Weeeellll, this is a fanfic about The Breakfast Club. I still don't know if it's gonna be John/OC or not, but there IS an original character. I'm trying to not make her Mary Sue at all, but if she starts to lean in that direction I want someone to immediately warn me hahah. I just want her to be as human and normal as possible.
This is taking place about a month after the Breakfast Club, and everyone is still friends... I wanna make it a perfect world like that ya know ;) It's gonna be alternating POVs, mostly between John and Avalon but every now and then I think I'll have another character's perspective just because they're all interesting characters.
Any suggestions, reviews, and constructive criticism are wholly welcome (even if they're bad) aaand I hope you like my story!
(DISCLAIMER: The Breakfast Club belongs to the late great John Hughes, the only thing that belongs to me are my characters.)
Avalon fidgets uncomfortably, pulling at the sleeves of her sweater and sighing loudly. The front office of this school is too cramped, too... plastic. The entire room smells like a stale kind of sterile, and the fluorescent lights put a weird glow on everything, from the rude attendance lady to the cheap blue carpet running from wall to wall. The heater is on much too high, or maybe she's just nervous. Nervous and sweaty. Very, very sweaty.
Not a good thing to be on your first day at a new high school.
"Here you go, honey," the nicer of the desk women says, and Avalon darts up, dragging her bag behind her as she steps up to the counter. The woman signs off on her schedule, passing it over to her. "It's alright if you're late for the first week or so that you're here, it's kind of hard to get adjusted, I know. But just a tip - all electives are on the first floor, all math and science is on the second floor, and all English and history is on the third. Alright?"
Avalon nods and smiles, saying a quick, "Thanks," and turning to exit the office.
Immediately, it's cooler in the hallway. She sighs in relief, fanning her face with her hand and slowly shuffling down the hallway. She hasn't even looked at her classes yet; she just wants to get to the nearest bathroom and sit there for awhile until she can work up the guts to just go to her first class.
She finds a bathroom next to the stairs and inside, it's empty. She sets down her bag, looking at herself in the mirror, making sure she doesn't look too bad. The flushing of her cheeks has gone down, her hair isn't messy - or as neat as it can possibly be, with hair as curly as hers - and her makeup is generally... agreeable. All she's asking for today is to go by mostly unnoticed, and even if she is, she'll have decent friends while she's here.
Illinois is supposed to be temporary.
Finally, she looks at her schedule. First period has been in session for at least twenty minutes, meaning there's a little over thirty minutes left. Chemistry, European History, Trig, Woodshop, Ceramics, English 3, and a free period. She presses her lips together. Not so bad.
Avalon picks up her bag and makes her way up to the second floor. The halls are completely empty except for a janitor that she goes by and a girl delivering passes, and she keeps circles around the halls, looking for 220. After ten minutes, she ends up where she started, the side staircase next to room 200. Avalon furrows her brows. Jesus, how did she pass it? The numbers on the doors are huge and white, no way to miss it. And she isn't even that nervous. She huffs in annoyance, deciding to go slower this time.
She works her way towards the middle bigger hall, eyes slowly scanning across the doors. 210, 211... At the end of it, she's assuming if she takes a right or a left, 220 has to be on either side. But she's not taking a risk, so she looks around, hoping to see the same girl delivering passes or the janitor to ask if she's generally going in the right direction. A door, the door to room 214 opens, and a boy in a jean jacket leans against the doorway. "What, Mrs. Stella, you don't trust me? I just need to take a leak, is all. Ya gotta go, ya gotta go."
Avalon's nose crinkles. He's her only option right now. He turns around and she steps up, quickly asking, "If I keep going this way am I gonna find 220?"
The boy stops. He looks her up at down, squinting at her curiously, as if she just asked him the most confusing question he's ever heard in his life. "Is your destination located within the walls of Shermer High School?"
"Obviously."
"Then you don't have a problem finding it, toots." He turns away from her, allegedly on his way to the bathroom, but now she's doubting it.
Avalon sighs. She fucking hates wise guys, boys that can't just stop for a minute and be serious instead of blowing everything off. "It's a simple question, man."
