First period began the regular, grueling task of paying attention to the most boring classes of all time. Clarke wasn't sure if they felt more boring now that she would rather be anywhere else but this school, or if she just hadn't noticed how boring they were until this point for some other unknown reason.
Second period began the hell that Clarke was sure she was going to be experiencing for the rest of the year.
Finn came in just after her and took his normal desk in the back, and Clarke quickly picked a spot across the room in the middle of the classroom, despite the fact that her normal seat was right next to his. A few people seemed annoyed by her change of routine, and had to adjust their own seating arrangements, but since apparently everyone had heard about the incident on Friday, no one asked her to move back to her old seat.
Third period was another with Finn, but the teacher had given assigned seats, so Clarke didn't have to worry about sitting next to him. However, she sat just a few seats in front of him, and she kept getting the feeling that he was looking at her. She wouldn't turn around to check, though, because then he might think that she cared to look at him, and she didn't.
Fourth period was English, and English was by far Clarke's favorite class. She was beyond happy that Finn didn't have the class with her. Senior year English was literature, and Clarke couldn't ever get enough of it. Maybe it made her a nerd, but she didn't care. She loved to read, and to write of course, and she didn't care what that said about her.
The school had two lunches, and basically all of the English, History and half of the elective classes had the first lunch, and the rest of the classes had the second lunch. That's how Octavia had known that the four of them would have lunch together, and it was also how Clarke knew that Finn would have the same lunch as them. He was in government fifth period too, and he and Clarke used to eat together every day. Now, though, Clarke walked into the cafeteria seeking out her new friends., and hoped that Finn's government class was with a different teacher than hers and Lexa's.
When she couldn't find them immediately, she made her way to the lunch line and bought some of the cheap, probably not real food, and then began looking again. Finally, she spotted them in the back of the cafeteria. Releasing a relieved breath, she started over to them.
"Hey, Clarke!" Octavia greeted her happily. "How has your day been so far?"
"Um. Could've been better," Clarke answered. "I have two classes in the morning with Finn."
"That fucking sucks," Raven commented. "I still think we should beat –"
"Raven," Octavia tutted, causing the other girl to roll her eyes and stop talking.
Lexa joined them a few minutes later, with the news that Anya and Harper had first lunch with them and would be showing up soon. During most of the lunch period, Clarke stayed quiet and listened to the other three girls talk. She still felt somewhat disconnected from them, which she supposed made sense. She'd only known them for four days, barely.
She accidentally zoned out at some point, but immediately came back to attention when a phone was being placed in front of her. "Give me your number, Clarke."
Blinking, and feeling like she was missing something, Clarke took Octavia's phone and quickly added in her number.
"Cool, I'll text you about this weekend," Octavia chimed happily. Clarke just nodded, and then the bell rang to dismiss them to fifth period.
Clarke nearly forgot that Lexa was going to the same place as she was until she noticed Lexa walking next to her out of the cafeteria. "She was talking about a party she's going to have at her place," Lexa offered, clearly amused that Clarke had zoned out.
"Oh. Right."
"You okay?"
"Fine," Clarke replied quickly, failing to notice the concerned frown that appeared across Lexa's face. They reached their government class quickly, and both found that their teacher had opted to give them a seating chart. The economics teacher hadn't bothered with seating charts, considering that they were all seniors after all, but Clarke became uneasy as soon as she looked at it. Of course this class would be the one that was more full of people with last names at the end of the alphabet, leaving her on the far side at the beginning, seated next to none other than Finn.
"Clarke," he said in greeting as Clarke took her seat next to him. Lexa had gone off to the other room, but the blonde was hyper aware of green eyes trained on her and her ex-boyfriend. Purposefully ignoring him, Clarke took out a pencil for class, as well as her notebook, and began to follow the direction on the board. "Really? You won't talk to me at all?" Silence. "This is the one class we have to sit next to each other in, we might as well make the best of it."
"There isn't a best of it, Finn," Clarke countered coldly, flashing him a glare. "You are not forgiven. Leave me alone."
"Come on, Clarke. Isn't it enough that everyone already knows what happened?"
Clarke released her pencil from her grasp, somewhat slamming against the desk as she finally gave him her full attention. "No, because apparently this is nothing new for you. I don't know why any girls would ever still want to date you after knowing that you have cheated on multiple other girls. Frankly, if someone had told me sooner, I may not have wasted half of a year confessing all of my feelings and my dark past to someone who would end up not caring enough to at least remain faithful. So no, it is not enough."
