Title: Spiderland
Disclaimers: L.J.S is the author from whom all new NW flights of fancy derive. All kudos to her cos she is the Goddess.
(the inevitable) A/N: This is a fic I've been mulling over for so long it's almost been ground into non-existent dust in my brain. But lately I've kind of figured out what I want to do with it, so here's 2 chapters, with more to come soon I hope.
2.
'I'm so damned, I can't win, my heart in my hands again' - ..And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead.
By the time lunchperiod rolled around Grier wasn't feeling a
whole lot more sure-footed in her new environs. The sheer
weirdness of that first encounter had toppled her off balance, and
now everything seemed off kilter. There was certainly no other
reasonable explanation for why the kids here seemed so brittle and
unwelcoming, so cliquey and unresponsive to thenewgirl, than that
she was projecting her own negative discomfit onto them. That was
basic psychology, and she'd learnt it early from Jim Morrison,
/people are strange when you're a stranger/; she'd just never
actually *been* in the mindset before, or at least not for very
long.
But there must have been something wrong with the way she'd said
hello to the girls in the hallway outside second period's modern
literature class, to make them fall quiet 2 minutes into the
getting-to-know-you chitchat and pick the other side of the
classroom when the teacher called them in. She'd shrugged that
reaction and off and been doubly bright and quadruply smiley with
the goodlooking boy that sat down next to her in math, but she
must have been acting dopey, because he too got very interested in
his textbook soon after they'd started chatting. Things didn't
improve through the next two periods, and by lunch Grier was
getting to know for the first time what it felt like to be a
stranger, an outsider.
It wasn't as if the students here looked any different to any
she'd seen at all her other schools; it was the usual melee of
geeks, arty kids, jocks and freaks. But what was weird was the
uniformly cold response she got from all of them, she felt like
she was lacking whatever component it is that makes one human
being want to talk to another one here.
And it might just be that I'm getting a little paranoid, she
thought ironically, as she paused with uncharacteristic
indecisiveness at the doors of the teeming cafetiria. What she
felt like doing over lunch period was grabbing a lemonade from the
vending machine, finding a quiet corner of an empty classroom, and
maybe making a start on the fat text they'd just been set in lit.
(Don Dellilo's 'Underworld', a title which seemed somehow
appropriate today). But instead, upon recognising in herself this
desire to run away, she stiffened her resolve, pushed open both of
the double-doors, and strode into a large room filled with long
rectangular tables with benches stretching along either side, and
the food counter at the front.
A high school lunch room that looked like every high school
lunchroom all over America, except this one perhaps was a little
more pleasant, with the loud noise created by chatter and eating,
and the oppressive press of many bodies offset by a row of big
windows on the outiside wall which gave a view of the back of the
school; a wide expanse of well kept green lawn and then the start
of the firtrees Grier had glimpsed that morning. Trying to take
comfort in the familiarity and ordinariness of it all, Grier
deliberately ignored everyone around her while she selected her
lunch, a bowl of fruit salad and a peanut butter sandwitch, and
then she stood still holding her tray while she cooly surveyed the
room, looking for a place to sit.
One of the nearer tables was half empty, with a group of five or
so students clustered at one end. Not really flash looking kids,
but they were talking animatedly, and Grier thought they looked
nice. She approached smiling, letting nothing of the knot of
nervousness in her stomache show on her face, and said 'Hi there.'
Conversations broke off immediately as the kids looked up. A
bizzarely long pause ensued, while Grier looked at the group and
the group looked anywhere else but at her. At last, when it became
apparent she wasn't going away, one of the boys mumbled 'Uh hi'.
He looked like he would have preferred disappearing under his
baseball cap.
Grier swallowed. 'Do you mind if I sit with you? There isn't many
other empty spaces.'
Another lengthy silence, this one even more heavy-feeling because
kids at surrounding tables seemed to have stopped what they were
doing to listen. At the packed-table next to the one she was
hovering by, Grier couldn't help noticing one girl reclining back
in her chair and openly watching. When she caught Grier's eye, she
smirked nastily.
