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Author's Chapter Notes:
So, so sorry for the lag in updates! There were personal issues that kept me away from TSR for awhile. It's been cleared up now. Thanks to everyone who reviewed last chapter! You guys are wonderful. Also, I've been nominated! at both the Spuffy Awards and the Love's Last Glimpse awards. Thank you to whoever nominated me--it's immensely flattering! I'm up for quite a few at both sites...so feel free to head over to the Spuffy Awards and vote. =P
~*~

It shouldn’t have been so hard to bear. Logically, Buffy knew that. She’d spent two years in high school being mocked and ridiculed on a pretty regular basis because she was a waitress at the town’s most popular diner, so she really shouldn’t have been bothered by a few more taunts. But these were different somehow.

When she mentioned this to Faith, the brunette just rolled her eyes and said, “Duh, B. They’re hittin’ you where it hurts.”

“But they’re just stupid stuff,” Buffy argued. “I mean, I’ve been called slut something like 20 times today, so it shouldn’t hurt me—“

“Cumulative.”

Buffy blinked at Oz. “Huh?”

“Cumulative,” he repeated. “They keeps saying it, so the hurt builds up.”

“I—I’m not sure it works that way,” Tara said slowly, twirling the spaghetti in her lunch tray with her fork. “If Buffy can just ignore them—“

“But who could?” Faith asked. “Those motherfuckers just don’t shut up.”

“Faith!”

“What?” Faith asked, unfazed by Willow’s admonishment. “C’mon, you know those skanky hos are just tryin’ to get under B’s skin, and it’s working.”

“Faith, were you hanging out with the white trash again?” Buffy asked dryly.

Faith was unrepentant. “I might’ve been,” she said, “But that’s not the point. The bitches are gonna keep annoying Buffy ‘till she breaks down.”

“So what are we going to do?” Oz asked. “We can’t let Harmony keep it up. She’ll drive us all crazy.”

Everyone blinked at him—even Willow, who’d heard him say a sentence longer than that once. His participation in conversations was generally limited to monosyllabic contributions.

“Um, Oz? Are you feeling okay?” Buffy asked, grinning.

Oz just gave her an expressionless look that on anyone else probably would have been sarcastic. “I’ve had to listen to Harmony beg me for details on you and Spike’s sexual relationship,” he said. “Trust me, I’ll give a speech if it will make her stop.”

“Okay, then.” Buffy nodded resolutely. “What we need is a plan. Of the evil variety.”

“Um. Okay.” Willow nodded, an action that unfortunately made her resemble a bobble-head doll. “We can do evil…can’t we?”

“Well, Faith can,” Buffy said, grinning. “Honestly though, don’t you think this whole thing is a little—“

“Stupid?” Tara suggested, smiling slightly.

“Yep.”

“Could be fun,” Oz said neutrally. “Old school.”

“Startin’ a war over Buffy’s boyfriend is old school?” Faith laughed. “Damn, what school is that?”

“The school of hard knocks,” Buffy said, suddenly grim. Well, an image of Harmony trying to claw Spike’s eyes out could do that to a person. “So, what are we going to do?”

“We could turn her hair green,” Willow suggested.

Everyone else looked at her, confused. The redhead’s face turned the same color as her hair. “I saw it on an after school special,” she mumbled.

“It’s actually not a bad idea,” Buffy said thoughtfully. “I mean, if we could get dye, or something. You know Harmony’s neurotic about her crinkly bad bleach job.”

“Unlike your boyfriend, right?”

Buffy rolled her eyes at Faith. “Okay, let’s see: who’s hotter, Harmony or Spike?”

“Point,” Oz said. “Now, back to the diabolical planning.”

“Right.” Willow nodded resolutely. “Diabolical planning. Because…we’re evil now.”

“I thought we were fighting evil,” Buffy said, confused.

“Well, you know what they say,” Tara said. “F-fight fire with fire.”

“So we’re gonna have to be evil,” Buffy said thoughtfully. “Okay. Aside from dying her hair, what else can we do?”

“We could feed Percy steroids, make his Willy shrink,” Faith said.