"Clarke –"
The bell rang, signifying the start of class, and so class commenced.
At the end of the period, Clarke was up and out of her desk in seconds, prepared to sprint away if she had to, but when she reached the doorway, she heard him call after her, "Come on, Clarke, wait!"
Before she could even try to fend him off, she heard another voice bite, "She clearly doesn't want to talk to you, Finn."
"Oh great, so now she has you as one of her guard dogs too?" Finn demanded, and Clarke found herself turning around once she reached the hallway, seeing Lexa and Finn facing each other in the hallway. She was slightly surprised, though not entirely, at seeing Lexa come to her defense. "Does she even know how much of a playgirl you are? I mean, you've clearly taken the time to enlighten her on my history."
"Sure Finn, it's no secret that I've been with a lot of girls. Frankly, I'm probably better at picking up girls than you are. The difference is, I have never devalued someone enough to betray their trust and cheat on them. So once your track record is shinier than mine, come back and try to accuse me of being as much of an asshole as you," Lexa snarled.
"Fuck you."
"Finn," Clarke snapped, drawing the attention of both the other people. "You need to back off, alright? You cheated on me, and I have the right to be mad about it, okay? So could you just leave me alone?" His eyes betrayed guilt for a moment, and Clarke took that as an answer. She nodded once, glanced at Lexa, and then turned and started off for math.
Her head was spinning. She knew nothing about her new friends – other than a few superficial things.
And while something inside told her that she was crazy for thinking that they might somehow end up hurting her like Finn had, the thought was still there.
When she got to math, she hadn't even noticed that she'd walked clean across the school. Sighing, she stepped into the room and took her usual seat in the back. Math was one of the classes that she got by in fairly well without having to listen much to the lectures, so she got out a pen and a notebook and prepared to sit back and daydream for the period. Or at least try to block out what had just happened.
However, there was a new factor in her math class – her new friends. Octavia was sitting next to her suddenly, Anya and Harper filling in the next two seats, and Clarke felt her eyes widening as Octavia greeted her. "Hey, Clarke!"
"Hey."
"Everything okay?"
Clarke nodded, and the bell rang. Thank goodness. She needed to clear her head.
Sixth period went by quickly enough, and seventh period was possibly the most peaceful class of the day, because the work was easy and it was void of any people that might confuse her thoughts at the moment. When the final bell rung, she was up and out of the building as quickly as she could manage. But she didn't head home. Instead, she started the somewhat lengthier walk toward the beach. The nearest beach wasn't much in comparison to the beach scattered with the four beach houses, but it was enough to calm Clarke down. It took her roughly half an hour to walk there.
She wasn't surprised to see that she wasn't the only one occupying it, but it wasn't full enough that she couldn't find a secluded place to park herself. She sat down in the sand, which, strangely enough, never bothered her, and retrieved her notebook from her bag. Grabbing her favorite ink pen as well, she flipped the book open to the next blank page, and began to write.
Words and feelings were strewn across the page, Clarke merely a vessel through which they traveled onto the paper from the mess of her mind. At some point, her pen stilled in her hand and she clicked the end of it, letting it drop into the crease of her notebook uselessly. Her hands fell into the sand at either side of her, and her golden hair blew in the slight breeze.
She was stressing herself out over nothing. Sure, her new friends weren't saints by any means. Who was? She was clearly just paranoid now that the one person she'd trusted here had gone behind her back to be with someone else. That didn't mean that her new friends would do the same thing, and just because Lexa, as she said, had been with a lot of girls, it didn't mean that she was anything like Finn. Plus, Clarke had had multiple conversations with Lexa by now, and so far, she seemed nothing like her ex-boyfriend. In fact, as Clarke glanced over her writing, she realized that there was already a stark difference between Lexa and Finn. While Clarke probably should've been transferring her anger at Finn onto paper, she had instead flooded the page with her confusion about her new friends, and Lexa specifically. Finn had never been the source of anything she'd written before, and he still wasn't, but Lexa was, and Clarke had known her for four days, barely.
"Fancy seeing you here," a voice said suddenly, causing Clarke to jump a little, her sandy hands coming off of the ground and abruptly closing her notebook as her blue eyes turned up to meet green ones. "Sorry, didn't mean to scare you."
