Just like any other day, this one started out awful.
First, I woke up late—and no one in my house thought it might be a good idea to go and wake me up. Next, my flatiron decided to try and electrocute me on the one day out of the year I attempt to use it. And finally, I had to get a ride to school with Jon, because Mother Nature also hates me, and it started to pour the moment I stepped over the threshold of our front door.
Now, leaning with my back flat against the dented door of my locker, my head tilted skywards and my eyes—surely decorated with dark half-moons—closed, I'm wishing I wouldn't have woken and up and slept straight till noon. Past noon, even.
I don't think I've ever slept in that long before. Not that it matters.
"Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning," Izzy comments in a sing-song voice as she strides up beside me, her hair hanging around her face and her feet clad in a pair of leather boots.
I crack an eye. "You haven't even talked to me yet. How can you tell?"
"Oh," she says simply with a shrug, "I can't. But those bags speak for themselves, babe." Obviously, she's pointing out the crescents under my eyes. It would be too unlike her not to point such a thing out. Even if it's more than manifest.
I grumble some sort of demonic noise at her under my breath and open my eyes, pushing off of my locker, my books for English Lit tucked safely under my arm. "Tell me again, what did you come over here for? Because this isn't going to work if we're both in bad moods and neither of us is going to play Sally-freaking-Sunshine." I tell her snappishly, readjusting the hold I have on my books.
Izzy rolls her obsidian eyes. "I thought that you might like to know that my cousin is going to ask you on a date sometime today."
"Your cousin?" I raise my brows at her, suspiciously, surprised, even. "Remind me why I would want to go out with your kin? If he's anything like you, I think I'll pass, thank you very much. One Lightwood is more than enough to handle."
"Clar-ee!" Stamping her foot on the floor like a kindergartener, Izzy drags out my name in the longest fashion possible, until there mere pitch of her voice makes me want to smash my head into the lockers just behind me.
"Fine! Fine! Just shut up, for God's sake!"
Shooting me a pearly smile that beams innocence to anyone within a five mile radius, she says: "We're kind of cousins, but that's irrelevant. His name is—"
"Oh, Bloody Clary," Jace's voice rings out above all, though most only pause their conversations to quickly glance at and appraise his appearance. A loose black t-shirt over his slender form toned and corded with muscle has nearly every girl drooling, and me on the verge of admitting, yeah, okay he's mildly attractive. I steel my gaze and turn away, returning to my conversation with Isabelle.
And like he wasn't just standing ten feet down the hall a few seconds ago, he's leaning his arm on the locker beside mine, flashing a charming grin. "I thought maybe after this long you would've grown tired of me and switched schools, but"—his gaze rakes me up and down before returning to meet mine—"I see not."
"Buzz off," Izzy waves her hand at his face, coming mere millimetres away from swatting his perfect little nose. His slightly taken-off-guard expression makes me smirk a little. "Clary and I are talking about her date." Because he so needed to know I have a date, right?
"A date? With that face?" Jace wrinkles up his nose in feigned disgust. I know I'm not ugly; I look like my mom, and she's pretty. Though between the stick-thin limbs and copper-spattered skin, I'm a Raggedy Ann to her Barbie doll.
"You're just jealous that it isn't you wining and dining her," Isabelle tells him with finality, a flip of her long inky hair closing the conversation completely. Jace rolls his eyes at the total absurdity of the idea, and I fight to do the same.
"I'll be jealous of whatever loser is taking out Vampire Bait over here when the sky legitimately comes crashing down on top of us—and even then I'll only be jealous because she died upon impact and I'm buried under the rubble." I groan lowly and Isabelle flips him off, narrowly avoiding a teacher seeing her middle finger stuck up high for all to see.
That'll be the day, I tell myself as Izzy and I part ways, her tuning right down the fork in the hallway and me turning left.
After an art class at Tisch, I head over to Simon's house, where Mrs. Lewis welcomes me inside with open arms, offering a tray of cookies to snack on while Simon does whatever it is that Simon does when Iz and I aren't around.
When Simon emerges from the hallway and his hair is messy and little beads of water are dripping down the sides of his face, a few stray rivulets dropping onto his gamer tee, it becomes painfully evident that he was in the shower. How did I not hear the water running? Maybe my senses were on overload while devouring about twelve of Mrs. Lewis's to-die-for cookies and weren't functioning properly. Yeah, that's viable.
"Hey," Simon offers me a smile. "How was Tisch?"
"Tough—but I loved it," I tell him as I hop down from the barstool set up by the Lewis's kitchen island, all but skipping over to him. Despite having an impossible amount of homework to plough through, I feel good, light. Painting allows me to let out my emotions—just like people venting in journals or ranting to their friends helps them let out some of the bottled up stuff.
"So, what should we do? That crap-ton of homework we were assigned or video games?" He grins, waggling his eyebrows at me—we both know what we're going to do: play video games and procrastinate until we're rushing to finish all our homework before I have to head back home.