'Okay..' baseball-cap boy was mumbling at last.
Grier sank onto the nearest stretch of bench, and wished she
could sink through it and into the floor. More silence. When she
could no longer stand it, she said; 'I'm Grier.'
The oppressive, unrelenting silence. The students, two girls and
two other boys besides the kid in the cap, didn't look happy, she
thought, staring at their plates and at their shoes, but they also
didn't respond, or offer their names. After a moment she struggled
on in an even softer voice that still seemed to ricochet around
the ever-widening circle of quiet she was the center of; 'I'm new
here, you know. Today's my first day. I guess I'm still learning
the ropes around this place..'
A snort of open and derisive laughter. Not from the table Grier
was at, which might as well have been the cacoon of silence, but
from the next one. Grier's head snapped up and she glared at the
same girl who had been watching her tiny melodrama unfold before,
and taking so much obvious pleasure in it. She held Grier's eye
again for a moment, and then turned to the person next to her and
said distinctly and in a tone of lazy hypothetical-inquiry 'What
do you reckon, do you think anyone here can be bothered to show
her what to do with her rope? Surely once she gathers enough of
it,she'll know neatly how to hang herself, and none of us need
trouble about it..'
The widening pit of fear and faint-nausea inside Grier turned
suddenly to ice. She sat immobolised with anger for a second,
while she faintly noticed that the person the girl was addressing
was the spunky Japanese boy from that morning, Naiad. Naiad at
that moment, in fact, was staring unenthralled-ly out of one of
the windows, and just then he stood up and dropped a paper napkin
on his plate, through long and beautiful fingers. 'Sometimes I
don't know what I find more attractive about you, Jewel, your
steadfast trivialness or your irrepressable pettyness. I'm off to
find Alex anyway, we're ditching the rest of the day to drive into
the city and get some stuff. Catch you late tonight, maybe.'
Grier was standing up, the ice in her tummy turning to something
like resolve, as she heard the girl called Jewel murmur 'Bye then'
throatily and unoffendedly, like animosity was the usual-tone of
her conversations with Naiad. Grier didn't care about that now
though. Leaving her lunch untouched on the tabletop, she stepped
out of the bench and stalked around the two tables, not stopping
until she was right next to Jewel and the empty space Naiad had
vacated.
From a distance, Jewel had looked beautiful in a long-legged,
blonde-haired, exquisitely dressed and accessorised barbie-doll
kind of way, right down to the gleaming white teeth behind the
mocking smile. Up close she was mesmerising. Grier couldn't help
noticing her skin had that same waxy-perfection she'd been unnerved
by..somewhere else that day, and her eyes were smokey blue, with a
wicked tilt. Grier felt almost dizzy looking into them, like some
door to a vortex had been opened, and she rocked slightly on her
feet.
Then the girl smiled again, that idle, amused, cruel smile, and
Grier recollected what she was doing there. She stood up
straighter and said quietly, politely, in a voice that barely
shook at all 'Can I sit here?'
'No you can't.' In the same patient tone as one would use to say
to a very small child who might choke on it, 'No you can't have a
stick of gum.'
Grier looked away for a second to hide the fact that she felt stung. Against the far wall she noticed a boy, sitting alone and quietly eating his lunch. He was different from everyone else in the room because he wasn't looking at her.
Grier squared up to face her straight on. 'Why not? Did it stop
being a free country?'
The girl tilted her head back and tittered with angelical
laughter at this, joined swiftly by a hefty-looking guy on her
other side, and then by the rest of the table. Grier folded her
arms and said nothing, waiting. 'Oh she's just like a six-week-old
kitten isn't she? It's adorable, honestly, honey I could eat you
right up.'
'Oh me too', overly-muscular-boy-on-the-right said.
