CHAPTER ONE

The boy was older than me, but only perhaps by a few years. His eyes were dark, and wide as he looked down on me. It would be the basis for are relationship that had yet to come. He was always looking down on me, for his height seemed to span miles in comparison to my own stubby legs. Even as I grew taller I remained always looking up.

I curled my lip back at him the words ready to run from my tongue as the rain pattered harmoniously around us.

It was always raining here.

"What's your name?". It was a simple enough question, but not one I would answer.

"You read books?" he smirked still looking down on me.

"Va the fairest mettre!" I cursed him with my tongue a sword slashing at his bravado with a certain air of grace.

The boy smirked still holding out the soaked pages of the book in his hands. The words would be smudged beyond repair I knew that instantly, that was why I'd left it to sit in the murky puddle water. The water that soaked through my shoes and stained my socks.

"You read?" He questioned again this time his voice becoming sterner.

I tried to place his face amongst the hundreds I'd brushed past, bumbled along with down corridors or fleeted past in the supermarket but yet somehow, I couldn't name him. He was a blank. Blanc.

Someone called his name. It was a voice almost as deep as his, and in the small carpark, as truck doors slammed and people ran squealing in the rain he continued to look down at me, holding my book. The book I had taken.

I didn't steal books.

I borrowed them.

I always returned them, I was after all no scoundrel.

At that moment I wanted nothing more than to break his stare. For I was after all only a girl, and he was almost a man. I knew my Mother watched from the car and the sound of her horn and raft would soon be upon me. But yet I could not.

So I did what I knew. I scorned the oaf.

"On t'a bercé trop prés du mur!" I screeched with a defiant glare. And as quickly as I could, I stamped on his foot and swung my rucksack at him.

"You scélérat, you dirty scélérat!" I added with another angry swing.

The boy smirked down at me still. His lips were not disproportionate to the rest of his face, in fact they were quite right. It made me swing for him again.

Thud, went the rucksack as stationary, a water bottle, a apple and hardback collided into the unwavering chest of the scoundrel, the absolute scélérat! The rain fell heavier now, like pellets around us. The carpark was empty. Bar the idling car. Myself and the scoundrel who stood in the murky water and his equally tall peers who loitered behind us, none brave enough to approach. It was almost musical, the thud, the pellet, the jeer and the horn of the car.

My mother beeped three times.

The first was to get my attention. I paused mid swing and looked back.

The second was when I waved my hand hushing her as I moved to snatch back the ruined words but he leered back from me.

The third was when I spat at his feet and called him a filthy vouler.

His smirk was gone then and he reached for me, anger absorbing his dark eyes. But I was gone.

My feet splashed in the puddles across the carpark as I sprinted aided with trepidation towards the waiting car.

Climbing up to the cab I could smell the overpowering stretch of football boots. The kind that littered the back seat.

"Where have you been, girl?" Demanded my Mother clipping my ear as I dropped my rucksack into the footwell. "And you will stay clear of that filth do you hear me! Paul Lahote is nothing but a …" she didn't finish her sentence.

Her hand pelted the horn and the screeched the abscourites and foul words I had so equitetly displayed only minutes earlier. However these were directed at a cat in the road rather than a filthy vouler like Paul Lahote.

Paul Lahote.

I would do well to memories the name.