A/N: This is part of a writer's challenge I am doing for myself called "Spring Cleaning." I'm going through all scrapped stories on my computer and brandishing every first chapter online to see which one is worth continuing. First story to get 10 reviews gets a second chapter. If I don't get any bites, I can move on and scrap the lot. Have a browse and see what interests you. And when I said Aqua's roommate is vampiric, it just means he's allergic to sunlight, well, figuratively. Carry on.
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Quit Bugging Me
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"I want you and only you," Aqua read from her smart phone. Without trying to make the gesture too noticeable, she bit her bottom lip like she wanted it and fist pumped the air ever so slightly. No, she was not reading a text from a significant other. She was reading an online novel her friend Cinderella had sent her. When she finished the chapter she sniffed and dabbed tears from her eyes, adjusting her legs so that she was not sitting on top of the lady boner she had just acquired. The minute she tried clicking her phone on sleep mode and settling it back into her bag, it vibrated. She scowled and picked it up, glancing at the caller ID with a snort. When she answered it she cupped her hand over her mouth and whispered in a husky voice, "I want you and only you." The old woman beside her glanced towards her in horror. Aqua chuckled and muttered that she was speaking to a friend. When the look of horror refused to leave the old woman's face, Aqua called it quits and turned away from her over the seat edge, clutching the metal bar beside the train car door.
"How was it?" asked Ella across the line.
"Fucking brilliant," whispered Aqua in return, trying not to massage her lady boner. "I nearly cried on the fucking train."
"Excuse me, ma'am," murmured the old woman beside her. "Could you refrain from the language?"
"Of course, grandmother," Aqua murmured in respect. Then she returned to Cinderella with a manic giggle.
"Oh my gosh, Aqua, control yourself!" Ella squealed, giggling like mad herself. "You've got a horde of post pubescent boys and girls to teach in like, thirty minutes."
"Oh, gods," Aqua groaned, slumping over the side of the seat and clapping her hands over her eyes in distaste. "Remind me why I got this fucking degree- I am so sorry ma'am."
The old woman stopped mid breath and snuggled back into her spot, inching a little farther away from Aqua as she glared ahead. Aqua rolled her eyes and returned to the phone, taking a sharp gust of breath when the train doors opened and the recording overhead called out her stop. She slipped her shoulder bag around her neck and lumbered off with her phone still clutched against her ear, lolloping up the steps and throwing her fluffy scarf close as she hit cold air. As the wind whipped around her legs she chattered her teeth. She hated wearing skirts and tights, but she had lent her slacks to someone last weekend and never got them back. To reduce the amount of leg she showed to near nothing, she had clamped riding boots over her legs. They clomped in a threatening way as she trudged down the road towards her high school.
Tell me why I got mine first," sighed Cinderella. "I should have become a costume designer, but my stepmother just had to force me into hotel management."
"At least you're not cleaning anymore," Aqua grumbled. "I had to clean up vomit from my desk last month."
"Who's the fucked up one?" asked Ella. Aqua furrowed her brows in confusion before groaning and crossing the street. By now, Departure High School was a wink away. She could feel the ooze of disappointment, death, and decay emanating towards her the minute she laid eyes on it. With a long sigh she muttered that she was not gossiping.
"Oh, come on, I forgot his name!" Ella whined. Aqua scowled and took a quick peek around the surrounding trees and trashcans. When she was sure the coast was clear she grinned, cupped her mouth around the speaker on her phone, and whispered, "Vanitas."
"Yeah!" cheered Ella. "Now there's my next pulp fiction, 'sexy high school teacher falls for dark, mysterious bad boy. Only trouble is, he's her student! Gasp!'"
"Okay, Ms. Pedophile," Aqua snapped, "thank gods we kept you away from the teaching profession."
"They're seventeen, right?" Ella asked. "You should see the ages of some of the kids coming into the hotel- barely legal is an understatement. Just last weekend we busted a man bringing in a fifteen year old."
"Gross," Aqua muttered, keeping close to the curb. Her creature radar was tingling. She could sense students close by. She wanted to continue talking to Ella, but she could not do that if she was forced to put her mental straight laces on. Biting her lip again, she giggled and whispered, "I don't need a kid. This school is hottie sensei central." She winced as it came out of her mouth. It sounded funnier in her head.
"You did not just say that," Ella sighed. Aqua shrugged and admitted that she had.
"But seriously," she added. "I ain't gonna name names… but let me name some motherfucking names." She gave herself a luxurious fanning before she threw her head back and laughed out loud.
"Didn't you say the parents were spicy too?" asked Ella.
"Oh no, no, no," said Aqua. Then she bit her lip and amended, "maybe one or two. There's a couple guys who come in all the time for student teacher conferences, I mean oh my goddess. Supermodels. You come out of speaking with them slightly blinded."
