Prologue
How can I love anyone?
Without it being you,
You took my hand and showed me,
To make me someone new
I sit and think for nights on end,
Daydreaming about your voice,
But then I suddenly realize,
It was you who had the choice.
You could have gone one way or the other,
You went for her instead of me,
Walking alone hand in hand,
Fills my heart with jealousy
Every night I look at the sky,
Talk to the stars to try and make do,
But they're far away and ignore me,
Acting just like you
Unreachable Solace
As she gazed momentarily, at the clock glued to the crippling walls, she was caught in a whirlwind of thoughts and ideas. Her mind continuously wandered in and out of reality. Barely fifteen minutes went by and yet she felt the need to escape from this suffocating claustrophobic atmosphere, in which she was currently inhibiting. French sucks she groaned to herself, hoping against her better judgment that no one heard her. Being the new girl was one thing but sensing the need to talk to one self was utterly insane and can lead to name calling. It was already far too hot. The air was stung, with an odour faintly resembling to the boys locker-room. Juliet's neck was streaked with sweat. Her dress was fastened onto her back, though her fingers hesitantly slid on the pen. This so called renovated building (It would last no longer then Shakespeare's plays) in which she learnt had not air conditioning and the temperature made it impossible to keep her attention intact. Juliet's head intermittently swung from her accustomed position and looked around the clustered room and saw several of them wilted over their desk, limp as old lattice leaves. She saw little sign of work in progress. Instead the students slept or whispered among themselves or stared out the window. Lucy Andrews had her hair in her face and her work on her lap. There was something especially brittle about her today, the aura of her recent dumpee. She'd been dating a senior and Juliet had no doubt, that she was yet another girlfriend with benefit in the eyes of his underlying principles. Juliet hoped she dumped him, as her necessitate of satisfying his needs was no more then becoming heartbreaking. Lucy was a sweet girl who wanted to be liked by everyone. With luck she would survive until college, when being likeable became a plausible path to that. Trey Norton said something low and nasty and everyone who could hear him laughed. If Juliet rose to go to see, she believed she'd find Erick and Kate playing hangman. Erick was probably gay but neither he nor Kate knew it. "Je, voudais au pomme" Mrs. Prudie coursed.
In fact why bother? Why bother to send teenagers to school at all? Their minds were so clogged with hormones they couldn't possibly learn a complex system like geology or chemistry, much less the wild tangle of learning a foreign language. Why put everyone to the aggravation of making them try? Juliet thought she could just do the rest of it. Watch for signs of suicide or weapons or pregnancy or drug addiction, but asking her to learn French at the same time was really too much.
There were days when just the sight of fresh, bright acne or badly applied mascara or the raw infected skin that bore around a new piercing touched Juliet deeply. Most of the students were far more beautiful then they would ever realize. Trey Norton on the other hand was beautiful and he knew it. Wounded eyes, Roman nose, slouched clothes, heavy swinging walk. "New dress" he asked Juliet, while taking his seat. He looked her over and his open assessment was both unsettling and infuriating. Juliet certainly knew how to dress competently. If she was exposing more skin than usual, that was because it was going to be a hundred fucking degrees. What was she supposed to wear a suit? "Hot" he'd said. He was angling for another tutor lesson she so reasoned to give, then what he deserved. She wished she was old enough to be impervious. You could hear Erick and Kate's sniggering at the far end corner of the room. Ever since Trey accidentally rumored that she had the hots for him, everyone presumed that she was another lingering fish he caught on his hook. To bad he wasn't her type.
But their lay in the upmost corner of the molded room the most annoying, irritating, infuriating, egotistic, narrsistic, eccentric man she had ever encounted at the point of the earth. If such a man ever existed to live she would see right through it. Her face stooped at his mere cheeky grin that she was forever reminded of. His legs wide in a patronizing fashion that paranoid her increasingly. His unkept shaggy hair nested like a bird's habitat and yet that acorn green eyes struck her like a bolt of lightening. He can see right through her. He knew what she was thinking; after all they did have a childhood. He was everything she ostracized in a man, a typical guy. She numbered them within four strikes. Strike one he had no sense of provisions unless it is edible. Strike two a man with little reasoning with in order to be in his good books. Strike three a man who sucks at mind games but prefers the complex art of football to have a good time. His faults were bold and clear yet she couldn't despise him or hate him. She was irrevocably in love with him. There was a saying "if love was not returned it was not love to start with". She pondered at the saying hoping it was wrong. Yet, her feelings for him was a secret she refused to reveal, hoping to play the façade of a social rival. Though he was a good looking young lad and incorporated most of the qualities a women would find attractive. He still required the unconditional love that Jules was currently fantasizing. She wanted a man to love and for him to love her. She detested simple love; it was a reason why she regarding every man as effortless, she craved for that ever lasting love that she so often witnessed in the cinema screen. No matter how naive and juvenile people found her she still wanted to feel that special moment with that special person. She wanted him to love her though she knew he didn't share the same feelings. She refused to fall in a deadly trap where she'll get damaged and hurt. Thus Juliet was not another mindless girl that would gladly fall under his charms. After all she wasn't that easy.
