Page 7 of Sour Lollipops and Sweet Nightmares (The Society #1)

Georgia

Spending nights with alcohol and debauchery was very high-schoolesque to me. Although no one ever invited me to the high school parties. I don’t think anyone in my graduating class knew my name, let alone thought of including me in social gatherings.

That wasn’t one of the differences I enjoyed. Those came with the overall atmosphere and attitude of the student body.

Teenagers were incredibly vain. All anyone had to do to see that was take a look at high school politics. To succeed in life, one had to be either intelligent or talented. Yet, the only requirement to be at the top of the social ladder in high school was beauty.

This was especially true for girls. The poorest girl who was failing all of her classes could still end up the queen bee, as long as she was beautiful. And what did that set them up for in life?

Disappointment.

Popularity didn’t matter after graduation. Years later, the so-called ‘it’ girls would show up to reunions desperate to relive their glory days because their lives didn’t turn out the way they thought they would.

High school was where they peaked. If they put more effort into the things that mattered, then maybe their life wouldn’t be so disappointing.

My mother was a perfect example of that. She was that girl in school. The one everybody wanted to be friends with or date, and look at her now. She was a thirty-six-year-old single mother who had gone through divorce twice.

Where were all of her so-called friends when she found out she was pregnant at seventeen? They moved on with their lives, as if she never existed, because beauty didn’t equate depth, just attention. And not in a good way.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my mom. She was a wonderfulperson, but the cost of her personality change was a lot of heartache.

There was nothing like being used and dumped over and over again to humble someone enough to look past a person’s exterior.

She saw herself as an object to be admired, so everyone else did too.

When that adoration started to die off, she turned her efforts to me.

My early childhood was one long game of dress up.

As if my mom were trying to say to the world, look how beautiful my daughter is.

I hated it, and I hated her for seeing me that way.

I wanted my mom to see me, not just my appearance.

I didn’t want her to tell me how pretty I looked, like he did.

Bad things happened to pretty little girls.

Now, my mom bragged about my academic accomplishments, but it took a lot of rebelling and pain to get there. While other girls were shopping and going to the spa with their mothers, I was cutting my hair and hiding from the world.

I often wondered if that was why I was so socially awkward. Or was it something else? Sometimes, I felt like there was an image or memory right there, but I couldn’t quite grasp it.

While we didn’t have the same views on life, my mother and I were remarkably similar-looking.

I even had the same dusting of freckles across my nose.

All I heard as a kid was how I was going to grow up to be just as pretty as her.

I didn’t want to be like her. Actually, I was terrified to end up like her.

So, I did everything I could to prevent that from happening.

I rarely wore makeup, didn’t dress in the latest styles, and kept to myself.

I became invisible for so long that I didn’t know how to be seen.

Nor was I sure I wanted to be. My mother’s dating history taught me one thing. people were liars.

Examples of this were everywhere, even here in Renfrew’s cafeteria. Two tables down from me sat a group of five girls, who at first glance appeared to be friends, but every time the one blonde girl looked away, the other four would roll their eyes.

Next to them were two guys talking and laughing, however, one of them had his fists balled. And there was the couple at the table in the far corner. She kept staring at a guy across the room, while her boyfriend had his hand on the thigh of the girl sitting next to them.

Sure, some of them may have good intentions of not wanting to hurt the other person or people, but they were all lying. And that was the problem. All my mom wanted for me was to have a friend, but how would I know if they were actually my friend?

Working with someone else on schoolwork was fine, and talking to authority figures came easy, but when it came to idle conversation, I was totallylost. Textbooks were straightforward and to the point. People were complicated liars. I could never tell if they meant what they were saying.

I flipped the page of my book.

‘Seismic activity in the Rocky Mountains.’

Geology, I understood. The world was simple. It worked on a series of actions and reactions. Tectonic plates caused earthquakes, tides ebbed in and out, and gravity held everything down.

Not knowing how an action would end made me uneasy. If I talked to a person, I might like them now, but what if I didn’t tomorrow? What if they didn’t like me? What if they were pretending because they wanted something from me? Bad things also happened to people who were too trusting.

The prospect of putting myself out there like that made me panic.

I overthought every possible response until I ended up just staring back at them or running away.

My mom called me shy, where I preferred cautious.

I spent half my childhood watching her get hurt by people coming in and out of our lives, and I had no desire to repeat her mistakes.

People lived in a perpetual state of pretending.

Pretending to be nice, pretending to be someone they thought you would like, or pretending to be your friend for whatever messed-up reason they had.

There was no way to know if the person you knew was the person they actually were.

That’s why I preferred to keep to myself.

I didn’t talk to anyone on the bus, I didn’t initiate conversations with the people I passed on campus, and I didn’t correct the resident of my dorm when he kept calling me Grace. Nor did I mind being placed in a small house behind the dorm by myself.

There was no roommate I’d be forced to talk to day after day, or crowds in the halls who might try to pull me into their interactions. It was just me and my studies.

What I didn’t expect was to feel this alone.

I was always the outcast or weird girl people avoided, but this sense of solitude was different.

It was more than sitting quietly in the background.

It was almost isolating. Like I was in some black void that continued to suck me into the darkness, while everyone around me carried on with their lives.

I swung my eyes around the crowd in the cafeteria.

No one cared about me here. I could spontaneously combust, and not a single person in this room would remember my name. I’d forever be that girl who blew up one day, my entire existence reduced down to a single moment.

I wasn’t looking for immortality or fame, but it was nice to know someone cared about you, that someone would remember you if you disappeared.

Huffing out a sigh, I read through the chart in my textbook.

I missed my mom. How sad was it that she was all I had?

I should have at least one friend by now, right?

Someone I wasn’t related to, who I could call when I had a problem or wanted to talk.

But no one wanted to talk about the eroding factors of water versus wind.

I thought things would be different here. Ivy League schools were the places where intelligence was revered. Or at least they should be. But Renfrew appeared also to revere beauty. This room was a testament to that.

It was big and open with pretty art hanging on the walls, and little decorative touches, like the vases of fresh flowers placed on every table.

Even the cedar-scented air laced with sweet undertones smelled rich.

And then there were the people. They were all bright and stylish, dressed in their finest while happily conversing with their peers.

I sat alone at a table with a couple who were too busy making out to notice there were other people around them. College was supposed to be my time to shine, yet I was just as invisible here as I was in high school. All these people around me, and I was totally alone.

Sighing, I pushed my fork through my scrambled eggs.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t want others to see me. I didn’t want to be seen by too many people or the wrong people. All I needed was one person. A friend I could watch movies with and talk to. Not that I watched a lot of movies, but that was beside the point.

I had a friend once, for a few months, when I was ten. Mary-Jane Alcott. She was sweet and kind. When she smiled, the whole room lit up. I met her after Mom and I got in a car accident, and I had to spend a week in the hospital.

She was being treated for leukaemia and didn’t have many friends herself. I’d go and visit her every day after school. We’d play and laugh. It was nice.

Then she died. A part of me wondered if the only reason she liked me was because she couldn’t go out and play with other kids. I was literally the only option she had.

Now, all I had was the couple trying to swallow each other’s faces at the other end of my table.

Taking a drink of my coffee, I cringed at the sloppy sounds coming from their tangled tongues.

They were going at it, hot and heavy. Their arms entwined around each other, and their eyes were closed, while one mouth tried to swallow the other. It was all wrong.

I didn’t have any experience to rely on, but that was not how a kiss should go. It was supposed to be intimate and full of passion. A soft caress you could feel in your soul. Something that ignited a deep desire that made your knees weak and left you wanting more.