'See. Russ too.' The girl's laughter finally subsided, and she
glanced down to the roll she was lazily buttering. 'In answer to
your question though, you just might have missed some road signage
on your way out here. Maybe you clicked your heels at the wrong
time. Your in Tribune, Kansas now, Dorothy, and we're a very old
town you know. Kind of out of the way of the hustlin', bustlin'
norm. This place has deep roots, and deeper traditions. It's not
exactly what you would call a free-country no.'
Grier attempted to hide her sheer amazement at this crazy speech
by deadpanning 'You have traditions about who sits at the table?'
Jewel looked up and smiled then in a way that made Grier feel
queasy 'Indeed we do. They hark back to fine old-time laws of
segregation.We're not uncouth enough to put up signs, but if we
did they'd read..' she paused graciously and looked at the bulky-
boy known as Russ.
'No mongrels, half-breeds, or clueless, burdensome fricken
newbies allowed.' Russ said. He looked like he relished it.
3.
By the end of the day Grier was exhausted from maintaining a facade of calm detachment, when outside she had to face an endless parade of kids who would barely make eye contact with her, and inside her head was a mess. There had been one boy who *had* seemed to very deliberately catch her eye as she was leaving the cafeteria after her confrontation with Jewel at lunch, but she hadn't seen him since and now thought maybe she'd imagined it. She considered skipping her last class and walking home, but rejected the idea almost immediately as too easy. Anyway, last period was art. Maybe something could be salvaged from this horrible day.
A quick scan of the almost-full classroom from the doorway at least reassured her that Jewel wasn't in this class, or any of her friends. She hadn't shared a class with any of them all day, so her luck was holding. It was a nice looking artroom, with long wooden desks in the front, easles and student works covering the big area at the back, and large windows along the side looking out on the front lawn. She slid into the back row, where there was still a few seats empty, and took out a pad and pen.
A compact woman with short curly hair and a pretty face walked in a few minutes later and introduced herself as Ms. Croft. 'Welcome again to advanced art. I hope you all had a nice break, and you're back rearing to go. I thought today we might just get straight into it. Next week we'll start on the Impressionists, but for today I want you to go back there and make me something. A momento of your summer break, if you like. Any format will do but I want it more or less complete by the end of the period. Go to it.'
With a snapping of books and a screeching of chairs the class got up and headed towards the back of the room. Grier followed along, a real buzz of quiet excitement stirring in her stomache for the first time that day. (Well. Excitement of the good, non-scary kind). Grier had always been excellent at art, in fact she could say with no false modesty that she'd always been the best out of any group she'd been in. Her artistic abilities were one thing she could count on to be recognized, even if nothing else she did at this school seemed to measure up.
She took a cursory glance at the stuff already displayed on a shelf along the back wall, paintings and sketches and sculptures in varying stages of completion. They all looked pretty standard until one shoved in a corner caught her eye. It was a grey stone sculpture, long and thin, in the shape of a loping horse. It was utterly strange, almost menacingly alien (no horse could be shaped like that or stretched out in that way), and it was breath-takingly beautiful.
'Wonderful, isn't it?' a quiet voice said from behind her.
Grier turned to see a tall girl with a serious face fixing cool green eyes on the horse sculpture. 'It is.' she replied carefully. This was the first time all day anyone had initiated a conversation with her.'Is it yours?'
'Oh I wish.' The girl laughed, a slightly bitter sound. 'No, that's Naiad. A boy who only turns up every third lesson or so to unleash his ridiculously effortless talent on the rest of us and to make us feel like hacks before cutting again again.' The girl turned to face her, then very deliberately looked her up and down. 'You're Grier. The new kid.'
'Yeah' Grier responded flatly. Then she added, suddenly irritated 'I feel like my reputation precedes me whereever I go at this school. I didn't think I'd been here long enough to have a reputation.'
The girl laughed shortly, a brittle sound. Grier blinked. The girl said, with a slightly malicious glint in her large green eyes, "It's not the length of time you've been here. It's the impression you've made."