He stops, not turning back to face her but to face the fire alarm and fire extinguisher in the wall. He looks at his reflection in the glass of the fire extinguisher, picks at something in his teeth, and eventually shrugs. "Yeah. Keep goin' that way and it's on your right. But Martin fuckin' blows," he says, referring to the teacher of the class.
He reaches over, pulls the fire alarm, and runs down the hall.
For the second time in two hours, Avalon is back in the office. The desk receptionist looks up at her in confusion, and the exasperated girl holds up a pink slip to see the principal. "Did a hall monitor think you were cutting class?" the woman asks.
"No. Someone pulled the fire alarm and I was just mysteriously too close," Avalon says, sitting down in the same chair she did before. The desk receptionist pokes her head into the principal's office, and immediately he calls her name in a monotone.
Avalon walks in slowly, expecting the worst. She doesn't remember much of him from when she registered, mainly because he was talking to her parents and he had on his best smile, rambling about the school's admirable test scores and how it was a prestigious state school. But as soon as her parents were out of earshot, he went off on a boy in his office, with a tall Mohawk and a studded jacket. Avalon knows the boy probably was doing something out of line, but the way the principal was screaming at him, basically treating him like he was nothing, made her immediately dislike him.
Inside of his office, she starts to fidget again. He points at a chair across from his desk and she settles down, sliding the slip across, issued to her by the only teacher that poked his head out.
The plaque on his desk proudly reads Principal Richard Vernon. Even his name throws her off.
"Are you this girl that thought it would be funny to pull the fire alarm?" he says brusquely.
Avalon shakes her head. "No, sir."
"Well, then, you had to have seen the guy who did it."
She pauses. She doesn't want to rat anyone out, not this soon, not at all. She doesn't want to get off on the wrong foot and be known as a snitch, and besides, what if she has a class with the kid that did it? She wouldn't have a good year. "No," she shrugs. "If I saw him, I would tell you. All I can say is I saw brown pants." The boy was wearing gray.
Vernon doesn't seem at all convinced and taps his fingers on his desk, laughing under his breath. "Did this boy have long hair? Was this boy unnecessarily obnoxious and cocky? Because there is no way you couldn't have seen him."
Exactly. "No, sir, I didn't see him. If I didn't see him, how would I have talked to him?"
"Don't give me sass, young lady!" he snaps sharply, pointing an accusing finger at her. "You're new here, aren't you? You don't want to be getting off on the wrong foot."
That's exactly what I'm trying to prevent, she thinks with a microscopic shake of her head. "Exactly, sir. I'm just telling the truth."
"It had to have been John goddamn Bender," he says under his breath, yanking open a drawer and pulling out a white slip. He scribbles her name across the top, reading it off of her pink pass, and from her position, she reads DETENTION proudly printed across the top. Her stomach drops. Already...
"Unless you want to tell me the truth, you have a detention this coming Thursday. If you come clean, it won't count for anything. But if you don't, you have a demerit you didn't earn, Missy," he says, ripping off the top slip and shoving it to her. "Get Sheila to sign that for you."
Avalon locks her jaw, crumpling the paper in her left hand before handing it to the desk receptionist. The woman looks up at her in concern, shaking her head pitifully. "We all know it was that Bender boy, honey. Don't get yourself into this because you don't want to have a bad reputation."
The girl just shrugs. "It won't matter. One detention doesn't matter."
She clucks her tongue, giving the slip back to the girl. "That boy isn't worth all the trouble."
With much less of a struggle than before, Avalon safely located herself to European History, arriving there at a time with a crowd of students big enough for her to slip in unnoticed. She gave her schedule to her teacher, who nodded her through, and luckily, he gave her a seat in the far left corner, right beside a window and a somewhat spastic boy to her right. She wasn't sure if he was naturally that way, or if he just got nervous that a girl was even bothering to speak to him. But he stuttered, rubbed his nose, snorted awkwardly when he laughed, and damn near sneezed on her. He would've, if she hasn't jerked out of the way and let all the mist fall on the worksheet he was helping her with. And then he turned beet red, rubbed his sleeve over his nose for the thousandth time that period, and hid his face while he apologized for his Spring allergies.
