Title: Fake It
Summary: Jade's a great actress, one of the best Hollywood Arts has ever seen. She acts okay, and everyone believes her, everyone that is, except for Tori. After her second break up Jade runs back to her old habits and her bad friends with bad reputations and worse habits. Jade's spiraling down a dark path with only her new found friendship with Tori to keep her a float, will Jade fall down, or will new love pull her free?
Rated: M
This story does deal with darker things like underage drinking, some drugs, sex and other things like that. if its not your cup of tea, don't read it then. You've been warned, and if you continue I hope you like the story.
I don't own most of the characters.
It's been nearly one month now, one month since I walked out on the best thing in my life. The best thing that's happened to me since I got my very first video camera right before my parents separated. I dig my nails into the palm of my hand, my bottom lip is clenched between my teeth and I feel ready to burst into tears. Loose strands of hair dance across my bare shoulders in the breeze, the ends of my pony tail tickling the back of my neck and making my shiver.
"Okay, I'm going to walk out that door and I'm going to count to 10."
Cat had said something, but the anger swallowed the others and washed them from the memory. It was only Beck, me and Vega's front door in my memory now. And even then, the memory was mostly a blur of pain, anger and fear. The fear he wouldn't walk out the door after me. The pain when he didn't. The anger at myself for risking it.
"If I get to ten and you're not out there, I'm going home, and we're over."
There had been a chilly breeze that night; I remember pulling my leather jacket tight over my chest and shivering as I yelled the numbers at the door. It was really the only thing I felt, that cold. I'd heard a commotion, I think Cat told me Trina had tackled Beck to try and keep him from the door. I don't remember.
I should have opened that damn door and just apologized, told him I was acting like a stupid gank. But I just couldn't force myself to open the door; I just couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't do that to him anymore. He deserved better then what I could give him right now. Better then I could ever give him when even he couldn't keep me held together anymore.
But boy am I regretting that right now.
I had headphones pressed over my ears, pointless guitar tracks slam against my ears, blocking out the world around me. I'm perched on my roof, staring down at the empty pool below me, absently wondering how much it would hurt to fall into the deep end of that thing, if I'd die quick or if I'd lay there in misery in a pool of my own blood.
I can feel my phone vibrating against my leg, and I know who it is. Vega. She's been calling me all night, we were supposed to work on a project but I didn't feel like going over to her house and if I ignored her it worked out for me. Finally, my phone gave a short vibrate. A text message. I sigh and pull the phone out. I can't ignore goody goody forever.
From: Vega
I'm at your house. Your dad let me in.
I curse under my breath and put my phone back, pulling one of the headphones off of my ear to listen for Vega to open my door. It took her about five minutes to make it up and she gave a timid knock before opening the door. "Jade?" she calls, I hear the door swing shut behind her and she sighs when she doesn't see me. I'm sitting off to the side of the window, so she can't see me where I'm at.
"Out here, Vega." I call back, rolling my eyes. Maybe if I stay out here she'll go away. Maybe, just maybe she'll leave me alone. When I hear the sounds of her climbing out onto the roof I hastily wipe the tears from my face and pray that my makeup isn't smudged too much. Why do I care if Vega knows I was crying? I don't know.
She settles on the roof beside me, from the corner of my eye I can see her arms are wrapped around her bare legs and she's resting her chin on them while she stares up into the sky. I glance down and see she's wearing basketball shorts that fell down her thighs since her legs were bent, Stop staring Jade.
"Are you alright?" I turn to her and scoff, giving no real answer.
We sit wrapped in verbal silence for awhile, the guitar track is still slamming against one ear, I take an occasional sip of my coffee and Vega picks up her phone a few times and taps on the screen before putting it away again and staring back out at the sky. "You know you can talk to me, Jade. You talked to me once." She comments. I turn my eyes toward her, she's still looking up at the sky but now she's leaning back as if she's basking in the moon light.
"And what will I say? I broke up with Beck and now I'm sad boo-hoo me? I don't need to talk, Vega, and if I did I certainly wouldn't talk to you." I snap harshly, she hardly flinches at the words, instead she sighs like she's dealing with a moody child's temper tantrum when they can't have the new toy they want.