But with Simon, the math and science whiz, it should be a breeze. And then all there's left to do is attempt to get through my English homework without having to beg Jon for help with it. Though I'm not so optimistic that he'll help me without a price, even if he is my brother.
Si pushes open the door to his bedroom, and I walk through, taking a running start before I catapult onto his hastily-made bed. He shakes his head, and I laugh faintly as he crouches down in front of his Xbox, turning it on and handing me a metallic blue controller. Grinning at the back of his head, I press the button in the center of the controller, watching as it lights up bright green beneath my fingertip.
For the next few hours, I manage to escape the homework jammed into my bag, though it's more than annoying when Jace's routine smirk keeps flashing like an exit sign in my mind.
"But Jon—" I fish around in my vocabulary for something to say, something that will convince him that it is, in fact, worth it to help me.
"But Sissy," Jon mocks, flipping the page of his textbook, his eyes scanning over the lines of the abnormally small text all our textbooks are printed in. After a moment, the white-haired boy across from me sighs, looking up with his head propped on his hand. "Look, I couldn't help you, even if I wanted to."
"Why no—"
"Because it has to be an original piece by you, and we have the same English teacher. I'm pretty sure he'd be able to tell that it was influenced by me. And besides—it has to come from you. It can't be some regurgitated bullshit I fed you while skimming over the History textbook—people would be able to tell. You and I, Sissy, we're very different people." Jon gestures between the two of us, and I know he's not just talking about physical differences. He's talking about the way we think, how we put two and two together, and our views on different aspects of things.
I huff, slouching in my chair, my shoulders curled inwards and my face hidden by a shield of ever-slowly darkening red hair. "I hate when you're right," I mumble to myself.
"Now that that's out of the way, I hope you know to do a good job on this one because it's your semester project and worth like, fifteen or thirty percent of your final grade." Jon says as though he's trying to be nonchalant about it, but he just sounds a little high-strung. Especially with the way his arms are crossed over his chest right now.
Despite the fact that my eyes bulge at hearing those numbers, I say, "Yeah, I know. And how much is your history final worth? Like, a good chunk of your final grade? Maybe you should be focusing on that, instead of me, Jonny." I ruffle his hair (he swats me away, shooting me an expression that's somewhere between a scowl and an icy glare), heading upstairs to start chipping away at this particularly infuriating English assignment.
I take my sweet time mounting the stairs, definitely preferring it to the mad dash I performed going down them this morning. When I get to the landing, I exhale heavily through my nose, rubbing at my temples. I already know how this is going to go, and it's not going to be easy.
It's nearly eleven at night; I realize glancing at the clock to my right. And you still don't have anything done. I'll be lucky to even pass this English course with a less than admirable average.
Maybe I should drop out of school and become psychic because my earlier prediction has rung true, nearly word for word: I didn't get a thing done. I don't know. Do I have enough education under my belt to become an artist yet? I doubt it, though I am taking those classes at Tisch…classes my parents would likely stop paying for and forbid me from going to if I ever dropped out of school.
God. I groan obnoxiously loud and rub my hands slowly down my face.
Not a second later Jon is pounding on the wall between our rooms, telling me to shut up because he's "trying to sleep". Yeah, I'm sure that's what he's doing.
Does he think I can't hear him clapping along to the Friends theme song every half hour?
Though I do plan to keep it down—even if the supposed loudness only came from me groaning louder than necessary, or normal—if only because my parents are sleeping just down at the end of the hall.
The last thing either of them wants to find, I'm sure, is their daughter all but ripping her hair out of her scalp at eleven twenty or so at night and sobbing dramatically while my body is thrown carelessly over my laptop.
Deciding it isn't worth my time or effort to sit here determinedly and have a staring match with the blank Word document open on my screen and the flashing cursor, I close my laptop, setting it on the floor, nearly under my bed.
I don't bother changing out of my shorts, rather stripping off my top, leaving me in the plain cotton bra that I, admittedly, don't really need. Attempting to run a hand through my hair, I sigh and drop it when it quickly becomes stuck on a knot.
Jon and I shared a wordless breakfast, him gnawing down on a too-green banana and me slurping down some Froot Loops. That was about the extent of my interaction with my family before Isabelle and Simon picked me up, unless you count my mom walking into the kitchen, her sleepy expression a little surprised to see both of us up and ready—as if that doesn't happen every morning—and her hair just short of a rat's nest.
Thinking back on it now, begrudgingly seated beside Jace in chemistry, I would have much rather tolerated my somewhat insane family than tolerate the blond boy fidgeting beside me. He keeps rolling his shoulders and shaking his leg and running his hands through his hair—ruining it, to my satisfaction. Though his messy hair doesn't seem to bother the girls behind us and beside us that have been staring either a little abashedly or unashamed at him for the entire period.