Grier stared at the auburn haired girl with the big green eyes for a moment more than turned away, with a silent shake of the head. She had no patience left today for a taunting conversation like this one.
At the back of the room were giant sheets of paper and a variety of art materials. Grier went straight for the charcoal pieces. With charcoal, drawing felt raw, unconstricted, honest. It created a black and white outlet for internal bewildering prisms of colour. Grier worked for 15 minutes almost without thinking, applying huge messy strokes and tiny deft ones, sometimes deliberately blotting the charcoal with the palm of her hand. She finally stepped back to take and breath, and looked at it. And felt a ripple of unease go the length of her spine.
'Well well'. Grier spun around, already agitated, and there was the green eye'd girl standing behind her again. 'The new kid has talent. That's striking. Is it a real place?'
Grier nodded. 'My street back home in New Town.'
'I'm glad I don't have to go there.' The girl turned around to face Grier. 'I'm Amy. Are you doing anything after school?'
'Um. No.'
'Good. Let's go into town together. I'll show you around.'
'Why would you want to do that?' Grier asked bluntly.
'Because you've made an excellent second impression, kid. I wanna know more.'
'You know you and I are about the same age. So if you cut out all this patronising 'kid' business, I'll come along.'
Amy laughed softly. "Fine. Why don't we go now, tiger?'
'Because there's still 20 minutes left of class?'
'So?'
'I'm not ditching on my first day.' Grier said flatly. The tingling sensation had made its way to her stomach. She wasn't sure if the sick feeling was fear or excitement or both.
Amy exagerratedly rolled her eyes. 'Well ok. If you want to be like that about it. Mz Croft?'
'Yes Amy?'
'I'm feeling a bit sick. I have a cold or something coming on I guess. So Grier is going to take me home.'
To Grier's utter amazement the teacher didn't even blink. She just walked over to her desk, got out a book of hallway pass notes, and scribbled on it. Then she ripped it out and handed it over. 'I hope you feel better Amy.' Ms Croft said. There was something odd about the tone of her voice. It was just... flat. Her eyes flickered over Grier for only the briefest moment before she turned and walked back over to a cluster of students who were working together on some kind of summer collage.
Amy held up the hall-pass in front of Grier's nose like it was fresh $100 bill hovering over a line of cocaine. 'Are we good to go?'
'Apparently' came Grier's low reply. She was looking at her picture again. It was her old street alright, but not the way she remembered it. The street the picture showed should have had the ambiance of a lively, comfortable lower-class- neighbourhood, lined with townhouses and big maple trees and the day care centre directly across from where she lived, and next to it a tiny park with a set of rusty swings and a badly- constructed slippery dip that kids got stuck on half way down. In her picture, a night time scene, the childcare centre and the park were gone, empty spaces; the small houses were black crouching shapes devoid of differentiation. A solitary light, signified by a gap in the swirling mass of dark smudgey charcoal that otherwise consumed the white paper, was there in the form of a streetlamp. The lamp lit up the first few metres of the street, which were nearest to the viewer's perspective, but the rest of it was dark, menacing. A wintry maple was the only other prominent feature of the picture, jutting black leafless fingers across the lighted space, looking like a dead and exposed transformer. The frisson she felt now was certainly fear. Why on earth had she drawn her street like *that*?
'It's the medium you know, charcoal. It distorts things, makes them seem other than they are.'
'What? How?' Grier snapped, really unsettled now.
'How? How nothing. I noticed how you were looking at the picture that's all.' Amy said. There was a note of concilliation in her voice.
'Oh' Grier said, feeling a bit silly. Of course. Amy was right too, it was hard to do anything else with charcoal than create black blobs. 'Ok. Well. Let's go.'
(the inevitable second, apologetic) A/N: these chapters are slow laying-the- ground work type ones. In the next few chapters Grier and Alex will find out they are enemies (and more interestingly from my angsty, soppy perspective, soulmates, natch!), and another big bad type enemy no-one could like is going to appear.