Avalon decided that she liked him, and at least she'd be able to talk to him. At least she'd have ONE person she could call an acquaintance.
The bell rings, and she makes her way out, the awkward boy - Brian, his name was - saying something to an equally awkward boy behind her. She looks down at her schedule, her next being woodshop, in room 112. "Hey, do you know where this is?" she says, turning around to face Brian.
He nods. "Oh, oh yeah, that's where I'm headed." She sticks to his side without saying anything, listening to him go off about the Physics club or something like that, nodding when she should and making little noises to let him know that she's actually listening. They make their way slowly down the packed stairs to the first floor, going past two couples joined at the mouth without coming up for air, past a pretty red-headed girl that playfully hits him in the arm when she passes by, and then Brian gets shoved from behind, almost falling down the rest of the stairs before a denim covered arm wraps around his neck to pull him back up.
"Hello, dweebie," a voice Avalon already recognizes said. "Sorry for endangering your life there. I just couldn't help myself."
"It-it's no problem, Bender," Brian says with a slight laugh. She's not sure if he's afraid of if he's happy to see this kid.
Bender peeks around Brian's head, lifting a brow at Avalon. "Who's your lady friend?"
"Um, this is, um, Avalon. She's new."
"We already met," she says quickly, trying to contain her frustration. She got a detention for this kid. Of course, she's going to be pissed.
"Ah. Ah, 220 girl," Bender nods. "How did that whole fire alarm situation go?"
Avalon snorts. "If you really wanna know, I got a detention. Didn't want to rat anyone out."
Brian shrugs. "Well, hey, you really shouldn't, um, worry about what people are gonna, gonna think about you, you know, because getting in trouble is, is just - "
Bender smirks and cuts him off. "Consider it your warm welcoming to Shermer."
The three of them enter a room that, naturally, reeks of wood, and Brian and Bender take their seats. Avalon tries to go quietly to the front, but half the class is just staring at her, and she hands her schedule to the shop teacher, Mr. Dawson. He looks over it and points to a table in the back. "You will be seated next to our... respectable... Mr. Bender."
Avalon's nose twitches and she heads to hear seat. settling down in a chair, the only thing between her and Bender being the currently turned off table saw. And again, he's looking at his reflection, picking his teeth with a little sliver of wood before tossing it to the side and leaning his chair back against the wall.
"Today, we're continuing Unit 3. Most of you should at least be ready to cut out what you need, and I am available for assistance," Mr. Dawson says, pulling out a bucket of goggles. She goes up to the front again, grabbing a pair from the bottom. Beside her, Bender sifts through them until he finds a pair marked with a little star in marker. He fogs them up with his breath and wipes them off with his sleeve, smiling and nodding at the amused Mr. Dawson.
"Give her the basic safety instructions, John," he says. "I'm trusting you can get that done."
"If you gotta help a lady, gotta help a lady."
They go back to their desk and she sits there expectantly, watching him as he switches on the table saw and it whirs to a speed that makes her stomach flip. But Bender doesn't say anything, doesn't do anything to help her, only goes to a little table stacked with fresh, huge sheets of wood.
She makes a face at him. He blinks. "Safety?"
He removes his jacket, draping it over the back of his chair. "I think it's pretty simple. Just don't cut yourself."
By the end of the day, Avalon is exhausted. She's sick of going up and down stairs, she's sick of rude people that bump into her like she's not even there, and she's sick of girls staring at her and whispering rather than coming up to talk to her and ask her where she's from. She wants to get home, but the worst part is - she has to goddamn walk.
Her parents have always been firm believers in walking when you get the chance. "Any walking is exercise," is what her stepdad always reminds her. Even if they live two miles from her school, they're expecting her to walk to and from. And that takes at least an hour with stoplights and school traffic. An hour taken out of her day.
Then again, she has nothing to do.
