I'm such trash when it comes to updating. Y'all are welcome to throw rocks at me. But also thank you thank you thank you to everyone who reviewed/favorited/followed this story because you keep me going. A sincere less-than-three to you.
"Fang!" Iggy delivered a well-placed kick to his best friend's kneecap just as the homeroom teacher walked by. Fang jerked awake from his nap, earning a dirty look from Mr. McMahon. "What's the matter, dude? You've been way quieter than usual, and that's even by your standards."
Fang stifled a yawn. He and Max had spent the entire night talking, with the consequence that he hadn't finished his Chemistry homework and that he didn't get any sleep. According to Max, the more she knew about Fang, the better her system could be tailored to meet his needs. And that wasn't just a ploy to get Fang to spill his deepest, darkest secrets.
Honestly, sometimes Max was just so real that Fang forgot she was just a voice in a computer.
"M' fine," Fang muttered, realizing Iggy was still waiting for an answer. "Just t-t-tired." He stifled another yawn as the teacher walked by. J.J. and Iggy's fight had escalated to the point where she was no longer sitting at their table, so Iggy was noticeably upset, having no one to play his intense game of footsies with.
"Stay up all night playing Skyrim?" Iggy smirked. "Honestly, I get it. If it weren't for that huge English oral, I'd do the same."
Fang's eyes widened. "English oral?"
"Yeah, the one about Odysseus. The one that's worth ten percent of our grade?" Iggy glanced at Fang, who had turned a very visible shade of green. "Uh, Fang?"
How could he have forgotten? Fang supposed that with all the drama of the past week (or what passed for drama in his life, anyway), he had totally forgotten about the project that their English teacher had been harping about for the past month. And all he had was a few preliminary notes he had made two weeks ago... while playing Skyrim.
"I'm so fucked," he muttered, and Iggy patted his shoulder.
"Cheer up, dude. I'm sure ol' Thompson'll give you an extension if you ask. She seems to like you. You are the only kid who didn't fail the Othello essay."
"Y-yeah," Fang muttered, ignoring the butterflies rising in his chest. Sure, he was a senior, but talking to a teacher, especially one like the strict, bespectacled Mrs. Thompson, was a really daunting task. He almost wanted to just busk the oral. But he was already doing poorly in Chemistry, and he didn't want to be failing English as well.
Iggy say with Fang at lunch again, ripping into the school's surf n' turf with the ferocity of a wounded tiger. "Girls!" he burst savagely, glaring at his girlfriend's table. "Why do they have to be so... girly?"
"A-are you guys still-"
"Fighting? Yeah. And I blew all my money on the expensive chocolates she likes from that store in the mall. Left them on her driveway. She ran over them with her car." Iggy sighed. "What does she expect from me, even? I didn't even do anything wrong! And Homecoming's in less than three weeks..."
Fang glanced at the head of the cafeteria, where the cheerleaders were selling tickets to the school's biggest dance of the year. Which he, as usual, would not be attending no matter how much Ella begged him to. He'd had enough experiences with dances... especially in the seventh grade... Fang forced himself to not think about that.
Iggy stabbed at his steal so hard that one of the prongs of the plastic knife broke off in his food. "Girls are harder to solve than Rubix cubes, dude. Remember that next time Lissa makes googly eyes at you."
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
A familiar cloud of red hair enveloped Fang's peripheral view.
Fang smiled slightly. "I'm fine." He'd been saying that a lot recently.
Lissa put an arm around Fang's shoulders. "Yeah, because I'm here." She plopped down on the lab stool next to Fang and began unpacking her backpack, slamming her. "I have a confession to make."
"What?"
She smiled that dimpled smile of hers, and Fang's heart beat slightly faster. Man, at this rate, he was gonna have a heart attack by the age of twenty if his heartbeat increased every time a girl looked at him. "I had a dream about you last night."
"R-really?" Fang asked quietly, mentally cursing himself.
"Yeah. It was weird. We were dancing, like, on top of a lake or something... I think? I don't really remember." Her bright eyes shone in earnest.
Before Fang could say anything, ter Borcht stood up gruffly. "We're going to have a shorter period than normal because we have a... special announcement from the student body president." His expression indicated that he couldn't care less about the school's student body. Or its president.
Fang, Lissa, and everyone else in the class watched as the classroom door opened and in walked Holden Fielding, the mousy senior who somehow managed to fit the biggest personality Fang had ever seen in such a small stature. He walked to the front of the room and smiled brightly at the class. "Hey guys! Just a reminder that Ridgefield's twenty-seventh annual Homecoming Dance is coming up in a few weeks! Make sure to buy your tickets at the tables in the cafeteria during lunch or before or after school, and don't forget to bring your dates!"
As Holden droned on about half of the ticket money going towards benefiting the local food bank, Fang's thoughts drifted elsewhere, to Max, to Lissa, to the one-week extension he had managed to get from his English teacher by not pissing himself when he talked to her.
Fang was jerked back to reality when he found a lab report slammed onto his desk with a large, spiky B- inscribed on the front.
He groaned and dropped his head. He had a lot of work to do.
"You're an idiot."
Fang grinned. "Nice to see you, too, Max."
"I've been reading your messages. And, uh, this girl Lissa is totally into you. Why don't you follow up with her? I also lowkey stalked her on Facebook. She's cute! Tell me you wanna get with that."
Fang winced.
"What? Too locker room?"
"Just a bit." Fang dropped his backpack on the ground and flopped on his bed, on the one spot not completely covered with clothes. He made a mental note to add cleaning room to the lengthening list of stuff he was supposed to do.
Max laughed. "Fang... I got an email from your school about a very special dance coming up. Something called Homecoming?"
Fang sat up. "You read my emails?"
"Well... I have to. So I can reference them, sort them, collate them, even print them out and staple them as you want me to. Right now, your inbox is disgusting. How can someone with no friends have so many emails?"
He smiled at Max's dig. "Uh, most of them are junk."
"More like pictures of peoples' junk. You get so much spam it's a miracle your computer's still functioning. Why are you subscribed to something called Brazzers?"
Fang turned red. "Uh..."
"Frank, darling, if you do what I'm telling you to do, you'll have the real thing and you won't have to settle for pornorgraphy," Max chided. "And what I want you to do is ask Lissa to Homecoming."
"I can't."
"Why the ever living fuck not? You like her, and she actually likes you, which doesn't happen very often, does it? And this dream she told you about with the two of you dancing? If she hinted any harder she'd have to stand outside your window and hold up a sign that says Ask me to Homecoming with permanent marker."
"I don't like school dances," Fang whispered softly, putting a pillow over his head to block out Max's... well, not her gaze, but he didn't want to look at his laptop anymore.
Max scoffed. "Pansy. You know what, I'll research how to ask a girl to Homecoming and tell you exactly what to do. And I promise you won't have to be one of those poor shmucks, standing on a table in the lunch room with a colored poster. Okay?"
"I have a lot of work to do," was Fang's response.
"Then let me do this work for you," Max said smoothly.
Fang lifted his pillow from his head. "No colored poster?"
"If I could smirk, I would. Absolutely not. I can't legally say satisfaction guaranteed, since I'm still in beta testing, but the success rate is virtually 100 percent. So you in, my reluctant Romeo?"
Fang smiled, and Max started whirring.