"They've got the trouble kids, right?" asked Ella. Aqua snorted, trying to bat down the pompous side of her personality as she crossed another street. Fire truck red spikes rippled over a line of hedges several yards ahead like a lurking lion. Aqua tried not to groan. She decided to straight lace herself to the waist. Immediately the posture of her legs changed: clipping, purposeful. Her breath hitched to catch up.
"Don't get me started," she muttered. "The last conference one of them came in and asked me why I was giving the kid a C. And I said, because he's giving me C work. I said I have tutoring hours but no one is motherfucking coming, and then he leaned in and said, 'my brother really needs this A,' and I said I'll really need a motherfucking mojito if I have to sit across from you for another five minutes." Aqua screeched with laughter, snapping her mouth shut when the line of red hair behind the hedge turned. To her surprise, Ella did not laugh back.
"How is Terra?" she ventured. Aqua stopped in her tracks, letting her mouth hang open. When Ella remained silent and one of Aqua's students bobbed from a parent's car in the school's front lawn, she straight laced herself fully and muttered, "I don't know."
"Do you not talk to him at all?" Ella asked.
"Fuck you, too," Aqua muttered, giving a motherly smile as the student waved at her. When the student turned her head, Aqua returned to scowling. "If I wanted relationship therapy I would have asked."
"I was just curious!" Ella sang as if wiping the slate clean. Aqua scowled deeper and muttered she had gotten her into a fantastic mood.
"I'm sorry," Ella apologized. "It was stupid of me. Did I get rid of your lady boner?"
"Now it's a sad boner," Aqua muttered.
"Who's a sad loner?" called a voice a couple feet behind her. Aqua gaped in shock and jabbed the end call button on her phone. Then she straight laced her face, sucked in a fighting breath, and turned on her heel with a smile that would melt butter. When she saw who stood with his arms crossed ahead of her, she gave a kind chuckle.
"Vanitas," she murmured. "How nice to see you."
Vanitas winked and stuck out his tongue at her. It was pierced. He was showing her his newly pierced tongue. Did Aqua like pierced tongues? She ran through the options in her mind and decided she could cope without them, especially on seventeen-year-old boys. Soon Vanitas traipsed an unhealthy distance from her side. His bare shoulder brushed against hers as they walked. What was it with teenage boys and not wearing clothing? Pants and coats for winter, shorts and t-shirts for summer. It was not difficult. Aqua reined back the building mental tirade in her head and closed her eyes, engaging her transverses to inspire alert serenity.
"Gonna ask me how my weekend went?" Vanitas drawled.
"I thought you would volunteer that information yourself," Aqua responded. Vanitas snorted. Then he said that it had been cool.
"I fixed up an old Harley over the winter break," he sighed. "Trying to get it in driving order before the end of the month."
"You started working on it in November and you still can't get it to turn on?" Aqua thought to herself. A snicker barely escaped her lips before she transformed it to a gentle, encouraging chuckle.
"That's good!" she said with gusto. "Using your ingenuity! You could be a mechanic or an architect if you set your mind to it!"
"Nah, I got other things on my mind right now," he murmured, looking her up and down. Aqua held back the impulse to pop him. She clutched her phone tightly to her side. She was moving into territory where any sign of weakness was pounced upon. Just last month Larxene had made Lexaeus cry when she found a dungeons and dragons card stuck to some gum on his shoe. After five minutes of casual conversation the savage nymph had him spilling his guts on his addiction to role playing games with strangers in dark cellars beneath comic stores. Sure, Aqua had merely been speaking to her best friend over the phone, but in the hard world of high school teaching, you did not have friends. You did not have a social life. According to every faculty member within a ten-mile radius, Aqua Holland was an angel sent upon them from a land of dreams, where "being social," was but a phrase and "personal drama" a weakness of the soul. As far as the rest of the school was concerned, the term, "private life," did not exist in her vocabulary. She was first, foremost, and forever, a professor. And a damn good one, if she did say so herself. So when she stowed her phone safely in the inside pocket of her shoulder bag, squared her shoulders, and waltzed through the school's entrance doors with the inconsequential Vanitas lumbering several feet behind, she smiled like a cherubim and waved like a queen. When she reached her classroom and plopped her bag into the perpetually locked drawer on the left side, a few students called hi. When she looked up, her heart warmed.
Kairi, Olette, Skuld, and Shiki lined the front of the class with bright smiles and pens and paper out. Aqua grinned and asked how their weekend had been.