So when the bell rings she packs up her books, leaving the library where she has her free period. She was able to get her trig homework done, at least, and half of her European capitals and countries done. So much homework on the first day...
She pushes her way out of the side exit of the library, into the flow of jocks coming from the sports area where they had their last period athletics. She tries to weave through them as fast as she can, because she knows at least one of them would be rude enough to grab her butt or something like that, and then they're apart of the giant crowd of kids trying to get out of school.
After ten minutes of pushing and shuffling she's able to get out on the main sidewalk, where other kids, mainly freshmen and sophomores who can't drive, are walking home. She's a junior who CAN drive, but doesn't have a car. She feels like an idiot.
She winds around the football field, turning in the direction of the little neighborhood she lives in. All the other kids walking home have someone to talk to, a friend that's coming with them. Man, I look lonely... she thinks, fiddling with the watch on her wrist.
At the end of the football field, there's a stoplight, and she stands just outside of the huddle of kids waiting for it to turn. Someone stands awfully close to her, and she fidgets when she hears them breathe a little deeper. They're literally pressed up against her side, and she steps a little to the left, only for them to follow. She tucks her hair behind her ear, looking at them from the corner of her eye, and cringes.
"How many times do I have to run into in one day, dude?"
Bender smirks and shrugs. "Just your lucky day."
She sighs and the crosswalk turns. She briefly considers walking faster than him but decides that A) he won't let up and B) she would rather have someone to walk with than nobody at all. "I'm surprised you don't have detention or something," she says with a shake of her head.
"Oh, I do," he replies quickly. "There's just no point in going."
Avalon doesn't question him. He starts to hum a guitar riff, slapping his hand against mailboxes they pass by, eventually breaking into a run and then skidding to a stop to wait for her.
"Why do you cause so much shit?" she asks, staring at the mailboxes that he's knocked so hard that they tilt to the right.
"I do what entertains me."
"And you're entertained by knocking people's mailboxes off their posts and pulling fire alarms for no reason?"
"I am entertained by what entertains me. And if that's what entertains me at the moment then I'm going to do it," he explains flatly, and she can't tell if he's angry or not. She looks at him from the corner of her eye again, his hair hanging over his face as he looks down at his gloves and clenches and unclenches his fists. "You must smoke so much weed," she wonders out loud, and she sees the corners of his lips barely lift up.
"Well, gee, how'd you guess, you genius, you," he says sarcastically, pushing his fingers into his cheeks as he smiles cheesily.
Avalon laughs under her breath. She would've loved a guy like him when she was a freshman, when her entire life pretty much revolved around smoking weed, listening to rock n roll, and she got in trouble more than she should have. That's not to say the first two still aren't apart of her general life; she still lights up and loves Led Zeppelin like no damn other. But she's smarter now.
"You know," he says after a minute, scraping a stick he picked up against the picket fences they pass by, "I have a girlfriend. So if it seems like I'm flirting, I'm not. I swear."
"You wouldn't seem like the type to have a steady girlfriend."
"I don't know if we're steady," he says quickly. "She's just the first one I've had where I haven't had three others at the same time."
"That sounds more likely," she says. There's a tenderness in his voice that she can hear, hidden deep down, but she still hears it loud and clear.
She can see her house, two blocks away. They reach another crosswalk, and he looks to the left, where a field separates the middle class from the lower class houses.
She should've known. A kid like him has to be from a bad neighborhood.
Avalon waits to push the button. He looks like he's debating going home or going somewhere, anywhere that isn't it, but the look quickly fades in his eyes. "I needa get home," he says quietly. "It's a regular palace, trust me."
Avalon manages a smile. "Alright."
He walks backwards slowly, like he's preparing himself to go home, and she realizes he probably has a terrible home life. Abusive parents. Something nobody ever deserves. When he finally turns around, facing the houses on the other side of town, the houses that are all somehow just darker and smaller and shadier, she feels something pull in her gut. She's not sure if it's pity or if she's scared for him. She just doesn't want anybody to get hurt.
"Bye, Bender," she calls after him, just barely loud enough.
He doesn't turn around, but she knows he heard her.