"And who would you talk to Jade? You don't have friends, remember? 'Tori's not my friend, I only tolerate Robbie, no one likes Trina and Cat's basically a pet.' Well maybe Andre is your friend, you gunna talk to him? I'm sure he'll tell Beck all about it." She replies, there's not a harsh tone to her voice but I can detect the smallest amount of sarcasm seeping into her voice. I almost smile. Almost.
"I don't need friends." I retort, "And there's nothing wrong with talking to a pet."
Tori rolls her eyes at the words and turns so she's facing me full on, "Look, everyone else might be fooled by your acting, but I'm not. I don't care if you talk to a tree, talk to someone. But for now, let's get our stupid history homework done so I can go home." Now the sarcasm has a bite and again I feel myself almost smile.
"You've got everyone fooled, Vega." I tell her, she gives me a confused glance but I don't give her time to question me as I motion her back inside my room. She crawls through the window and drops down into my computer chair like she owns the place, her eyes watching me closely as I climb back through.
"Fooled how, Jade?" she asks when I'm inside. I shrug in response and pull a second chair over to the table where we have a small poster written up with a mini-concentration camp model half way done. When we were first assigned the project of picking a part of World War Two to focus on Vega's hand shot up at the mention of the Holocaust. Everyone else wanted to do war weapons-it wasn't some big tragedy and they didn't have to do much to find information on weapons.
Honestly I was kind of happy to do the Holocaust, it'd been one of the only things Vega and I could agree on, and it was the only thing in History I'd really ever paid attention to, because it still baffled me how any human could blindly hate a whole race of people. Then again I blindly hate Vega, sure her first impression wasn't the greatest, but she wasn't a bad person. I was.
I sat on my chair watching as she neatly finished writing our report and after awhile I started tinkering with our mini-concentration camp model. The thing itself was able to move from one paper to another. The first had the general layout of where every building was located, and the second showed the path planes took bombing-taking out the factories and other things around the camps but not the camps themselves.
While I doodle on a piece of paper I watch Vega work, she's focused blindly on the project, strands of her brown hair rolling over her face from her sloppy ponytail and her glasses are sliding down her nose almost off. After a few minutes I slide back and watch as she finishes our project. I'd done work on the model and some research, but I was no good at writing posters because my hand writing was more of a scrawled out mess then actual writing.
She'd been putting up with my pessimistic attitude since we'd been assigned to the project a month ago, shortly before the break up, and we were meant to start it the day after we broke up, she smartly left me alone the next day but the day after that she stood outside my house pounding on my front door and calling me- thanks to Cat for giving her my address and phone number- until I let her in.
I'm not sure why I still act like I hate her, I don't hate her, but I sure did when I walked in that day and found her rubbing all over my boyfriend. Who would like a girl doing that? But when I faked that black-eye and she didn't say anything, I stopped hating her. I'm not saying I like her, but I certainly don't hate her, even if I act like I do. "Jade?" she's snapping in front of my face, her fingers smell like pen and marker and I slap her hand away quickly, glaring up at her face. She's standing in front of me, hands on her hips and an angry scowl on her face, "I ask you to do one simple thing and you can't even do that!" she huffs, storming toward my bedroom door.
What? And then she starts to reach for my door knob, "No!" I hiss, surging forward and yanking the door open before she can touch it. She rolls her eyes telling me she was probably talking about me not getting up to open the door for her in the first place since I didn't want the permanent marker getting everywhere, there was already a red smudge on my door from the first day. I push open the bathroom door for her and flick on the water before walking back into my bedroom and returning to the wooden chair I'd been sitting in before, this time I sit backwards so I can rest my head on the back.
I run my finger over a crack on it from where Beck and I snapped the ancient thing one day playing around. He was tickling me and we both fell back over the chair and the back of it snapped and my dad was so angry is face was a red as a tomato, I couldn't stop laughing. My heart aches as I think of Beck, the little hole growing a little bigger. I fold my arms over the back and rest my face on them, watching Vega walk back into the room. She pauses to softly shut the door behind her and sits back down at the desk, scribbling more things down. I suppose I should be helping, but I don't feel like it.