Disclaimers: L.J.S is the author from whom all new NW flights of fancy derive. All kudos to her cos she is the Goddess.
(the inevitable) A/N: This is a fic I've been mulling over for so long it's almost been ground into non-existent dust in my brain. But lately I've kind of figured out what I want to do with it, so here's 2 chapters, with more to come soon I hope.
2.
'I'm so damned, I can't win, my heart in my hands again' - ..And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead.
By the time lunchperiod rolled around Grier wasn't feeling a
whole lot more sure-footed in her new environs. The sheer
weirdness of that first encounter had toppled her off balance, and
now everything seemed off kilter. There was certainly no other
reasonable explanation for why the kids here seemed so brittle and
unwelcoming, so cliquey and unresponsive to thenewgirl, than that
she was projecting her own negative discomfit onto them. That was
basic psychology, and she'd learnt it early from Jim Morrison,
/people are strange when you're a stranger/; she'd just never
actually *been* in the mindset before, or at least not for very
long.
But there must have been something wrong with the way she'd said
hello to the girls in the hallway outside second period's modern
literature class, to make them fall quiet 2 minutes into the
getting-to-know-you chitchat and pick the other side of the
classroom when the teacher called them in. She'd shrugged that
reaction and off and been doubly bright and quadruply smiley with
the goodlooking boy that sat down next to her in math, but she
must have been acting dopey, because he too got very interested in
his textbook soon after they'd started chatting. Things didn't
improve through the next two periods, and by lunch Grier was
getting to know for the first time what it felt like to be a
stranger, an outsider.
It wasn't as if the students here looked any different to any
she'd seen at all her other schools; it was the usual melee of
geeks, arty kids, jocks and freaks. But what was weird was the
uniformly cold response she got from all of them, she felt like
she was lacking whatever component it is that makes one human
being want to talk to another one here.
And it might just be that I'm getting a little paranoid, she
thought ironically, as she paused with uncharacteristic
indecisiveness at the doors of the teeming cafetiria. What she
felt like doing over lunch period was grabbing a lemonade from the
vending machine, finding a quiet corner of an empty classroom, and
maybe making a start on the fat text they'd just been set in lit.
(Don Dellilo's 'Underworld', a title which seemed somehow
appropriate today). But instead, upon recognising in herself this
desire to run away, she stiffened her resolve, pushed open both of
the double-doors, and strode into a large room filled with long
rectangular tables with benches stretching along either side, and
the food counter at the front.
A high school lunch room that looked like every high school
lunchroom all over America, except this one perhaps was a little
more pleasant, with the loud noise created by chatter and eating,
and the oppressive press of many bodies offset by a row of big
windows on the outiside wall which gave a view of the back of the
school; a wide expanse of well kept green lawn and then the start
of the firtrees Grier had glimpsed that morning. Trying to take
comfort in the familiarity and ordinariness of it all, Grier
deliberately ignored everyone around her while she selected her
lunch, a bowl of fruit salad and a peanut butter sandwitch, and
then she stood still holding her tray while she cooly surveyed the
room, looking for a place to sit.
One of the nearer tables was half empty, with a group of five or
so students clustered at one end. Not really flash looking kids,
but they were talking animatedly, and Grier thought they looked
nice. She approached smiling, letting nothing of the knot of
nervousness in her stomache show on her face, and said 'Hi there.'
Conversations broke off immediately as the kids looked up. A
bizzarely long pause ensued, while Grier looked at the group and
the group looked anywhere else but at her. At last, when it became
apparent she wasn't going away, one of the boys mumbled 'Uh hi'.
He looked like he would have preferred disappearing under his
baseball cap.
Grier swallowed. 'Do you mind if I sit with you? There isn't many
other empty spaces.'
Another lengthy silence, this one even more heavy-feeling because
kids at surrounding tables seemed to have stopped what they were
doing to listen. At the packed-table next to the one she was
hovering by, Grier couldn't help noticing one girl reclining back
in her chair and openly watching. When she caught Grier's eye, she
smirked nastily.