But at the very moment she thought this, her fingers slipping up and down her pen, she put her mind on the given worksheet she was vaguely attempting. She looked up and found that Trey Norton had swung about, was watching her. This was no surprise. He smiled at her and it was such a smile that renders her body into mild shivering. Ironic that it was in the midst of May. She dropped the pen, wiped her hand on her skirt and said "Do you need something Trey?"
"You know what I need" he answered. Paused a deliberate moment and held his work up.
She rose to go see, but the bell rang "Allez-vouse en!" she heard Mrs. Prudie say playfully. Trey was the first on his feet, the first out the door. The other students gathered their papers, their binders their books. Went of too sleep in someone else's class.
Juliet had a free period, and she walked through the quad to the library, where there was air conditioning as well as two computer stations with internet access. She wiped the sweat from her face and neck with her hands on her hem and looked at her emails. Span was all it took to get her exasperated with fury. Integrated offers to consolidate her dept, enlarge her assets; provide craft tips, recipes, jokes, missing persons, cheap pharmaceuticals. Deleting all this took only a minute, but it was a minute she begrudged, because who'd ask for any of it? Who had the time? And tomorrow every bit of it would be back.
Cameron Watson settled into the terminal next to her. Cameron was a sloped back, beak nosed kid who looked eleven but really seventeen. He'd been in Juliet's D.T class and was also a neighbor from 3 houses over. His mother and her mother were both established in the monthly book club Trey's aunt had promptly organized. After all they were new in town and it only took a few minutes to find an excuse to get the latest gossip on the new neighbor's. Pennsylvania was peculiar. It didn't incorporate the swift racing atmosphere she was forever familiar off. It was an isolated peaceful, harmonious place. Some may have loved living here away from the clamor and talk, but Juliet wasn't a peaceful girl, she sought for the sounds of people talking wildly rather then murmurs among themselves. She loved the sound of the cars screeching away from yet another pedestrian. Building that stood as vast ornaments wanting to be seen. London was beautiful, filled with pollution, litter and most of all her friends. She missed them. She lived most of her life with them. Every memory, every Christmas, every heartbreak, every happiness she lived through. It all integrated her friends. St Marie's Catholic Boarding school was a pain in the arse, being deprived from any male intimacy wasn't fun either. The nuns were continuously on patrol finding any excuse to see the one male priest found in the minster. If only they knew the truth. The real reason why she moved. The sounds of the computer churning brought her back to the present. The screen promptly turned into a halcyon black. Knowing that even a turd monkey could tell something was wrong with the monitor; she turned slyly to her competent neighbor.
Cameron once suggested Juliet to be taken a photo for his annual computer club, to replicate his group further and in order to do so he needed a bate. Juliet was fairly pretty but what was even prettier was her attitude and sensuality. She was a curvy, well developed in those regional areas's kind of girl. Her hair was her best attribute. It lay long and powerful. Mahogany locks stood like a twisting hurricane, alongside her cascading lashes descending from the shell of her hazel eyes. In return she would often ask for help with her D.T. She saw nothing more in her relationship then mere friendship, later did she realize Cameron had other things in mind. And so the chapter of her acquaintance with her typical neighbor stood borderless. He was clearly bright as a bee; Cameron had that peculiar mix of competence and cluelessness that marks the suburban computer geek. Juliet went to him with all her computer problems and did her best in return to genuinely like him.
"My computer died" she said glumly.
"Perhaps, pressing the on button might help" he wasn't looking at her, slowly leaning into his own screen. She groaned even louder.