Tori is too nice to say anything. She's wasted all of her stored up mean on insulting me about not having any friends. Instead I notice her copying the words she wrote onto my paper in a perfect mimic of my handwriting. She scribbles Jade West at the top and tears it out of her note book, setting it on the keyboard silently.
"Can you at least help me carry this down to my car?" she asks. I nod slowly, standing up and grabbing the two papers and the model while Tori packs up her bag and grabs the big poster. She opens the doors for me and I place it into Trina's trunk, she slams it closed and walks over to the driver's seat. I watch her leave, I'm not sure why, and then I march into my house and up to my room.
I lay down on my bed, kicking my boots across the room as I slide my jeans off as well, they pool at the bottom of my bed and I draw my knees up into my chest, squeezing my eyes shut tight. Downstairs my dad is thumping around in his office like he always does. He's always downstairs, he's never here. The only people that have been up here since we've bought the house were me, the movers, a doctor, my little brother who used to come every other weekend and now stops by once in a blue moon, Beck and Vega.
My dad hardly ever sees me, and he talks to me even less. Once in awhile he'll leave a message on the bulletin board in the garage-the only place we have in common- that he won't be home for a week or something trivial like that. We do how ever; share the floor of my room. My floor is the ceiling of his office. When I was younger I'd curl up on the floor right over where his desk was and press my ear to the floor so I could hear his voice. He was usually arguing with someone about something, but it was the only time I really got to hear his voice back then.
Now I had my bed between me and that place on the floor and a whole world-no a whole life between us. I didn't know much about him, he probably didn't know much about me. I knew his signature, though, a simple 'D' and then some chicken scratch and a 'W' and more chicken scratch. I'd learned it when I really wanted to go on a school field trip to the aquarium to watch the shark feeding time, and I'd been using it ever since.
I knew he had the same brown hair I once had, and light colored eyes. These were things I'd learned from an old family photo hanging over the fire place in my living room. It was of my mom, dad and me, my brother wasn't born until they'd separated and my mom had the most custody over him, at least he was wanted.
Maybe if I tried harder my parents would have liked me, I wasn't exceptional at anything that they valued as 'good'. To them art was stupid and pointless. And art, creation, acting, singing, writing, directing. I was great at that, I was fantastic, but that wasn't what they wanted. That wasn't good enough.
It's not that I didn't try, I did, I tried hard. I was a straight A, pony-tail haired, sweater-vest wearing nerd. I was in AP Calc by my Sophomore year and English Three Honors-because they refused to let me into AP-. The only thing I wasn't overly talented in was Science and that was just fine with me. Now I was in AP Lit, College Algebra, Honors US History and General Science. If I didn't want to stick around through the last year of high school I could do early graduation, but now I can take a lot of Art classes and maybe an English and math. Of course most of my friends don't even know what classes I'm in, except for Robbie who I share a lot of classes in.
People just assume I never go to class because they don't know of anyone who talks about Jade West in their classes, the seniors here mostly stick to themselves, so I don't have to worry about it and Robbie values his life and thinks I'll stab him with my scissors if he told anyone. I wouldn't though. What do I care if people know I'm smart? I roll over onto my back and stare up at my ceiling, blinking at it trying to make strange patterns appear or give myself a headache. Neither happened so I gave up, picked up my phone and turned on my Pandora application while I rolled out of bed and padded softly down the hallway to a sound proof room and shut myself in.
I put my phone on the speaker system, clicked a random playlist and plunked down in a bean bag, turning on my TV and Wii, since it was the game station that was last used by my little brother to play Mario Cart or something. I put in one of the Resident Evil games, turned up the volume on my speakers and let the music blast through the room. I hummed along to a few songs while I blew zombies heads off level after level. Since I figured I wasn't getting any sleep tonight at least I could pass the time somewhat amused.
A new chapter was loading when the song changed over to a Seether song; I roll my eyes, "Who's to know if your soul will fade at all, the one you sold to fool the world, you lost your self-esteem along the way. Yeah." I tapped my foot to the beat and zoned in on the zombies, "Good god you're coming up with reasons, good god you're dragging it out, good god it's the changing of the seasons!" I pause in my singing to sit forward and focus on the zombie trying to eat my character.