'Okay..' baseball-cap boy was mumbling at last.
Grier sank onto the nearest stretch of bench, and wished she
could sink through it and into the floor. More silence. When she
could no longer stand it, she said; 'I'm Grier.'
The oppressive, unrelenting silence. The students, two girls and
two other boys besides the kid in the cap, didn't look happy, she
thought, staring at their plates and at their shoes, but they also
didn't respond, or offer their names. After a moment she struggled
on in an even softer voice that still seemed to ricochet around
the ever-widening circle of quiet she was the center of; 'I'm new
here, you know. Today's my first day. I guess I'm still learning
the ropes around this place..'
A snort of open and derisive laughter. Not from the table Grier
was at, which might as well have been the cacoon of silence, but
from the next one. Grier's head snapped up and she glared at the
same girl who had been watching her tiny melodrama unfold before,
and taking so much obvious pleasure in it. She held Grier's eye
again for a moment, and then turned to the person next to her and
said distinctly and in a tone of lazy hypothetical-inquiry 'What
do you reckon, do you think anyone here can be bothered to show
her what to do with her rope? Surely once she gathers enough of
it,she'll know neatly how to hang herself, and none of us need
trouble about it..'
The widening pit of fear and faint-nausea inside Grier turned
suddenly to ice. She sat immobolised with anger for a second,
while she faintly noticed that the person the girl was addressing
was the spunky Japanese boy from that morning, Naiad. Naiad at
that moment, in fact, was staring unenthralled-ly out of one of
the windows, and just then he stood up and dropped a paper napkin
on his plate, through long and beautiful fingers. 'Sometimes I
don't know what I find more attractive about you, Jewel, your
steadfast trivialness or your irrepressable pettyness. I'm off to
find Alex anyway, we're ditching the rest of the day to drive into
the city and get some stuff. Catch you late tonight, maybe.'
Grier was standing up, the ice in her tummy turning to something
like resolve, as she heard the girl called Jewel murmur 'Bye then'
throatily and unoffendedly, like animosity was the usual-tone of
her conversations with Naiad. Grier didn't care about that now
though. Leaving her lunch untouched on the tabletop, she stepped
out of the bench and stalked around the two tables, not stopping
until she was right next to Jewel and the empty space Naiad had
vacated.
From a distance, Jewel had looked beautiful in a long-legged,
blonde-haired, exquisitely dressed and accessorised barbie-doll
kind of way, right down to the gleaming white teeth behind the
mocking smile. Up close she was mesmerising. Grier couldn't help
noticing her skin had that same waxy-perfection she'd been unnerved
by..somewhere else that day, and her eyes were smokey blue, with a
wicked tilt. Grier felt almost dizzy looking into them, like some
door to a vortex had been opened, and she rocked slightly on her
feet.
Then the girl smiled again, that idle, amused, cruel smile, and
Grier recollected what she was doing there. She stood up
straighter and said quietly, politely, in a voice that barely
shook at all 'Can I sit here?'
'No you can't.' In the same patient tone as one would use to say
to a very small child who might choke on it, 'No you can't have a
stick of gum.'
Grier looked away for a second to hide the fact that she felt stung. Against the far wall she noticed a boy, sitting alone and quietly eating his lunch. He was different from everyone else in the room because he wasn't looking at her.
Grier squared up to face her straight on. 'Why not? Did it stop
being a free country?'
The girl tilted her head back and tittered with angelical
laughter at this, joined swiftly by a hefty-looking guy on her
other side, and then by the rest of the table. Grier folded her
arms and said nothing, waiting. 'Oh she's just like a six-week-old
kitten isn't she? It's adorable, honestly, honey I could eat you
right up.'
'Oh me too', overly-muscular-boy-on-the-right said.
