Free Love Edy by Shewanda Pugh Page B

backpack and zipped up the bag.
    “I need to ask you something,” she said.
“So, please. Don’t take my head off.”
    The image of Chloe looking from Edy to
Hassan returned. Edy stilled, too aware of her own breathing.
    “Ask,” Edy said. “Otherwise, I need to get
to class.”
    Chloe nodded and a sweep of dark curls
tumbled into her face. She tucked them back with manicured
fingers.
    “You,” she said. “Don’t have anything with
Hassan, do you?”
    A sound leapt from Edy’s throat. A choked,
startled something that she stuffed back into the hell it
abandoned. She opened her mouth, found it too dry, and turned back
to her locker for cover.
    “Why would you ask something so silly?” she
said and concentrated on deep even breaths.
    “It’s only . . . ” Chloe’s voice drifted
alongside her gaze. Edy followed it to a pack of girls. Aimee the
redhead, Sandra Jacobs and Eva Meadows. Sandra lifted a hand and
waved, before the three erupted in giggles.
    A match lit under Edy, engulfing her in an
unreasonable fury.
    She was there for them. She was one of
them. No matter how many days they rode to school together, Chloe
Castillo was one of them. Edy wouldn’t forget it again. Not
ever.
    She ripped Chloe’s headband from her hair,
heard the audible tear, and tossed the hairpiece to the floor. It
in were thin strands of dark locks.
    “Learn your place,” Edy said. “You’re
Lawrence’s skank; not one of us. We don’t have to humor you when
you talk.”
    Edy slammed her locker and strode off,
pushing past Chloe on her way to class.
    ~~~
    At lunch, Edy took her seat with Wyatt, gaze
boring into the three girls first to arrive at the “it” table.
Aimee, Sandra and Eva. They sat huddled together with Caesar salad
on each plate, talking without the slightest flicker of hunger.
When Sandra looked up and saw her, she gave a little wave of
fingers meant to annoy. Aimee followed it by puckering up her lips.
That’s right, Edy remembered, she’d been eager to brag about
tasting Hassan. Maybe she’d be interested in a fork buried right
through those lips. Edy sighed. So much for pacifism.
    Hassan, Lawrence and Kyle arrived as a set,
went for the lunch line, came away with double helpings and sat
with the girls. All three went erect at the sight of their cattle,
with Sandra going so far as to tease her curls with fingers.
    “I called you last night,” Wyatt said. “I
was concerned when you didn’t respond.”
    Edy blinked. Tried to think of something to
say. “I wasn’t available,” seemed snarky, yet it was all she could
come up with. She turned to her food. Nothing special that day,
just twice warmed butter chicken, leftovers because of Rani’s
headache the night before.
    “I have a class with him,” Wyatt said.
    Edy looked up. “Who?”
    “Him,” he nodded in the direction behind
Edy.
    She turned to see Hassan approaching with
his tray. Back at the “it” table, Lawrence, Kyle and the twins
gathered their things.
    A mass exodus, Edy realized with a twist of
a smile. A mass exodus for her, she wanted to tell the queens of
primping.
    Except, not quite.
    The twins dropped down on either side of
Edy, while Hassan and Lawrence sat down to bookend Wyatt.
    “Edy,” Hassan said without looking at her.
“Could you excuse us for a second?”
    She half expected a camera crew to appear
and taunt her with jeers. “I will not,” was what she said.
    The twins sighed as if exhaling from a
single pair of lungs. No doubt, they’d elected Hassan to deliver
this idea that she should get lost.
    “You move,” Mason said in her ear. “Or this
gets real embarrassing for your boyfriend. You know, with us
dragging him to privacy and all.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake!” Edy snatched her lunch
bag and stood, scanning a still life of what should have been a
bustling cafeteria. Every pair of eyes watched, thirsty for drama
and banking on it.
    Then Edy realized it. The one place open,
the one place she could sit was the