Which, so far, has been a grand total of fifteen minutes, that is, if you count the five it took for everyone to rearrange themselves after Coach re-did the seating chart. No longer am I lab partners with Simon, but rather with Jace, the incompetent, while Simon, now seated across the room has Aline Penhallow as a lab partner. On a scale of one to ten of how loud and fidgety in comparison to Jace she is, Aline is a negative six.
Suffice to say I'm a little jealous and mildly bitter. It could have been anyone—literally, anyone else in this entire class and I would have been fine with it. But no, Coach likes to make me suffer, obviously.
"Should we start the lab or are you just going to shake the table the entire time?" I say monotonously, turning my head slowly to look at Jace's profile. He's just staring ahead at the white-smudged blackboard.
Probably feeling my gaze weighing heavily upon him, Jace looks down at me, his face schooled into somewhat cold neutrality. "I don't want to do this with you—"
"And you think I do, how highly you must think of yourself."
"But I also can't afford to fail this class—so, yes, Gingerbread, by all means, let's get started." His neutral expression his turned into a little bit of a sneer by the end of his sentence. I merely turn to face forwards, staring down at the empty glass beakers lined up in front of both of us. Chemicals in different test tubes are lined up in test tube racks, and I don't know if I'll be able to even bring myself to attempt to pronounce the names of them after sneaking into the basement with Jon and binge watching Friends nearly all night long.
But it's not really a choice, so I suck it up and read through the lab.
Sitting in my English class, my stomach still aches with the remnants of laughter. Isabelle keeps glancing sideways at me, though I ignore. She would surely think me insane for being this happy if she found out that Jace and I now sat next to each other in chemistry.
But that has nothing to do with it—well, that's actually a lie.
Jace was pouring in one of the chemicals into the beaker, his face nearly directly in the thing, and despite the fact that I kept telling him it was the wrong one and it would not react the way it was supposed to, he didn't listen to me, and then he poured the chemical into the concoction we had created.
And what happened to Golden Boy? The mixture exploded in his face—and his close proximity to the beaker didn't help much at all—singed the ends of his hair, so now they're quite a bit shorter and black—along with his eyebrows, which now look unfitting to his tawny hair colour (you know, because they're black), and his forehead, cheekbones, chin—and well, everything is black. At least the chemical reaction didn't cause any serious damage—except maybe to his pride…and dignity, considering he has to walk around the rest of the day like that because both of his parents were apparently unreachable.
For the rest of the day, I'm laughing quietly, barely heard over the roaring chatter of the student body. But Jace—when I pass him in the halls, he hears me, and despite what I might have expected…he smiles at me, looking something I can't quite place my finger on with the ends of his hair singed off and his skin darker because of the black. He smiles at me like we're friends.
Not a smirk or a grin, but…a smile. A small one, albeit, but a smile nonetheless.
As I head to the parking lot when the final bell rings, my brain kind of fogs over and I get a little dazed—because it was Jace who made me laugh and grin uncontrollably nearly all day. Not Izzy or Simon. Jace.
I don't know why—maybe it's my unmatched stubbornness, but I can't stop thinking about it…even when I'm busy, thoughts of it are hovering like clouds in front of the sun somewhere in the back of my head.
And what's even worse is that I don't entirely mind.
Did anyone get the Vampire Bait joke? No, well it was worth a shot. I meant it like cause Clary's hair is so red and bright it looks like blood (a beacon to vampires, bait, you know?).
Anyways.
oesteffel: Soon, my pet, soon.
Shauna Kullden: Honestly, I thought Maryse's comments were a little on the hilarious side too because, well, they do end up getting married and not to spoil anything (keep it a secret, kay *giggles*) but Maryse doesn't get invited to Clace's wedding. Or Sizzy's. You'll find out why much later on in the story. Like two years later in the story. And Maryse is cold blooded for reasons that will come up later on.
A Brunette Angel: Thank you:)) And you know how Jace is distancing himself as the due date nears? You'll understand more of why in this story, you'll kind of see him evolve and change, and watch the things that unfold within the story shape the characters that we all love. (Honestly still not sure how people still like Jace in Fading, but I mean, he's Jace.) I think everyone will really have that moment of "Oh, wow that was a little obvious from the start, wasn't it?" when they find out the reasoning behind the name.
Janna: I was going to explain why Jace and Izzy have more of a sibling dynamic in this story than Fading, but I realized I'll spoil a whole lot of stuff if I do that, and well, that wouldn't be much fun, would it?
Mentirosas: I KNOW I CACKLED TO MYSELF WHILE WRITING THAT PART. And I can guarantee you that, yes, Jace was in fact rolling his he whole time (though only when Maryse wasn't looking. Jocelyn could hardly keep a straight face). I'm so excited to actually go further in depth and see how it all came together, too, even if I already know the base outline of how everything changed and how they all came to be who they are in Fading.
Drop me a review?