Three more students walked in, ostensibly on a research assignment. They punched up the catalogue, wrote things in their notebooks, conferred with the librarian. One of these students was Trey Norton. There was a second boy, whom Juliet didn't know. One girl was Sallie Wong. Sallie had long polished hair and tiny glasses. She was wearing a blue tank top with straps that crossed in the back and her shoulders gleamed with sweat and that lotion with glitter all the girls were using. No bra.
When they went into the aisle, they went in three different directions. Trey and Sallie met up immediately somewhere in poetry. Through the glass window of the computer station, Juliet had a clear view down four of the aisle. She watched Trey take Sallie's hair in his hand. He whispered something. They ducked into the next aisle, just before the other boy, a heavy young man with an earnest, baffled expression appeared. He was obviously looking for him. He tried the next aisle.
Cameron had been talking this whole time, talking with passion although still scrolling down his own screen. Multitasking.
"You need to install yourself a template if you're planning to preview your assessment" he continues.
Trey and Sallie had surfaced in the magazines. She was laughing. He slid his hand under one strap of her top, opened his fingers over her shoulders. They heard the other boy coming. Sallie laughed harder, and Trey pulled her down another aisle and out of Juliet's sight.
" So, speaking as a third party observer, who has no immerse interest in the schools current relationships, is Trey and Sallie been on it again "? I preached hoping to get more then I bargained for.
"I do not have such mindless priorities to attend to, so I wouldn't know, in fact I wouldn't f-f-fricking care". Cameron replied sullenly. Clearly he hasn't lived. Getting in the core of the schools overturn was a hobby Juliet enjoyed. Far more then making men gawk for air at her current garments. Short mini chequred dress that hung on her skin, school shoes including a two inch heels for walking purposes obviously. Personally she wouldn't have minded stockings to top her new extravagant look. But she wasn't surrounded with girls, nor was she illustrated to men. Thus, she left the stocking aside and settled for a more modest look. Knee high socks. A lucid representation of London. Uniform. Somehow they'd morphed into The Matrix. Juliet hadn't been paying attention and might not have known when it happened even if she had been. The air conditioning was starting to chill her. Nothing like a walk on the beach wouldn't cure.
Trey and Sallie reappeared near the magazine aisle. He backed her into Teen Readers and they kissed.
The heavy young man came from the computer station. If he had turned around he would have seen Sallie Wong's mouth close around his tongue. He didn't turn around.
"You're not supposed to be in here "he told Cameron accusingly. "We're all supposed to be working together"
"I'll be there in a minute" Cameron sounded neither apologist nor concerned. "Find the others"
"I can't" The boy took a seat. "I'm not going to do anything by myself"
Sallie was holding on to the back of Trey's neck, arching slightly. The air conditioning was no longer a problem to Juliet. She forced herself to stop looking and swung back to Cameron.
"I'm not going to do the whole assignment by myself and then put all your names on it." The boy said. "If that's what you think"
Cameron continued to type. He could spot a prank in seconds, but he had no sense of humor. He thought the graphics of Guitar Hero was totally awesome. His fingers twitched sporadically when he talked about them. Although it was a fatal step for his high school reputation, he consoled Juliet when she heard about it. This was a boy who knew the difference between what was real and what wasn't.
For an instant, like an ambush, a picture came into Juliet's mind. In this picture she was backed into Teen Readers kissing Cameron Watson. She deleted the image Instantly (Oh dear Lord!), kept an expressionless face, concentrated on whatever the hell Cameron was saying.
"Juliet, you have to compress the file in order to preview it" he said annoyingly. God! Why does he have to be perfect two shoes all the bloody time?
"How do you know?" she narrowed her eyes questioningly.
"I'm a teenager technology doesn't faze me" he replied gloomily.
As she was in the midst of correcting her initial fault, Chris comes out of know where, as usual, swings his arms around Juliet's shoulder. God! He has the nerve! While sits himself comfortably beside a very pissed of girl.
He was wearing a tight T shirt insinuating his tense muscles, printed with striped zebra patterns. His white tracksuit was left as an understatement. Hypothetically speaking he looked quite fetching, in an I-don't-know-what-the-hell-I-was-thinking kind of way. Strike four he has NO sense of fashion.
"Hello…. Pretty lady" his eye brows going up and down in a flirty manner, sent Juliet to eye rolling. Clearly he has issues. She got up and collected her books and said as politely as she could "What did you have a wardrobe malfunction?" and with that she sent the boys in eye opening smiles.