“That’s just gross,” was Oz’s assessment.

“Yeah, but just think of how pissed Harm would be once she found out her boyfriend’s dick was too tiny to—“

“Visual!” Willow squeaked, clapping her hands over her ears. “I don’t wanna think about that, Faith!”

Buffy laughed, and the rest of the table joined in. They were still debating diabolical strategies when the bell rang and the group separated to go to their classes.

Willow gave Buffy a small, sympathetic look; they both had English right after lunch. “So…the world’s gone insane,” Willow said cheerfully.

“Looks like,” Buffy said dryly, flipping off a girl who’d just slunk by her and hissed, slut. “Of course, I figured it had gone nuts when I got into a fight this morning. I just don’t do that.”

The look Willow gave her was the same she would have worn if Buffy had informed her that the earth was made of cheese. “Because you’ve never had Snyder yell at you for fighting before…”

“Maybe once or twice…or every other week,” Buffy admitted.

“Exactly.” Willow nodded. “But we’ve never done the whole clichéd large-scale revenge thing.”

“There’s a first time for everything, though.” They entered the classroom and sat down. “And anyway,” Buffy continued, crumpling up the flier lying on her desk and throwing it in the trash, “I am getting pretty monumentally sick of this hellish town’s obsession with my love life.”

A paper airplane hit her in the back of her head. Grabbing the paper, Buffy unfolded it to a lurid drawing of herself and a man that she assumed was Spike, participating in an activity that she was sure had never occurred. God knows she would’ve remembered if it had.

She crumpled up the paper and threw it in the classroom, weariness suddenly overcoming her. Plots and immature pranks aside, this was shaping up to be a truly suck-ass school year.

I hate my life, she grumbled mentally, and fought to focus on the now-lecturing teacher.

~*~

“So? How was your day?”

“How was yours?” Buffy asked, fighting to remain neutral.

“Tolerable. C’mon, pet, I go to work every day. You only get a first day of school every…er…”

“Three hundred sixty five days.”

“Right. Once a year. So you should tell me about your day first.”

Buffy collapsed onto Spike’s couch. “I got teased,” she pouted. “Not just about the diner, either—they called me a slut and you a pedophile.”

“So far ‘m not seein’ anything that’s all that different from last year,” Spike mused, sitting down on the opposite end of the couch and pulling her feet into his lap.

“They had pictures,” she said, snuggling deeper into the couch and wriggling her toes as he began to massage the soles of her feet. “And this time, it wasn’t all made up.”

A slight smile graced his lips. “Odd to think that last year, none ‘f this had happened yet.”

“Yeah, I lived in bliss back then,” Buffy said dryly.

She noticed two things immediately. Firstly, he stopped rubbing her feet; and secondly, his entire body stiffened beneath hers. “So, you’d rather this hadn’t happened, then?”

His voice sounded hollow. Not even angry, just…empty.

She sat up, not an easy feat when you considered that he was clutching her feet. Feet. Feat. Ha.

I’m going insane.

“Hey,” she said, wriggling her toes again—except this time, it was more of an urgent wriggling. If there was such a thing.

He looked up, his face blank. Buffy wasn’t fooled, though. She’d been friends with him for four years—even when he fought to hide behind a mask of invulnerability, she could read him like a book. An easy book.

Looking him straight in the eye, Buffy said quietly, “You were the first person I met who…who took me at face value. Who didn’t try to make me into something I wasn’t. And I loved you first. I loved you more than An—more than anybody. And that hasn’t changed. It will never change. Okay?”

Pathetic excuse for a speech that it was, it somehow managed to cheer Spike up. Ladies and gentlemen, the seventh—or is that eighth?—wonder of the world, Buffy thought dryly. Buffy Summers can cheerfully speechify.

“’course you love me,” Spike replied lightly, jarring Buffy out of her thoughts. “’m just so damn adorable.” And then, with all the abruptness that she’d come to expect from him: “Wanna go shopping?”

Buffy laughed and the tension was broken. “Sure, Bleach-Boy. Let’s go.”

~*~





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