Blue Eyes
And Other Teenage Hazards
By Janette Rallison
Copyright 2011 Janette Rallison
Other titles by Janette Rallison
Son of War, Daughter of Chaos
Blue Eyes and Other Teenage Hazards
Just One Wish
Masquerade
My Double Life
A Longtime (and at One Point Illegal) Crush
Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Free Throws
Playing The Field
My Fair Godmother
My Unfair Godmother
All’s Fair in Love, War, and High School
Fame, Glory, and Other Things on my To Do List
It’s a Mall World After All
Revenge of the Cheerleaders
How to Take The Ex Out of Ex-boyfriend
Slayers (under pen name CJ Hill)
Slayers: Friends and Traitors (under pen name CJ Hill)
Erasing Time (under pen name CJ Hill)
Echo in Time (under pen name CJ Hill)
What the Doctor Ordered (under pen name Sierra St. James)
Kindle Edition, License Notes
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Chapter 1
Anjie rolled out of my life on a sharply clear September morning. I lived in Pullman, Washington, where most of the time the sky looked like it was holding a grumpy-cloud convention; but on the day Anjie moved, there was nothing but sun. I hate it when the weather lies like that.
I’d gotten up at six in the morning to see Anjie off. Neither of us was sleepy. We stood by her family’s minivan while her dad loaded suitcases into the back. The moving van would come later in the day to take everything else.
“Call me as soon as you get to Virginia,” I said.
“I will.” Anjie put a pillow and a book into the backseat of the minivan. “And you call me too. Call me tomorrow.”
“Nothing will have happened by tomorrow to talk about.”
“But I still want to hear from you.”
Anjie and I had been inseparable since second grade when she moved onto my street, five houses away. We’d shared everything: bikes, clothes, even a crush on super hot Chad Warren. And now, a week before our sophomore year got underway, she was moving. We were finally no longer on the lowest rung of social life at high school. Life was supposed to be fun now. But with Anjie leaving, I felt like I’d been set adrift. In a sea of uncaring teenagers. Many of whom would happily puncture my boat. And laugh as I sunk into the depths of unpopularity.
Anjie’s mother came outside carrying a box filled with houseplants. She put it into the backseat of their van. “Come on, Anjie,” she said. “It’s time to go.” Then, because she felt sorry for me, she added, “You’ll have to come up and visit us sometime, Cassidy.”
I tried to smile. “Sure.” It would probably never happen. Fairfax, Virginia, was on the other side of the nation.
Anjie put her hand on the door but didn’t open it. “We’ll see each other again. Remember, we’ll be roommates at college. Promise?”
“Promise.”
She gave me a hug and got in the back seat next to her little sister and brother.
I watched until the minivan turned the corner and drove out of sight. With it went our late-night phone conversations, homework sessions where we didn’t do homework, and summers sitting by the public pool unsuccessfully trying to get tans. With it went a thousand other things I couldn’t name but felt anyway. As I walked home, I looked up at the sun hanging there alone and abandoned in the sky and decided the weather hadn’t lied after all.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have other friends. I did. I sat with Faith and Caitlin at lunch. We didn’t actually ever do anything together, but they were nice to me. Okay, maybe they were actually more like acquaintances, but that was only because I’d never needed anyone else before. Anjie was like me: a straight-A student, avid reader, and someone who kept the rules instead of looking for ways to bend them. I could talk to her about my goals or values things without her looking at me like the Goody-Two-Shoes Fairy was about to carry me away.
The only other sophomore girl on the street was Samantha Taylor—or Queen Samantha, as Anjie and I had taken to calling her. This was because Samantha was bound to be homecoming queen someday, and she generally treated us like peasants. We had all been best friends in elementary school, but in junior high things had changed. Samantha was blond, beautiful, and on the cheerleading squad. Now she mostly ignored me at school, but if we were ever thrown together in class, she rolled her eyes when I answered questions. Sometimes she also shook her head.
School started and I went through the first few days mechanically. I didn’t say much at the lunch table. As I ate, I noticed how everyone talked about things without ever really saying anything important, or even interesting. It was all about who was dating who, or fighting with who, or where people were going, or what programs they’d watched. Not one single idea. Nothing about our school assignments except how hard or stupid they were.
If Anjie had been around, we would have talked about today’s lecture on whether hunter-gather societies were really better for the environment (Um, obviously not; otherwise everybody would be out hunting and gathering instead of farming.) or whether the entire English department had some sort of crush on Hamlet (Probably, even though all the characters in that play were pathetic).
I couldn’t imagine three more years of school going through every day without having anyone to talk to—well, to really talk to.
Anjie and I called each other nearly every day, and I got to hear about her new school. Her first day at school no one talked to her. No one. She’d been so sick about it, she had skipped lunch and spent that period in the library. Things were getting better for her now though. She’d found lunch friends.
My parents knew I was feeling down about Anjie’s move, and they tried to be sympathetic. Dad told me this was an opportunity to branch out and expand myself. Meet new people. Stretch. Dad’s the optimist of the family.
Mom told me I’d better get used to it because sometimes in life you’re alone and you have to learn to cope. She’s the cynic. I could tell Mom felt sorry for me, though. She took me shopping and bought me designer clothes. The expensive kind. She’d never done that before.
As we got to the cash register, she said, “Lesson number one in solitude. If you have to be lonely, do it in high fashion.”
While she was waiting for the clerk to finish with her credit card, I traced the Anne Cline label on her wallet. “Is that why you have a designer wallet? Your money is lonely?”
“I don’t have enough money to get lonely. The wallet’s for me.”
“You’re lonely?”
“Not as long as I’m with you, my little peach.” Mom had an unending list of cute names she used to embarrass me with. “I’m stocking up in preparation for the time when you go off to college. I can’t believe it’s only three years away. Three short years.” She said this last part as if college was death.
Mom had never wanted me to grow up. When I was little, after each of my birthdays she would look at me solemnly and say, “Absolutely no more growing up.” I had sensed, even back then, what I had been too young to remember—the grief she felt over a pregnancy where she’d lost not only the baby, but the chance of ever getting pregnant again. I was an only child, and always would be.
When Mom and I got home from shopping, Dad was on the couch answering emails on his laptop. “Will MasterCard call tomorrow to thank me for our support?”