IMPORTANT AUTHOR'S NOTE
Did you know that if you lick the back of Dots, they'll stick to glass? Just a little fun fact.
This is based off of both the new promo and my old story, which was also called Live and Let Die (I deleted it, sorry. It wasn't that good anyways.)
Six Feet From the Edge is still my main story, so this one probably won't be updated as frequently. I'm just writing this because I'm in the Halloween spirit, and because I just got back from seeing Apollo 18 and I'm in the mood to write something vaguely creepy. This story won't be very long, anyways. Characters will most likely be very OOC.
I do not own Degrassi or any books, movies, songs, etc. that I reference/use in this story. I do own the "mystery character," and those of you who read the first Live and Let Die probably already know who she is.
By the way, the title of this story is taken from the Green Day song 21 Guns ("when it's time to live and let die, and you can't get another try, something inside this heart has died, you're in ruins"), not the James Bond movie.
And now… the story.
000
Clare had to admit that she wasn't exactly thrilled by this whole camping-trip thing.
Her mother and Glen had decided to stay home, of course, but they'd pushed Clare into going to the cabin with Jake. They'd said that it would be a good bonding experience for them before the wedding.
Oh, I think we've bonded enough already. You know, when he was shoving his tongue down my throat and all that.
And Jake, being a high school guy, immediately seized the chance to throw a party. Clare had lost count of how many people he had invited, and to be honest, she thought that he was an idiot. The cabin wasn't that big, and Clare knew that she would be stuck on cleanup duty after everyone left.
Oh, how lovely. Scrubbing teenage puke from the floor and washing sheets with mysterious sticky substances on them.
She couldn't wait.
It was a two-hour drive to the cabin, and Clare wondered almost hopefully if anyone would really bother to make the trip. What would they get from it, anyways? Drunken truth-or-dare games and being kept up all night by obnoxiously loud crickets on steroids? She remembered that she had always hated this when she was a kid, and she didn't see how that could possibly change now.
Well, maybe she could hate it more. Jake had invited Alli, Jenna, KC, and Eli, to name a few names.
Alli and Clare had been drifting apart ever since Clare had started dating Eli and hanging out with him and Adam. They were still friends, just not best friends as they had once been. As for Jenna… Clare had done her best to put the past behind her, but that was hard to do when Jenna was constantly whining about everything. Yeah, she was pregnant at fifteen. That sucked, but it had been her decision to have sex. Yeah, KC cheated on her, but bitch, that was karma. The only time in the past, well, year or so when Clare had actually felt sorry for Jenna was when she gave Tyson up for adoption. She knew how much Jenna loved her son, and it couldn't have been easy.
But Jenna still majorly pissed Clare off.
Clare had been over KC for a long, long time. She wasn't jealous of Jenna or anything; far from it, actually. But it was still awkward, seeing him around. She still remembered the chaste kisses they'd shared, back when everything was all rainbows and butterflies, back before the drama of Degrassi had really impacted her life.
And Eli.
They were sort of friends now, but it was different. There wasn't the happy, friendly joking that they'd once shared, the relaxed and peaceful aura, because that could have been mistaken for flirting. Clare couldn't deny that she still had feelings for Eli, and she knew that he still had feelings for her.
So why was this so hard?
She wasn't ready for another relationship, not yet. She'd been through a boy who didn't care about her enough, a boy who cared about her too much, and the second she'd found her perfect neutral, her perfect rebound, he turned out to be her stepbrother-to-be.
She just couldn't catch a break.
Clare stared out of the window, watching the world fly by. Jake sat in silence behind the wheel; you could almost feel the tension between them. She was still attracted to him, of course, and she realized that in a few short weeks, she was going to be attracted to her stepbrother.
Oh, my God.
But all feelings and respect she'd had for him had just flown out the window when he decided that the best thing to do would be to break up with her at prom. Clare didn't exactly have the best track record with school dances, did she?
Of course, she'd had it better than Adam. At least she hadn't been shot by Bianca's gangster boyfriend. Or… ex-boyfriend. Whatever.
Clare was thrilled that Adam was going to this stupid party thing, but that meant that she'd have to hang around Eli, too, and… well, she wanted to be friends with him. Of course she did. The problem was that she wanted to be more that friends with him, too, and that was just confusing.
Maybe Jake was just a rebound.
"We're here," Jake told her shortly, yanking the keys out of the ignition and almost kicking the door open. Clare watched him with a sort of fascination, wondering what the hell had pissed him off this time. Maybe her simple presence was enough to irritate him these days.
And she was going to have to live with him until he hopefully went off to college.
Wonderful.
The cabin seemed a little smaller than she remembered, and cleaner. It was pretty, she couldn't deny that, especially the forest surrounding it, the brightly colored leaves carpeting the ground, a few branches on each tree still coated with ones that stubbornly refused to fall. But Clare wasn't exactly the outdoorsy type, and she hoped that there would be no forced marches through that pretty forest.
They had a good hour or so before the high school partygoers started arriving, and Clare opened the door into the bedroom she used to occupy every time she went there as a kid. She lay down on her back on the bed, closing her eyes and pretending that the worst things in life were scraped knees and time-outs. Pretending that she was back in the good old days of childhood, before she knew what divorce and bipolar disorder meant.
