Their Paid Girl

Their Paid Girl - Part 20

          The next morning, everything went from bad, to worse. First, I overslept and ended up entirely missing my morning seminar. Then, rushing to the second one between buildings, my bag had ripped and all my papers went flying into the wind. It took twenty minutes for me and several loafters outside to catch most of them and stuff them in a garbage bag that someone had dug up.

          I ended up being late for my second seminar, but an inconspicuous entrance sort of went out the window since, as soon as I walked in, I ended up falling hard on my butt, not having seen the “CAUTION: WET FLOOR” signs posted everywhere. Getting up off the floor, I finally managed to find a seat and settled into it with a sigh, pulling out notepaper from my garbage bag.

          But for some reason, people all around me kept twisting around in their seats to look at me, putting their heads together with their neighbours to whisper. I squirmed uncomfortably, feeling paranoid. What, had they never seen a garbage bag before? I didn’t look that poor, did I?

          I shot a pair of jocks an irritated glance, but they merely beamed at me. My irritation faded to confusion. I concluded that the world no longer made sense, so I just focused on the words my professor was babbling, trying to make sense of those ones, at least.

          Two hours later, I gave another sigh, this time of relief, when my last class for the day was over. Standing up, I stretched before proceeding to pack away my things into the enormous black garbage bag. Not knowing how else to carry it, I slung it over my shoulder like Santa Claus and joined the queue of people waiting to leave the lecture hall.

          I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see the same jocks still beaming at me. Vaguely, I remembered them as being on our football team, but the only game I’d attended was the one I was supposed to cover for our campus newspaper last week.

          “Yes?” I asked cautiously.

          The taller one, who was honey-blond and muscular, gave me what he evidently thought was a charming smile. “You’re Shawna Roberts, aren’t you?” he asked.

          My stomach clenched. Dear God, I couldn’t go on another fake date; not so soon after my disastrous one with Adam. Alright, so it could’ve been worse. But Adam was a nerve-wracking person, and I still hadn’t recovered.

          So I did the thing I was good at. “Nope,” I lied, then turned right back around.

          Unfortunately for me, the pair of them didn’t give up. “So you didn’t write this article?” the blond waved a newspaper in my face, folded to the front page.

          There was a picture of the football team, and a rather unflattering picture of Adam rolling around on the ground after having gotten tackled with a group of cheerleaders gathered around him. But that wasn’t the part that was going to get me obliterated; my headline at the top of the newspaper read in enormous, black block letters, “CAPTAIN? WE’RE PLAYING FOOTBALL, NOT GIRLS RIGHT NOW.”     

          Below the picture, my caption made sure to leave no doubt in people’s minds that it was, in fact, Adam in the picture, and my article clearly sited the exact number of times that Adam’s body had made contact with the ground: 14. True, four of those times Adam had made a touchdown, but as for the other ten, I described in vivid detail Adam’s painful downfalls. I may have also slipped in Adam’s reputation of being a player several times, mentioning that he played on more than just a football field.

          Overall, he wasn’t going to be very happy with me.

          The two jocks were still talking as I finally tore my eyes away from the article. “...so naturally we wanted to thank whoever wrote this article.”