"Great!" Kairi sang. Then, watching to see if any of the boys were around, she whispered, "I think I'm gonna tell Roxas that I like him!" The thrill of the admission nearly rocketed her out of her seat. Aqua tried continuing her encouraging smile, but on the inside she deflated. Just last week she had seen the student in question snogging a senior boy outside the nurse's office. When Olette winked towards Kairi with a giggle, Kairi said that they would be like sisters, since Olette was planning on asking out Roxas' friend Hayner as well. Aqua laughed heartily but mentally banged her face against her desk.
"Now, girls," she warned, "I hope you don't let these boys take over your lives."
"Oh, come on, Ms. Holland!" Kairi whined. "YOLO! You've got to take life by the horns!"
"Exactly!" quipped Aqua. "Especially when a single mistake could lose you hundreds of thousands of dollars, two decades, and the possible destruction of your future career!"
The smiles wiped off the four girls' faces. Aqua stared at them with a frozen smile. Then she whipped around and started writing the guiding thought for the day on the blackboard.
"Stupid," she thought to herself with a shake of her head. "Why did you say that?" Just as the classroom started filling up, a tap echoed from the wall near the pencil sharpener. When Aqua turned to see who was there, she was greeted with the same, fiery red mane she had spotted behind the hedges on her way in. A green eye with a teardrop tattoo beneath winked at her. She forced her lips into a greeting grin. Axel Flynn. Human Geography.
"Hey," he winked, rapping his knuckles on the paneling at the side of the door as he directed his serpentine irises across the sea of incoming students. "Social studies faculty meeting on Wednesday at eight. Thought I'd warn you."
"When was this information sent out?" Aqua asked. Quickly she flipped open her laptop and opened her browser, entering into her school email account with a cool glance. When she saw that the first email in her inbox was captioned with the subject line, "SEXY SEXY PULPY OOH LA LA!" she internally screamed and slowly slid the screen from her colleague's view. Axel eyed her with an equally cool glance and asked if she had gotten it yet. Aqua archived Ella's message and deleted it from her main inbox. Then, with an inaudible sigh of relief, she murmured that she was looking. When she was sure there were no more suspicious inboxes, she chirped, "I can't seem to find it!" and slid the screen around for Axel to see. The man leaned over her shoulder and skimmed down one by one. His eyes furrowed as he settled on the third email from the bottom. He snorted.
"Emailing your school account because you won't answer me any other way?" he murmured. Aqua blinked in horror and rushed her eyes to the bottom of the screen to see what he was reading from. When she saw it, she mentally kicked herself. She scoffed out loud and waved her hand.
"Aunt," she muttered, adding, "needy," as an afterthought.
"Terradebiceps hotmail?" Axel read.
"Don't ask me," Aqua sighed. "She's got a thing for pulp fiction."
"You guys don't get along?" Axel asked. Aqua stared at him with another frozen smile.
"We get along just fine," she beamed. "I said she was needy. Gotta love family, right?" she added in expectation. Axel grunted and shrugged; saying he and his family did not get along.
"Well, family is important, Mr. Flynn," Aqua cooed in a warm, syrupy voice. "I know I would not be anywhere without the strong line of Holland women flanking my path."
Axel grunted again. Then he asked if he could search through the rest of Aqua's recent emails incase something popped up.
"You should have gotten it within the last week," he murmured. Aqua chuckled and said she would look through them with him incase he got excited by anymore family messages. To her relief, there was nothing else out of the ordinary. When the pair could not find anything, Aqua threw up her hands and asked why they had forgotten to tell her.
"Larxene sent 'em out this time," Axel sighed. "Maybe she hates you."
"No one should hate anyone," Aqua intoned like a mother to a child. With raised brows Axel nodded and said goodbye. Aqua thanked him for telling her. When he was gone, she relaxed. The bell rang.
"All right, everyone," she announced, clapping her hands and snapping for everyone to quiet down. "Guiding thought for today is 'what are the different ways anthropology examines gender.' I want everyone to take out their phones and hold them up in their left hand- yes, Sora, I know yours is in your lap."
Sora blushed and swept his phone into his left hand. Aqua grinned and put her right forefinger up. "And now I want you to take this finger and," as she raised her forefinger to click the power off button, her phone vibrated. The class leaned forward in anticipation. Aqua furrowed her brows in surprise. Then she snorted, giving her class a sly grin.
"This is why we all have to turn our phones off," she mused. When she looked at the caller ID, her smile faltered. The name "Terra," blared up at her with the symbol of a heart beside it. She cursed under her breath. How could she not have removed the heart by now? Sucking in, she tapped the end call button and told everyone to turn his or her phones off with her.
"No call is important enough to distract you from your education," she announced. "Not even calls from crazy aunts!"
The class gave a polite laugh and settled down. Aqua glanced towards the clock on the wall and steeled herself for the next three hours until her lunch break. For some reason, she felt like it was going to be a very long day.
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