ONE
Enjolras
Inciting a mini-rebellion in AP Biology had been a bad idea.
Enjolras' intentions had been good, of course. Some of his classmates just couldn't afford that giant tome of a biology textbook, and still Mr. Hayden had threatened to bring them all down one letter grade for not purchasing the brick.
And Enjolras, being Enjolras, couldn't just sit there and let that shit happen.
So he'd stood up and given Mr. Hayden a fiery denunciation that had started with "You, sir, are part of the problem with today's society" and had only gone downhill from there. And then Enjolras—along with many of his classmates, at Enjolras' goading—had walked right out of that classroom in a glorious act of rebellion against the injustices of upper class privilege.
And then he'd gotten detention.
Now he was sitting in a mostly empty classroom, bored out of his mind and unable to do anything productive. He had been assigned to write an essay about how starting rebellions in class was wrong, but he'd finished it in less than an hour, so he was forced to stare at the wall for the remaining two hours and ten minutes of detention.
There was one other person in the room besides Enjolras and the detention monitor. The girl sat at the table next to Enjolras, still writing her own essay. She was hunched over her paper, silent and solemn, drawing out the letters with a slow, careful hand. Enjolras was curious to discover what she'd done to get in trouble, but there was a strict no-talking policy for detention.
The girl was in Enjolras' English class. No one else in the class seemed to notice her; she usually kept to herself. Enjolras probably shouldn't have noticed her, either—after all, he rarely noticed women in general. And yet, he'd noticed her, that skinny, tangle-haired girl in the corner of the room. The one with her nose buried in a sketchbook. The one with eyes like dark wildfire.
As of yet, he knew three things about the girl.
One: her name. Eponine Thenardier. She'd never told him, but he'd seen the name scribbled across the top of her paper in her loopy scrawl whenever they'd had to pass in their tests or assignments. A rather romantic name for one so poor and plain.
Two: she was…different. She didn't talk much, but sometimes Enjolras heard her singing off-key to herself in a soft, ghost-like voice. And her eyes. Her eyes either had this shifty, wicked gleam to them, like she was plotting something devilish, or they were staring intently at something in the distance, at something only Eponine could see. Or they were focused on her sketchbook—a tattered little thing filled with thousands of pencil drawings. Enjolras had never gotten a good look at them, but once he'd caught a glimpse of a fog-colored rose dripping dark gray blood.
And three (this, to Enjolras, was the most important fact): she was poor. Her reddish-brown locks were always unruly. Her worn, baggy outfits had obviously seen better days. Her textbooks—ripped, dog-eared pages and frayed covers—were in a similar state. Her position on the high school social ladder was pretty much equivalent to her position in society as a whole. She didn't belong to any one group, as far as Enjolras was concerned. He occasionally saw her attempting to converse—for one so quiet, she was quite an animated speaker—but her attempts were either ignored or dismissed with a polite, uneasy smile.
She was, in short, an outcast.
Which meant that she was exactly the kind of person for whom Enjolras fought. The poor, the downtrodden, the oppressed. They were humans, but society was too vain to realize it.
He sometimes wished he could talk with Eponine, but he—to put it bluntly—sucked at small talk. His walls were decorated with speech contest awards, but for some reason, it was difficult for him to ask how someone's day was going without sounding stiff. Conversing with his friends came easy enough, but strangers like Eponine? Awkward as hell.
That, Enjolras knew, was his biggest obstacle. He'd interviewed dozens of people, read hundreds of books on politics and psychology and poverty, penned approximately twenty essays on the state of the common man in society, and avidly supported human rights, but he'd never gotten to know personally someone like Eponine.
And here, in detention, was his chance. His chance to earn deeper, more intimate insight on the psychological state of a person of the lower class. And not just a person of the lower class, but a woman—one who was possibly even more degraded and oppressed than the common man.
Damn that no-talking-in-detention policy.
Enjolras sighed and tapped his pencil—wait a minute. Pencil. Paper. Enjolras and Eponine weren't able to talk to each other, but speaking wasn't the only form of communication...
Enjolras glanced up at the detention monitor. Her nose was buried in a novel. If Enjolras and Eponine were careful, they would be able to carry out a full conversation without the monitor noticing.
A tiny flicker of hope flared in Enjolras' heart as he carefully folded his extra sheet of binder paper in half and put his pencil to paper. What would he write? A thousand questions fluttered through his mind, but he decided on the simplest, most obvious one.
What did you do to earn detention?
He checked one more time to make sure that the monitor was still occupied with her book, then gingerly reached over and placed the note on Eponine's desk. Enjolras could hear his heart pounding in his ears, so loud he was sure even the monitor could hear it, but she didn't look up.
Enjolras didn't dare look over to watch Eponine's reaction. He simply stared at his Rebellion Is Wrong essay, at the banal lies he'd managed to squeeze out, and waited impatiently for Eponine's reply.
True, he'd asked a simple question, but there was a myriad of possible answers, Enjolras realized. Maybe Eponine had burst into song in the middle of class. Maybe the invisible thing that she always seemed to stare at had started conversing with her.
Or—even better!—maybe she, too, was a sort of revolutionary. She had spray-painted bright red propagandistic graffiti across the back wall of the school, or she'd done the same thing as Enjolras had, and had verbally protested the unfair treatment of the lower class. Maybe that sketchbook she always carried around was filled with plots to overthrow the government. The possibilities were endless, especially for someone as different as Eponine.
A few—though it felt more like thirty—minutes later, the slip of binder paper slid slowly onto Enjolras' desk. At last! Enjolras' heart performed a rapid little dance. He paused a moment before opening the note, savoring the feelings of curiosity and anticipation. He was, it seemed, on the brink of a miraculous discovery.
He unfolded the page with the eagerness of a child opening a present.
Six words had been scribbled out in that familiar, loopy handwriting. Eponine's first words to Enjolras, ever.
And Enjolras had no idea what the hell they were supposed to mean.
I don't know how to fly
