The Duff: Designated Ugly Fat Friend Read Free Page A

likes you. She thinks you’re a good
     influenceon me. So that’ll be okay. Thanks, Bianca. Can we watch
Atonement
again? Are you sick of it yet?”
    Yes, I was getting very sick of the mushy romances Jessica swooned over, but I could get over it. I grinned at her. “I never
     get tired of James McAvoy. We can even watch
Becoming Jane
if you want. It’ll be a double feature.”
    She laughed—finally—just as the teacher made her way to the front of the room and began obsessively straightening the pencils
     on her desk before calling roll. Jessica tossed a glance at the scrawny instructor. When she looked back at me, her dark brown
     eyes sparkled with a few fresh tears. “You know what the worst part is, Bianca?” she whispered. “I was gonna ask Harrison
     to go with me. Now I’ll have to wait until prom to ask him to a dance.”
    Because of her sensitive state, I decided not to remind her that Harrison wouldn’t be interested because she had boobs—big
     ones. Instead I just said, “I know. I’m sorry, Jessica.”
    Once that little crisis was behind us, Spanish went by smoothly. Jessica’s tears cleared up, and by the time the bell rang,
     she was laughing giddily while Angela, a friend of ours, told us about her new boyfriend. I found out that I’d made an A on
     my last
prueba de vocabulario
. Plus, I totally understood how to conjugate regular present subjunctive verbs. So I was in a pretty damn good mood when
     Jessica, Angela, and I walked out of the classroom.
    “And he has a job on campus,” Angela rambled as we pushed our way into the crowded hall.
    “Where does he go to school?” I asked.
    “Oak Hill Community College.” She sounded a littleembarrassed, and she quickly added, “But he’s just getting his associate’s degree there before he goes to a university. And
     OHCC isn’t a bad school or anything.”
    “That’s where I’m going,” Jessica said. “I don’t want to go too far from home.”
    Jessica and I were such polar opposites, it was sort of funny sometimes. You could always predict what one of us was going
     to want to do just by picking the reverse of the other. Personally, I wanted to get the hell out of Hamilton as soon as possible.
     Graduation couldn’t arrive soon enough, and then I’d be off to New York for college.
    But the idea of being so far away from Jessica—not seeing her bounce by me every day or hearing her jabber about dances and
     gay boys—suddenly scared me. I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d handle it. She and Casey kind of balanced me out. I wasn’t sure
     anyone else would be willing to put up with my cynicism once I left town.
    “We should get to chemistry, Jess,” Angela said as she shook her long black bangs from her eyes. “You know how Mr. Rollins
     gets when we show up late.”
    They scampered off to the science department, and I started down the hallway heading toward AP government. My mind drifted
     to other places, to a future without my best friends to keep me sane. I’d never considered that before, and now that I was
     thinking about it, it made me really nervous. I knew they’d tease me for it, but I would have to find a way to keep in constant
     touch.
    I guess my eyes lost contact with my brain, because the next thing I knew, I ran smack into Wesley Rush.
    That was the end of my good mood.
    I stumbled backward, and all of my textbooks slipped from my arms and crashed to the floor. Wesley grabbed me by both shoulders,
     his large hands catching me before I had the chance to trip over my own feet and slam into the tile.
    “Whoa,” he said, steadying me.
    We were standing
way
too close to each other. I felt like I had bugs crawling under my skin, spreading from the places where his hands touched
     me. I shivered with disgust, but he misread it.
    “Wow, Duffy,” he said, looking down at me with a cocky grin. He was really tall—I’d forgotten that, sitting next to him at
     the Nest the other night. He was one of the only boys