"No, you're fine," Clarke insisted. "I was just... thinking."
Lexa nodded. "Can I sit?" When Clarke didn't object, the brunette took a seat in the sand next to her. "I'm sorry about earlier. I shouldn't have gotten between you and Finn without knowing if you were okay with that. I guess I'm kind of defensive about your situation, because I have a very strong complex about treating people with respect and loyalty and shit like that. I kind of especially hate it when guys think they somehow have a right to be dicks to girls."
"It's okay," Clarke said finally, "I was just surprised."
"Also, the whole thing about me hooking up with a lot of girls... it's true, but it's not like... some game or something that I play," Lexa stated. "Not that I think it's okay to judge anyone for their sex lives when it's consensual, but just so you know. It just so happens that I've hooked up with a number of girls, especially this past summer. A lot of people drove down to Tampa, or up to Orlando, or over to Miami... Anya and I went to all three, and we kind of had... a little too much fun with our fake IDs."
Clarke smirked. "This town is wild."
"Oh yeah," Lexa agreed with a snicker, before pausing for a moment. The warm air blew past them with a slight breeze, and Clarke was reminded again that it was technically winter, and that it would actually start to get chilly soon. "I don't know, I guess Finn was in Miami for some of the same nights that we were, and he saw me there. He was dating some girl at the time – someone who had just graduated, I think her name was Trinity – but I caught him making out with someone else. I called him out on it, and he got pissed as fuck of course, and made it his mission to get into my business about the girls that I slept with. But it's not like I was in a serious relationship when I slept with any of them, and I was safe and everything, so I don't get the big deal."
Clarke shrugged. "Well, I've learned quite a few things about Finn in the past few days, and I guess the moral of all the stories is that he is a bit of a hypocrite if he's calling you out for something like that." Silence settled for a moment again, and Clarke let her hands drop back into the sand in front of her, playing with bits of it in between her fingers.
"Did you have a boyfriend in New York?"
"I had a couple, on and off, throughout high school," Clarke answered. "Nothing serious. My best friend there, Belle, she was always the one who cared a lot about relationships. I was pretty happy without them, because I was in a perfect little bubble, living in a cozy apartment with my mom. I spent all of my free time either out with my friends or curled up in bed writing wild stories based on all of the imaginative literature I couldn't ever tear my eyes away from. And then my mom told me about this awesome new job she was getting in a little town in Florida. Moving sucked, and summer sucked. It sucked even more when my mom had to go back to New York, and I ended up in this fucked up situation I'm in now. Even my friends from NYC are starting to be an indication of my life becoming a royal disappointment. I think I've heard just about every excuse not to talk to me by now."
"Is that what you're doing in there?" Lexa asked, and it took Clarke a moment to realize that she meant writing imaginative literature in her notebook.
"No," she admitted. "I have two notebooks going right now. One of them is a long story, chapter based, and I'm kind of stuck on it right now. This one is just rambles and shit. I haven't written really cool, imaginative stuff in a while. Funnily enough, Finn was never much of a writing muse."
Lexa hummed softly. "I'm sorry about all that. Your move, and your friends being distant. I went through it all at the beginning of eighth grade, but it was easier then. I can't imagine moving before your last year of high school. Why didn't you transfer back to NYC and go with your mom?"
"There wouldn't have been enough time to move all my stuff again, and I would've missed a week or so of school because of it. Just... it would've been a big hassle. My mom is already stressed to the max, so I agreed to the easiest option when it was presented."
"Well, I think you're very strong for getting through it all," Lexa stated. A pause. "I hope in the midst of all that chaos you had time to read Go Set A Watchman."
Clarke felt a smile split across her face as she looked to the brunette. "Did you read it?"
"I did. I liked To Kill A Mockingbird better."
"Of course, I was really disappointed with the sequel, to be honest. I really liked Atticus in the first book, and I hated that he turned out to be a racist. I mean, the whole goddamn story line of TKAM declares Atticus as the good guy, who defends people of color," Clarke growled.
Lexa chuckled. "I agree. I was also pretty pissed at Jack for slapping Scout across the face."