"Fake it if you don't belong here, fake it, if you feel like affection, wooaaah you're such a fucking hypocrite." I grinned as I took a zombie's head off and it slumped to the floor. I was up close so the digital blood shot everywhere and covered the camera a bit.
"And you should know that the lies won't hide your flaws, no sense in hiding all of yours, you gave up on your dreams along the way. Yeah. Good god you're coming up with reasons, good god you're dragging it out, good god it's the changing of the seasons, I feel so raped. So follow me down, and just fake it if you're out of direction. Fake it if you don't belong here, fake it if you feel like affection. Wooaaah you're such a fucking hypocrite. Ah shit." I cursed as one of those gross skinless-tongue flickers lashed out and cut my life down to half.
When I finally died for the fourth time I shut the game off, pulled my phone off of the jack and walked back down to my bedroom. It's about three in the morning and its quiet in my house, my dad must've finally gone to bed. I'm silent as I pull my jeans back on, tug a hoodie over my head and slip some tennis shoes on my feet. I load my pockets with my phone, headphones, keys, wallet and a pack of gum- just in case. I pad silently down the 12-step stair case and tiptoe over to the door leading from the kitchen into the garage. I slip into the garage, out the side garage door, and out the gate.
My dad might not ever talk to me, but he had the ears of a bat and if I went out the front door he'd murder me because that door was on his side of the house. The kitchen and the garage were on my side, so I could slip in and out as I pleased. I did so frequently, unlike Vega pointed out, I did have friends.
Just not any that she knew I knew.
Outside the air was still chilly and the wind tossed my pony tail around. I reached up and yanked it out, letting the thick black curls fall around me. I felt more surrounded that way. My jacket and hair seemed to provide cover, shielding me from prying eyes-which at three in the morning I really did want to be hidden from.
Three doors down there's an empty-looking lot, and inside that lot is the doors to a basement of a house that was torn down years ago, all that is left now is the basement. I walk up and kick the door four times in a short beat. I bury my hands in my pockets and wait for a few minutes.
It's not long until the door opens and a head of curly blonde hair appears attached to the face of Courtney Van Cleef. I scowl at her and she steps out of my way. I jog down the steps while she secures the door behind me.
"What are you doing here?" Courtney asks, "Does Beck know you're here?"
"Beck doesn't control me." I hiss, turning on her in a blind rage, "does Sinjin know you're here?" she visibly gulps and raises her hands in surrender from where I've pinned her against a wall with just a glare. I roll my eyes at her and step away to let her scurry off. As soon as she's gone an arm is slung over my shoulder. It's heavy and the scent of cigarettes and vodka is accompanying it. When I look over at the owner I find its Ryder Daniels.
"Funny seeing you here so soon, what happened to 'it's a one time thing.'?" He asks, giving me a strange smile I don't want to read into. I shrug his arm off and step away a bit, "You miss me that much?"
"No, I miss feeling numb that much." I reply easily. He shrugs, muttering something that sounds like the 'same thing.' As he walks away he takes my hand and pulls me off to a back corner. The whole basement is filled with smoke and loud music, laughter and the sounds of sexual activity in the farthest back area of the basement.
Ryder hands me a cup of something and gestures for me to sit on an old tattered couch. I oblige and drop down onto the old couch, the scent of stale cigarettes engulfs me but I lean back, burying myself in the couch while I take a large gulp of the vodka. It burns down my throat before it settles in my stomach with a warm tingling feeling and I close my eyes sighing happily.
Four large cups later and I'm snuggled up with Ryder kissing up my neck and drawing patterns on my side through my shirt. My sweater is draped over the back of Ryder's couch and the loud music from the basement is replaced by the sounds of the TV a room over where someone is probably passed out.
Ryder's kisses move from my neck to my lips and his hands are grabbing my hips and pushing me back until he's hovering over me, our tongue battling for dominance while his soft fingers trail up my shirt.
Just like I total Vega, a guy this perfect had to be hiding something. I tangle my hands in his hair and yank him closer. His hair isn't as great as Beck's but it looks the same in my drunken state and neither of us gives a shit anymore.