makes no move to actually acknowledge me, to act like we’re actually friends.

She just looks at me snidely then says something to the rest of the girls she’s with, people I know, people I cheer with and have hung out with at parties. They turn and look at me, breaking out in laughter at whatever she said. I hear echoes of “desperate” and “pathetic” and “still in love with Chase” bound down the hallway until they hit my ears.

My heart starts beating rapidly as I realize what this is. They’re freezing me out. They’ve seen what I did over the weekend, seen me for the pathetic, desperate, friendless creature that I am, and they’ve chosen Sarah over me.

The worst thing is, I don’t even blame them.

I am pathetic right now. I wouldn’t want to be near me either.

Sarah reaches for her phone, fully aware that I’m watching her, and taps on it a couple of times. Next I hear various beeps from around me as people look at a message then start snickering and looking over at me.

My heart thuds in my chest.

She’s just done something to me, something pre-meditated that she already had planned, something that is going to hurt. I know it with everything inside me.

With shaky hands, I reach for my own phone and pull it out of my bag, quickly turning it on and trying hard to keep it together as I hear the murmurs around me and feel the eyes on me.

Eventually my phone powers on and loads. I ignore the texts and messages I have waiting for me, from Sasha, Jennifer, and even a couple from Chase that I don’t want to think about, and I open the only one that’s there waiting for me from Sarah.

I look at the caption she’s sent attached to a video, and