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SHANNON
“Don’t ask,” I warned when I found Claire standing outside the girls’ bathroom on Wednesday morning with a horrified expression on her face. Snaking my arm through hers, I tugged her into the bathroom. “Just help me hide it.”
“Shannon, I–I…” Claire shook her head and stared at me. “Shan—”
“Please,” I snapped, dropping my bag on the bathroom floor and catching her hands. “Help me.”
Tears filled her eyes.
“Don’t do that,” I begged, squeezing her hands. “Just help.”
She continued to stare at me for the longest moment with an almost trancelike expression before finally snapping out of it.
“Okay,” she sniffled and then offered me a bright smile. “I have just the trick.”
I exhaled a huge sigh of relief. “Thank you.”
Twenty minutes later, I stared at my reflection in the mirror and hardly recognized myself.
“I had to go full smoky-eyed glamour-puss on your face to match the shade of foundation I used to cover your…” Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat several times before adding, “Well, what do you think?”
“Whoa,” I breathed, touching my red-painted lips. “My lips are huge.”
“Yes, they are,” Claire agreed. “Women pay thousands of euros for lips like yours, and you don’t even appreciate them.”
“And my eyes.” I shook my head and gaped at myself, fluttering my eyelashes admiringly. “Whoa, those are—”
“Gorgeous?” Claire offered, coming to stand beside me. “Because you are sickeningly gorgeous.”
“It’s the makeup,” I assured her, embarrassed.
“It’s the girl,” Claire corrected as she slung an arm around my shoulder.
I flinched from the contact, still tender from my father’s outburst, and Claire’s face fell.
“Shannon, I can’t keep—”
The bathroom door creaked open and Lizzie stepped into the bathroom, causing Claire to snap her mouth closed and me to sag in relief.
“Come on, girls,” Lizzie said, waving a hand at us. “We’re late for class.”
Never in my life had I been more grateful to see her than I was in this moment.
“I’m going to kill that bitch,” Lizzie hissed later that day during lunch. Word had spread around school about the incident with Bella yesterday and my friend was peppering with anger.
“Seriously,” Lizzie added, glaring at the table at the opposite side of the lunch hall, which seated at least fifty students—one of whom being Bella Wilkinson.
“If she looks over here one more time, I am going to go over there and rip those shiny new extensions out of her hair.”
“They’re pretty bad,” Claire agreed with a grimace.
“Bad?” Lizzie snapped. “It looks like she attached black seaweed to her hair.” Muttering something else under her breath, she added, “She’s a troll.”
“Just ignore her,” I pleaded, choosing to keep my eyes trained on my sandwich and not the table I was receiving death glares from.
It was safer to keep my head down.
All day, everywhere I went, curious eyes followed me. I didn’t know how to handle this sort of attention. I needed to not rock the boat. And spending time with Johnny was as good as capsizing the ship.