'See. Russ too.' The girl's laughter finally subsided, and she
glanced down to the roll she was lazily buttering. 'In answer to
your question though, you just might have missed some road signage
on your way out here. Maybe you clicked your heels at the wrong
time. Your in Tribune, Kansas now, Dorothy, and we're a very old
town you know. Kind of out of the way of the hustlin', bustlin'
norm. This place has deep roots, and deeper traditions. It's not
exactly what you would call a free-country no.'
Grier attempted to hide her sheer amazement at this crazy speech
by deadpanning 'You have traditions about who sits at the table?'
Jewel looked up and smiled then in a way that made Grier feel
queasy 'Indeed we do. They hark back to fine old-time laws of
segregation.We're not uncouth enough to put up signs, but if we
did they'd read..' she paused graciously and looked at the bulky-
boy known as Russ.
'No mongrels, half-breeds, or clueless, burdensome fricken
newbies allowed.' Russ said. He looked like he relished it.
3.
By the end of the day Grier was exhausted from maintaining a facade of calm detachment, when outside she had to face an endless parade of kids who would barely make eye contact with her, and inside her head was a mess. There had been one boy who *had* seemed to very deliberately catch her eye as she was leaving the cafeteria after her confrontation with Jewel at lunch, but she hadn't seen him since and now thought maybe she'd imagined it. She considered skipping her last class and walking home, but rejected the idea almost immediately as too easy. Anyway, last period was art. Maybe something could be salvaged from this horrible day.
A quick scan of the almost-full classroom from the doorway at least reassured her that Jewel wasn't in this class, or any of her friends. She hadn't shared a class with any of them all day, so her luck was holding. It was a nice looking artroom, with long wooden desks in the front, easles and student works covering the big area at the back, and large windows along the side looking out on the front lawn. She slid into the back row, where there was still a few seats empty, and took out a pad and pen.
A compact woman with short curly hair and a pretty face walked in a few minutes later and introduced herself as Ms. Croft. 'Welcome again to advanced art. I hope you all had a nice break, and you're back rearing to go. I thought today we might just get straight into it. Next week we'll start on the Impressionists, but for today I want you to go back there and make me something. A momento of your summer break, if you like. Any format will do but I want it more or less complete by the end of the period. Go to it.'
With a snapping of books and a screeching of chairs the class got up and headed towards the back of the room. Grier followed along, a real buzz of quiet excitement stirring in her stomache for the first time that day. (Well. Excitement of the good, non-scary kind). Grier had always been excellent at art, in fact she could say with no false modesty that she'd always been the best out of any group she'd been in. Her artistic abilities were one thing she could count on to be recognized, even if nothing else she did at this school seemed to measure up.
She took a cursory glance at the stuff already displayed on a shelf along the back wall, paintings and sketches and sculptures in varying stages of completion. They all looked pretty standard until one shoved in a corner caught her eye. It was a grey stone sculpture, long and thin, in the shape of a loping horse. It was utterly strange, almost menacingly alien (no horse could be shaped like that or stretched out in that way), and it was breath-takingly beautiful.
'Wonderful, isn't it?' a quiet voice said from behind her.
Grier turned to see a tall girl with a serious face fixing cool green eyes on the horse sculpture. 'It is.' she replied carefully. This was the first time all day anyone had initiated a conversation with her.'Is it yours?'
'Oh I wish.' The girl laughed, a slightly bitter sound. 'No, that's Naiad. A boy who only turns up every third lesson or so to unleash his ridiculously effortless talent on the rest of us and to make us feel like hacks before cutting again again.' The girl turned to face her, then very deliberately looked her up and down. 'You're Grier. The new kid.'
'Yeah' Grier responded flatly. Then she added, suddenly irritated 'I feel like my reputation precedes me whereever I go at this school. I didn't think I'd been here long enough to have a reputation.'
The girl laughed shortly, a brittle sound. Grier blinked. The girl said, with a slightly malicious glint in her large green eyes, "It's not the length of time you've been here. It's the impression you've made."
