Chapter Thirteen #6
She huffed back towards me. “Looks like I owe you f–”
Another knock came. Swift and sharp, like the crack of a belt. A storm quickly brewed in her eyes as she marched back towards the door.
I couldn’t help but smile at the thought that popped up in my head. “Ten bucks.”
She threw me a smirk over her shoulder. “Shit bet, that is.”
“You taking?”
“I’ll indulge.”
I couldn’t help the smile overtaking my face–at the easy money I was going to make.
She opened the door with more effort, except this time, while I tried leaning as far back without toppling over, Paris suddenly threw her head back and barked out that strong laugh of hers, slapping a hand on her thigh. “No way!”
She stepped aside, and lo and behold, Wolf Kingsley strolled in with a weird look he sent to the hysterical girl who hadn’t stopped laughing.
“Oh, piss off!” The words flew out of my mouth before I could stop them, and I found that I didn’t want to stop them. Wolf was like a damp towel after a shower. Slightly helpful but ultimately inconvenient–and often uncomfortable.
He focused on my voice and found me glaring over my shoulder, except the lasers I was trying to send out through my eyes weren’t what had his eyes widening. He eyed me from head to toe before blinking rapidly, as if trying to wash away a dream. “What are you doing?”
Paris seemed to have calmed down and went to close her door before another voice sounded, “I didn’t know there was an after party.”
Ajax’s confident tone rang as he pushed the door with a rough arm over August’s shoulders, or more like holding him in a chokehold as he dragged him inside. “Sorry,” the smaller boy said guiltily to Wolf, who hadn’t paid him any mind. “I followed you and… he followed me.”
Paris yelped as the swing of the door almost made her trip over. Upon seeing him, she glared. “No. No, absolutely not. Go back to your dorm.”
Wolf was still standing, watching me with his head tilted to the side. “Why are you dying your hair?”
At the question, Ajax, who only a few moments ago was arguing with Paris, “Don’t worry, no one’s judging your… loungewear. Though it isn’t doing you any fav–” focused on me. “Ah! You took my advice, huh?”
I rolled my eyes and scoffed. “Yeah, because what you gave me can be counted as advice.”
“This is the worst! You can’t all stay here. It’s against the rules.” Paris said with a stomp of her foot. She crossed her arms over her chest and refused to move from her door until they stepped out, as if that would stop the three boys from moving deeper into her dorm.
Ajax smirked back at her. “Haven’t you heard? We make the rules now.”
“Don’t get cocky, airhead.”
Wolf should have gotten the last word, had Ajax not worked his jaw before standing and leaving Paris’ dorm, to her satisfaction, before returning a few moments later, dragging a disgruntled Rain by the arm.
It wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a fault of Rain’s that she was dragged into this. But Wolf treated it as such when he, too, left Paris’ dorm with angry stomps, just to return with a silent and wildly confused Marigold.
The moment she’d stepped in after him, the pencil Rain was holding snapped in half.
I still never understood what Marigold had over Rain, but it sure was entertaining to watch.
I caught Paris’ eye and, over the simmering tension, mouthed, “Ignore them.”
I know I was going to.
When she had returned to finish my hair, it had caught the attention of almost everyone in the room, save for Marigold, who was busy admiring the sweater she had probably worn a number of times before.
I really didn’t understand what her deal was.
“Your hair!” August exclaimed, as if I shaved it off.
Wolf, who made himself comfortable on Paris’ bed, nodded along with him. “What are you two doing? Is Paris experimenting on you?”
At his last words, the girl in question sent him a nasty look over her shoulder.
Rain’s voice trumped them all, authority ringing in her tone, “You’d better hope there aren't any bylaws regarding outrageous hair colours in the Founder’s Society.”
Ajax groaned as he got comfortable on the floor, rifling through the bag I’d carried in from the store. “Forget the Society. Castle Hill’s bylaws alone are airtight around these types of things–Score! Who got these?”
Wolf leaned over him and perked up at the contents inside. “You restocked?”
Ajax wiggled his brows at me and waved them up. “Alexandr, you naughty, naughty boy. Rain, look.” He thrust them into her face. “He could get in trouble for these, couldn’t he?”
She smacked his hand away with a resounding thwack, and I almost smiled at the way he’d held his hand close to his chest with a grunt and a glare.
Narc.
August, with a playful tone, said as much, though in a much more colourful manner, before a thud and a groan sounded.
Wolf plucked them from his hands, and Rain was sure not to speak of anything within his possession, so she left the conversation there, focusing on something outside Paris’ window, though I was sure there was nothing of interest out there.
After the dinner tonight, I hadn’t thought there was anything that could save this group of misfits, but Thaddeus had been proved right and wrong.
With a few lit cigarettes and the devil’s hour, I watched the tension within the shoulders of each of the six students around me slowly ease away. Conversation, albeit in between long periods of awkward or stilted silence, ran smoothly.
Paris had almost finished when a lit cigarette found itself near my mouth. I didn’t question Wolf’s gesture, only leaning slightly forward to take a drag.
Spending time in each other’s presence did help, although only slightly, ease the tension and grudges between them.
A formal dinner was exactly that, formal.
Ajax seemed to have grown bored and joined Wolf as they leaned on either side of Paris’ desk to face us. “So, should this really be taking this long?”
