Free Breaking Deluce by Chad Campbell Page B

about to leave when Mr. Johnson spoke. “It looks like you are going to have to step your game up if you want to stay number one in your class.”
    Mona looked at him, shook her head, and walked out of the classroom.
    Mona spent the walk to her next class in one of her famous thinking fogs. As she entered the locker room, she gathered that she was late, since the entire locker room was empty. She quickly changed her clothes and headed to the gym floor, only to arrive to the sound of the gym teacher, Mr. Affholter, explaining the day’s activity. She tried to sneak in unnoticed, but Mr. Affholter didn’t miss much and he certainly didn’t miss Mona slowly joining the group. “Ahem!” Mr. Affholter coughed to let her know he had seen her.
    “ Now where was I? Oh yeah, today we will be doing fitness testing. Most of you will remember we did this at the beginning of the year. Now we will do it again to compare how you’ve grown over the year. For you two new kids...”
    Mona tuned out his voice after she heard two new kids. Were Damon and Jason in this class too? Her eyes darted around the gym but she was unable to locate them. She felt a shadowy presence behind her sending a slight chill up her spine. When she was about to turn around and see who it was, the presence spoke: “How many tests are there?”
    There was no mistaking Jason’s voice as it already annoyed Mona to the core. She hasn’t even known the guy an hour and already she hated him. She side-stepped away with a look of disgust on her face as she wanted nothing to do with him. Mr. Affholter shot her another look and she realized he had been speaking this entire time without hearing a word of it. “... Now everyone get into your groups and head to your stations,” Mr. Affholter finished.
    Mona stood there, dumbfounded—she had no clue which group she was in. If only I hadn’t been so busy in my own world! She wandered forward, hoping if she looked lost enough that people in her group would call to her.
    “ Mona! Over here!” someone yelled.
    Mona was scanning the gym, trying to find who was calling her name, when she spotted two blond girls waving at her from across the room. She slowly walked towards them, and they smiled as she approached. The shorter blonde she recognized as Becca; though they weren’t friends, they’d been classmates since elementary school. “Hey Becca,” Mona said as she looked at the taller blonde girl that she didn’t know. “What’s your friend’s name? I don’t believe we’ve met.”
    “ Wow Mona, that’s cold. You don’t remember Vanessa? She’s only gone to school with us since elementary school,” Becca scolded.
    Mona looked at Vanessa again as a hazy fog clouded her mind. She tried to shake it off, but that only caused a splitting headache. The pain caused her to fall to one knee, a voice spoke into her mind, “Vanessa...”
    The voice was almost hypnotic. It was like some outside force was trying to control her. Visions and images that felt real were flashing vividly in her head, though she knew at the back of her mind that they weren’t—she was standing here, in the gym of Ellensburg High. She continued to fight the invasion of her mind, but suddenly, the images stopped, along with the pain, and she rose back to her feet. “I’m sorry, guys, I was just kidding. It was a bad joke,” she lied. “So what are we doing at this station?”
    The girls snickered for a bit before Becca finally read from a sheet of paper she’d been holding. “It says we have two minutes to do as many push-ups as possible. One of us is supposed to time while the other two do push-ups and then we switch.”
    “ How many did you two do last time?” Mona asked.
    The girls giggled and Vanessa replied, “4.”
    “ 6,” Becca added.
    “ Oh my god, you are such a man!” Vanessa teased.
    “ Am not!”
    Becca slapped Vanessa on the arm and they started bickering back and forth. Vanessa stopped and looked at Mona. “What