Grier stared at the auburn haired girl with the big green eyes for a moment more than turned away, with a silent shake of the head. She had no patience left today for a taunting conversation like this one.
At the back of the room were giant sheets of paper and a variety of art materials. Grier went straight for the charcoal pieces. With charcoal, drawing felt raw, unconstricted, honest. It created a black and white outlet for internal bewildering prisms of colour. Grier worked for 15 minutes almost without thinking, applying huge messy strokes and tiny deft ones, sometimes deliberately blotting the charcoal with the palm of her hand. She finally stepped back to take and breath, and looked at it. And felt a ripple of unease go the length of her spine.
'Well well'. Grier spun around, already agitated, and there was the green eye'd girl standing behind her again. 'The new kid has talent. That's striking. Is it a real place?'
Grier nodded. 'My street back home in New Town.'
'I'm glad I don't have to go there.' The girl turned around to face Grier. 'I'm Amy. Are you doing anything after school?'
'Um. No.'
'Good. Let's go into town together. I'll show you around.'
'Why would you want to do that?' Grier asked bluntly.
'Because you've made an excellent second impression, kid. I wanna know more.'
'You know you and I are about the same age. So if you cut out all this patronising 'kid' business, I'll come along.'
Amy laughed softly. "Fine. Why don't we go now, tiger?'
'Because there's still 20 minutes left of class?'
'So?'
'I'm not ditching on my first day.' Grier said flatly. The tingling sensation had made its way to her stomach. She wasn't sure if the sick feeling was fear or excitement or both.
Amy exagerratedly rolled her eyes. 'Well ok. If you want to be like that about it. Mz Croft?'
'Yes Amy?'
'I'm feeling a bit sick. I have a cold or something coming on I guess. So Grier is going to take me home.'
To Grier's utter amazement the teacher didn't even blink. She just walked over to her desk, got out a book of hallway pass notes, and scribbled on it. Then she ripped it out and handed it over. 'I hope you feel better Amy.' Ms Croft said. There was something odd about the tone of her voice. It was just... flat. Her eyes flickered over Grier for only the briefest moment before she turned and walked back over to a cluster of students who were working together on some kind of summer collage.
Amy held up the hall-pass in front of Grier's nose like it was fresh $100 bill hovering over a line of cocaine. 'Are we good to go?'
'Apparently' came Grier's low reply. She was looking at her picture again. It was her old street alright, but not the way she remembered it. The street the picture showed should have had the ambiance of a lively, comfortable lower-class- neighbourhood, lined with townhouses and big maple trees and the day care centre directly across from where she lived, and next to it a tiny park with a set of rusty swings and a badly- constructed slippery dip that kids got stuck on half way down. In her picture, a night time scene, the childcare centre and the park were gone, empty spaces; the small houses were black crouching shapes devoid of differentiation. A solitary light, signified by a gap in the swirling mass of dark smudgey charcoal that otherwise consumed the white paper, was there in the form of a streetlamp. The lamp lit up the first few metres of the street, which were nearest to the viewer's perspective, but the rest of it was dark, menacing. A wintry maple was the only other prominent feature of the picture, jutting black leafless fingers across the lighted space, looking like a dead and exposed transformer. The frisson she felt now was certainly fear. Why on earth had she drawn her street like *that*?
'It's the medium you know, charcoal. It distorts things, makes them seem other than they are.'
'What? How?' Grier snapped, really unsettled now.
'How? How nothing. I noticed how you were looking at the picture that's all.' Amy said. There was a note of concilliation in her voice.
'Oh' Grier said, feeling a bit silly. Of course. Amy was right too, it was hard to do anything else with charcoal than create black blobs. 'Ok. Well. Let's go.'
(the inevitable second, apologetic) A/N: these chapters are slow laying-the- ground work type ones. In the next few chapters Grier and Alex will find out they are enemies (and more interestingly from my angsty, soppy perspective, soulmates, natch!), and another big bad type enemy no-one could like is going to appear.