She took a deep breath, let it out, and kept her eyes closed.
She had no idea that, not-so-far-away, out the window, someone was watching her.
000
"Remind me again why we're doing this?"
Adam rolled his eyes. "Because you could have fun. You could enjoy yourself. You could get back together with Clare."
Not likely.
Eli did want to get back together with her, but… hell, it was complicated. Everything in life was complicated.
Scratch that. Everything in his life was complicated.
"And because I don't want to be stuck in a car with Katie, Bianca, and my brother for two hours, because that's a nasty fight waiting to happen."
"You do realize that I don't have a license anymore, right?" Eli checked. Apparently, what they thought was attempted suicide by crashing your hearse into a wall was reason to revoke your hard-earned license. Food for the thought.
"Which is why you're not going to get pulled over, right?"
"I'll try my best."
"Don't you have a fake license?"
"I have a fake ID," Eli corrected. "Which I haven't used in months and probably don't have on me."
Eli hadn't really used that thing for much, anyways. He didn't smoke and rarely drank, and his anti-social tendencies kept him far away from the nightclubs. He didn't think that he'd even picked up the thing since the beginning of his relationship with Clare, almost… five or six months ago now.
Things had changed so much since then.
"And I don't see why we're going to this lumberjack's cabin for some half-assed high school party."
"You know that Jake and Clare aren't together anymore, right?" Adam checked.
Eli sighed. "Yes, I know. This isn't about her."
"Dude, everything you do is about her."
It's all about you, Clare.
"Whatever. Just shut up so I can concentrate, okay?" Eli snapped.
Yeah, everything was about Clare. It always was, and it always would be.
Stop it! You're suffocating me!
Even now, Eli flinched when he remembered her words. He was different now, he reminded himself. He was getting him for his bipolar disorder. He would get better, and then maybe he and Clare could be friends again. That was all he dared to ask for. Just friends, no matter how badly it hurt.
He was an emotionally unstable wreck.
Oh, joy.
Eli pulled into the long, winding driveway at the address Jake had given, well, everyone in tenth through twelfth grade. He kept his eyes trained directly on the road in front of him, controlling his breathing. He was getting better. He was dealing. He wasn't going to be okay.
But he was good at faking it.
Adam suddenly twisted around in his seat, as if trying to see something that had just past. "Shit, Eli, did you see her?"
"See who?" Eli asked, bringing the car to a stop.
"There was this girl, by the side of the road…" Adam rolled down his window and leaned out, looking behind them. "She's not there now. She was blond, I think, and… wearing these really weird, torn-up clothes."
Eli laughed. "Dude, you're seeing things."
"She was pretty hot, too."
"You're just proving my point." Eli tapped lightly on Adam's arm, which was still encased in the heavy cast from the shooting at prom. "Come on, dude, get your ass back in the car."
"My ass is in the car."
"Get your face back in the car, then."
Adam sighed and leaned back, rolling up the window. "Guess I was seeing things. But she was really, really hot."
"Yeah, whatever you say."
Let's just get this over with.
000
The sky was darkening, such a deep shade of blue that it looked black until you stared intently at it for a few seconds. Clare realized that she was the only person at this entire party who was bored enough to stare at the sky for extended periods of time.
She hadn't been able to gather the courage to face Adam and Eli, and Alli had disappeared somewhere, so she was stuck with Jenna. To her credit, Jenna was a little less irritating than normal.
But only a little.
"The stars are out."
"What's your wish?"
"If I tell you, then it won't come true."
"How cheesy would it be if I said that mine already has?"
The two girls were walking along the edge of the forest, and Clare imagined a thousand pairs of dark, creepy eyes staring at her from the shadows. As much as she told herself that she was just being paranoid, she couldn't shake the feeling that something or someone was watching her, that there was something in there that she couldn't see.
Remind me not to go into the woods tonight. For any reason.
She remembered when she'd watched that movie with Darcy, Lady in the Water or whatever. It hadn't really been that scary, but she'd had nightmares for a week. Clare never was one for horror movies; she preferred comedies, romantic comedies at that. It was the stereotype for girls, but she didn't care. She liked her movies funny, with a little bit of kissing and happy endings here and there.
In most horror movies, on the other hand, the main characters were torn to bits or eaten by a werewolf or something.
This seemed like the setting for a real-life horror movie.
Um, God? Please don't let there be any werewolves in the woods. Thanks.
"Clare Bear? You okay?"
Clare snapped back to reality, turning to look at Jenna. "Yeah, I'm fine. Let's get back to the campfire."
000
The girl waits, watches.
Maybe she once had a name. She doesn't remember one now. She's been here, in this forest, for as long as she can remember.
No, that's not right, because she can't remember anything.
She watches these people. She waits for an opportunity.
They've come here, disrupted her safe haven, torn apart the peace of this place.
The girl closes her eyes. A slight smile ghosts over her lips as her hand reaches down to trace the handle of the knife sticking out of her boot.
But they'll be sorry.
Oh, yes. They'll be sorry.