this story is the prologue to my fic titled Sharp!
high school au!
song inspiration: i'm so tired..., by Lauv and Troye Sivan
"This party actually sucks," Misty groans, not bothering to keep her voice down. There's no point to being subtle; literally everyone in hearing range is too busy grooving to the worst playlist she's heard since she was eleven years old. She can't tell whether she's more disgusted by their lack of taste or impressed by their lack of caring, but whoever put the music together needs to be immediately fired.
Sure, Ash is somewhere in the house, probably dancing like a maniac and giving thumbs-up to the DJ, but that really doesn't serve as a reliable check on quality control.
Actually, there is one other person out here on the second-floor balcony who isn't dancing, but if he was, she would probably fall right off the ledge in utter shock.
She considers jumping anyway, but she'd rather have his company than that of the trodden-upon lawn down there.
"Do you think anyone will care if we just dip?" she asks him. The look he returns drips with acidic sarcasm before the first word even leaves his tongue and she appreciates it.
"No one cares what I do," Paul deadpans, and it's only because she's known him for so long that she can catch the amusement buried deep beneath layers and layers of constructed gloom.
"That's not true." Misty presses her soda can to her forehead, hoping to relieve some of this truly terrible pain. It's to no avail; the tinny outside is already room-temperature despite having withstood the night air for the whole of seventeen long minutes. "People notice you. They're just scared of you too. So. The scales just balance out."
Silence. She peeks over. He is looking at her with a solid, unflinching stare that contains his oh-so genuine, impressed appreciation of her detective skills.
"Shut up."
"Hn," he grunts, or maybe hums. The sound lands somewhere in the middle.
From deep inside the dredges of the house, the music changes abruptly and the sad, sad excuse for a a head-banger that's been playing on loop for eight minutes turns into yet another mopey love song.
Misty leans over the balcony and pretends to puke.
"Hm." Ah. This time, Paul's grunt is one of agreement. Fascinating.
Ugh. She wants to go home. She wants it to be Friday. She wants to be asleep beneath her comfy duvet, watching her bedroom fish-tank friends swimming about under their carefully-regulated heat lamps and through their teeny-tiny fish furniture.
Honestly, the only reason she's here is that Daisy is home from her prestigious, expensive acting school this week, and this is her only semblance of privacy. Funny, how she had to find someone else's house with about five dozen kids from her school for privacy.
It occurs to her now that's already tomorrow — "1:35?!" she gapes — and that everything in her is utterly and unmistakably exhausted.
"I need my own car," Misty sighs, because when she had escaped earlier that evening, Violet had been threatening to crack Lily's new acrylic fingernails off one by one if she left the tank empty again. "Or a new bike!" she shouts uselessly towards the balcony door. It's just something to say for kicks, now. Still, it's kind of sad that no one answers with a drawn-out I'm sorrrrrry, Misty! but whatever. They're best friends, not attached at the hip.
Stars, she's tired.
"C'mon. Let's go inside," Paul says. She needs no convincing. He flicks his empty and flattened soda can off the balcony. Environmentalist and good person that she is, she kind of wants to make him go retrieve the litter. If they were at a park, it would be without question. But they're not. And she's tired. And she also knows that the host will be out here til noon at least, picking over the lightly-trashed yard, so she lets it pass.
They head inside, following their ears towards the quietest-sounding room. On the way, she grabs another soda. And they succeed, miraculously enough, locating a tiny sitting room with the game playing, two couches, a handful of her fellow seniors, and Drew.
He snaps at them with a single hand's finger guns in greeting and she blinks at the deadness in his expression. Wow. And they call Paul the glassy-eyed one. Paul nods at Drew in response, sitting on the empty two-seater across from him.
"You need this more than I do," she decides, though such a thing had seemed impossible just a minute ago, and she hands him the soda. He takes it, cracks it loudly, and downs half of it without flinching. She perches on the armrest between the two boys and can't even muster a scowl when yet another achey-heart-breaky song comes on.
"I'm so tired..." Misty waves her arm around. "...of all of this."
"Yup," Drew says, not taking his eyes off the television. He will be no more entertainment than the rest of the party, it appears, so she flops onto the seat beside Paul and closes her eyes.
After about a minute, she feels and hears him moving, rustling, and then a second later, warm fabric drapes itself over her face. She swears at him, muffled and without heat, before grabbing at it.
Oh.
A smirk curls across her lips. Has pessimistic, unyielding, antagonistic Paul just given her his sweatshirt? Why, yes. Yes, he has.
"I will push you off this sofa," Paul tells her darkly. She only laughs at him, wriggling inside the generous offer. She can wrap both hands in the ends of the long sleeves and shove the whole wad into the overlarge kangaroo pocket without trouble. So that's what she does.
And within like five minutes, she's asleep.