"Altogether, I didn't like it. I mean, it was written well, and I would've kicked myself for not reading it if I didn't," Clarke said. Lexa smiled a little, nodding. "Ugh. I've kept my inner book nerd to a minimum while I've lived here, and now here you are drawing it out of me."
"Hey, what's wrong with being a book nerd?" Lexa asked with a wide grin. "If you haven't been able to tell, I am also one. I bet you couldn't be a book nerd with Finn."
Clarke rolled her eyes. "I'm not sure if Finn has ever opened a book for his own pleasure." She looked at Lexa thoughtfully. "You don't seem like a book nerd to me, though. You're too cool."
"Me? Cool? Babe, you've got the wrong girl."
"Are you kidding?" Clarke narrowed her eyes at the brunette.
"What? If either of us is the cool one, it's you, Miss Girl-Who-Dated-The-Most-Popular-Douche-Bag-At-School," Lexa insisted.
Clarke shook her head, chuckling quietly, and shifted her gaze back in front of her, looking out over the ocean. The sun was dipping its way down the sky, beginning to cause a streak of orange near the surface of the water. "I guess we're both just not cool, and instead we're major book nerds."
"Accurate." Another moment of silence. "Are you going to want a ride home? I have my car with me."
Clarke glanced down at her hands. "I can walk; I don't want to inconvenience you or anything."
"Your uncle actually lives really close to where I live," Lexa promised, "so you should let me drive you home. It's a long way to walk."
Finally smiling, the blonde shifted her gaze to Lexa. "If you insist. Were you going to head back now?"
"Unless you want to stay longer." Clarke shook her head, and the two of them stood up. Clarke quickly repacked her bag, hoisted it up onto her back, and then the two of them made their way back along the beach to the parking lot, where Lexa led Clarke to her car. It was small, a two door, with four seats, but it wasn't like Clarke could judge. It was more than what she had.
She settled into the passenger seat, and Lexa started the car and pulled out of the lot. "You know," Clarke said, "I got my license in New York when I turned sixteen, and I haven't driven at all since then."
"I guess that makes sense. You didn't really need to drive in NYC, right?"
"Yeah."
"You're welcome to drive me around if you ever feel like refreshing your memory," Lexa teased. The smile that tugged at Clarke's lips was unforced, and she felt calm and at ease, sitting here talking to Lexa.
"I might actually take you up on that someday. You'll just have to make sure that we're in a deserted area the first time around, so I don't accidentally crash the car or something."
An abrupt laugh let loose from Lexa's lips, and green eyes glanced at her. "Yeah, maybe we don't do that then. This car may have been a very generous gift from my parents, but there is no way that they would consider paying for damages if someone else crashed it, and I don't think you want to do that either."
"Hey! I'm not saying I will crash it! I'm just saying that it's probably a better idea if we start by letting me 'refresh my memory' in a place where no one else is driving."
"I don't know, Clarke, I'm not sure if I know you well enough to entrust my life to you."
Clarke raised her eyebrows. "I'm entrusting my life to you right now, aren't I?"
"That's different, I've been driving for over two years since getting my license!" Lexa exclaimed incredulously, giving Clarke an exasperated look. The blonde just smiled devilishly at her. "You better stop distracting me, or else entrusting your life to me is going to have been a bad idea."
"I'm not that distracting."
Lexa snorted out a laugh, her nose crinkling. "I beg to differ." Clarke felt a blush spread across her cheeks, but she averted her gaze quickly, sure that Lexa didn't mean what first came to Clarke's mind.
It was ridiculous to think that Lexa would be interested in her in any way beyond friendship – it wasn't like the fact that she was gay and had been with lots of girls meant that she liked Clarke that way. It was even more ridiculous for Clarke to think that she might be interested in Lexa that way, because she was four days out of the most serious relationship she'd ever been in, and had never actually been into a girl.
Before she knew it, they were pulling up in front of Clarke's uncle's townhouse. "Here we are," Lexa said softly. "Do you... want a ride tomorrow morning?"
"Oh no, I'm okay. I like walking in the morning. It's a nice way to wake up and start the day," Clarke admitted, her face reddening again. "Thanks, though."
"Sure." Lexa nodded. "I'll see you tomorrow, then."
"Yep. See you, Lexa." Clarke opened the passenger side door, grabbing her bag and then closing the door. With one last wave to the brunette, she made her way up to the door of Marcus' house as she heard the noise of Lexa's car drive off.