Paris didn’t spare a glance as she placed the plastic sheet over my head. “So simple-minded. I envy you.”
He smiled sarcastically but didn’t bite back. It was either the nicotine in his system or the eyes I was watching him with that made him let it go. “I think we should all play a game. What with it being dark and… chilling.”
With the window open, Paris paused to throw a fit when August wrapped himself in her throw blanket and exclaimed, “It’s cold!”
But I knew that wasn’t what Ajax had been implying when he said chilling, “You’re not scaring anyone but yourself.”
I stood and stretched from the chair that I had been sitting on for quite a while when Paris tapped her vacant wrist.
“Thirty minutes,” she reminded me.
I nodded and removed the cape around me, turning to Wolf, who remained leaning with one leg over the corner of Paris’s desk, to take the cigarette from his hands.
August, still wrapped up to his nose, laughed and almost rolled off the bed. “You look like you’re looking for radioactivity with that headpiece on.”
Ajax flattened his arms out. “Enough, let’s play truth or dare.”
Right, because nothing screams chilling night activity like truth or dare.
How riveting.
Paris jutted her hip out and fixed him a glare. “You don’t call the shots in my dorm, you bonehead.”
“Alright, genius, what’s your great idea?”
I was hoping she’d send them all straight to bed, but Paris had a reputation to uphold where fun was practically her middle name.
I could also see the glint of mischief in her eyes; she was going to gain something out of this, “Let’s play truth… or truth.”
“You’re a revolutionary,” Ajax said with a blank face.
“Alright.” Rain perked up at Paris’ suggestion, the most attention she’d given her peers since she’d entered. “Who’s going first?”
That night, I had found out that Wolf wet the bed until he was six, August was deathly allergic to paint, and that he was deathly afraid of cats, Rain was in her academy’s annual play as Neptune and sang a song about the solar system, Ajax once walked in on his mother and father (before his death at ninety-two), Marigold, the sweet soul that she is, admitted to shoplifting.
Paris failed rehab twice when Ajax asked her about it–well, he practically said it for her.
I waited until after Paris had washed out the dye from my hair before hiding the cigarette boxes away and putting out my own.
Rain smoked one stick and treated it like a Cuban cigar, to my surprise, that she even smoked at all, and August was happy to inhale by the millisecond, giving him an estimated time of three days to finish it.
I threw his out when he wasn't looking, which served him right for putting a lit cigarette on a wooden bedside table.
“Alright, Sasha–”
“You can’t call him that.”
Paris paused in her words and turned to whoever had interrupted her, Wolf. “Sorry?”
“I call him that. Find your own nickname.”
Paris bared her teeth, the night waning on her. “When you find your own dorm and invite me in, you can tell me what to do.”
He sat back glumly but didn’t speak otherwise, letting her continue with an annoyed wave of his hand. “Alright, Sasha, truth or truth?”
“Do I have a choice?” I didn’t mind the game. It wasn’t like I’d be admitting to anything that can be used against me.
I’m sure Rain’s solar system song would make such great blackmail material.
Besides, who really willingly offers up the truth, save for someone with a straight-as-an-arrow moral compass, during these games?
Paris grinned. “Sure you do. Truth or truth.”
I bit down on my growing smile, thanking the weak glow of the lamp illuminating us and answered, “Truth.”
She stroked her imaginary beard and looked around, from Marigold, who sat perched on the corner of her bed, to August, who was still wrapped in a blanket lying across the same bed, to Rain against the wall under the window, Ajax and Wolf sitting against the bed, before meeting my eyes again.
She sat cross-legged on her chair and spoke again, addressing everyone, “What we have here is a very rare occurrence. Rarer than an astronomical miracle. Alexandr Miroslav,” she’d said my name with its respective accent, “will be answering a question, honestly might I add, of my choosing. What say you all, would be an answer worth knowing?”
I hadn’t known there were so many questions left unanswered about me until voices around me spoke up, “What’s the worst crime he’d committed?”
“How did his parents die?”
A little insensitive, but I didn’t take offence.
“Was he bullied in his old school?”
They wouldn’t dare.
“Was he ever in a gang?”
Briefly.
“What was the lowest of his life?”
I’d rather not delve that deep.
“What’s a secret he’d take to the grave?”
Wouldn’t be a secret I’d take to the grave, now would it?
Paris’ smile grew wider, and my eyebrows flattened with each question. “Alright, alright! All valiant requests, but I have a question of my own.”
I leaned back and feigned boredom, my curiosity at its peak. “Are you going to get to it?”
She sat up and peered at me. “Have you ever been in love?”
The question threw me off, far from anything I’d been preparing for.
A flash of soft smiles passed over my mind, a forgotten memory I refused to look back on. “No.”
Paris’ smile quickly fell. “Well, that was anticlimactic.”
August threw his head into the bed, groaning. “You had the perfect opportunity, and that’s what you ask?”
“I’m only ever going to do this once and agree with August, really Paris?”
It was later in the night, when the faint glow of dawn was beginning to show and everyone else had lost their battle with sleep, that Paris lowered herself to her carpeted floor for a more comfortable sleep, not that Marigold and August, curled up like cats, left her any space.
She leaned her head against my shoulder and whispered, “It’s called truth or truth, Sasha. ”