Chapter One
"Don't you think that, maybe, if you were a little nicer to him things would go easier?" Nixa asked, starting to walk down the hall.
"He was jerk first. And, by the way, thanks for being on our side," Chris said, pushing forward from the locker and starting down the hall towards Nixa's retreating back.
"We tried that once, remember?" Nixa reminded him, as he fell into step next to her.
"Yeah. Apparently it made you look "unmanly," Bridget chimed in with, making the quote marks in the air and, as Ben came up beside her, pausing before going on, "well, even more than usual. What does that even mean, anyway?"
"You wouldn't get it," Chris told them, shoving the door to the quad open.
"Nah," Ben said, following them outside. "It just isn't a girl thing. Speaking of girl things, shouldn't you both be running off to the mall sometime soon to buy new bikinis?"
Bridget scoffed and wrinkled her nose. "Bikinis? Pfft."
"Josh only invited you because you'd look half good in a bikini," Ben explained, as if he were talking to a small child. "Because, hell, it sure wasn't your charm that got you those two pieces of paper clutched in your clammy palm."
"Really?"
"Really."
"I don't own a bikini," Bridget said, disheartened. "Why would I want one?"
"He probably has it somewhere in a dress code," Chris said. "Which, by the way, doesn't exist if you come to the Manor."
"No dress code for the Manor?" Nixa scoffed disbelievingly. "The dress code for the Halliwell house is full combat gear and as many weapons as you can carry."
Chris blinked and looked a little sad. Is that what his friends felt like when they came over? That they were in constant danger of being attacked? That they didn't feel safe unless they had more weapons than a small country strapped to them? "Really?"
"No, Chris. Not really. We always go out dressed to kill," Nixa said, missing the expression as she scouted for a table.
"Whatever Bridget's wearing makes her dressed to kill," Ben mumbled, managing to dodge nimbly out of the way of Bridget's unsuspected blow but diffuse the situation. "Compliment!" he yelled indignantly, holding his hands up in surrender and laughing. "It was a compliment!"
"What happened to you rising above hitting him?" Chris asked slyly.
"I got so scared of the height I fell off," Bridget informed them, tossing her bag through the air onto the bench of a vacant table to snag it before anyone else got any ideas. She reached the table first and kicked her bag onto the floor, sitting down and lying across the tabletop on her arms with her eyes closed, sighing lightly as the sun shone across her features.
"Ouch," Ben said. "Did you bounce?"
"Somebody hit him," Bridget mumbled sleepily. "It's hot and I'm tired."
"Well, you'd better grab some caffeine," Nixa said, prodding her awake. "Because we need to get you a bikini after school." The blonde narrowed her eyes a little in thought. "I think I can see you in something pink, with a buckle. Halter neck. Hee. Shopping rush."
Bridget looked up. "Huh. Then you need to get some glasses. We'll stop off at the eye doctor as well. I see something… round with wire frames. We could get a chain for you to hang them on! Whoa… you're right. Shopping rush."
"You're getting a bikini," Nixa said in a final tone, the one that her mother usually told her that she was not allowed a tattoo in, and ignoring Bridget's crack about her getting glasses that the school's seventy-something librarian wore.
"Where am I going to keep an athame in a bikini?" Bridget whined, recognising Nixa's tone but frowning anyway. "I don't want a bikini. I've gone all these years without one."
"You're not taking an athame anywhere near Josh's party," Nixa told her severely. "Seriously." The blonde, worried that she was overdoing this mothering thing, straightened out her forehead, not particularly wanting Botox before she was thirty because needles plus poison just equalled ow.
Bridget huffed but then nodded after catching Nixa's look. "Okay, okay! No athames at Josh's party. "Girl Scout's honour."
"'Girl Scout'?" Ben asked, snorting disbelievingly. "Where did you put your cookies?"
"I know where I'm going to put them," Bridget shot back pointedly, only eliciting harder laughter from Ben.
"Are you guys mad that we got invited?" Nixa asked, mainly to break off Bridget and Ben's verbal battle because, without her intervention, it would have gone on all lunch. She wound a loose threat from her bag around her fingers and snapped it off before it could unravel anymore and fixed the witches with a concerned, blue-eyed stare.
"Uh, lemme think… No?" Ben said. "Really. On a scale of one to ten of how bothered I am? I'd say about minus four thousand. It's not a big deal."
"Apparently he just doesn't think we can pull off bikinis," Chris said with a smile and a shrug.
"Hey, speak for yourself," Ben said, diving into his bag to see if he'd remembered to bring something to eat. "I've got a great beach body."
"Oh, good grief," Nixa grumbled, scooting further away from Ben. "Bridget, we need to get ourselves some less geeky friends. Now."
"Would a less geeky friend be, oh, I don't know Josh?" Ben asked innocently, finding an apple that had seen better days and wrinkling his nose, tossing it at the trash can. It hit the rim and shattered, spraying rotten fruit everywhere. Ben didn't notice.
"Yes," Bridget said immediately. "Yes, he would definitely count as a less geeky friend."
"Anyway, I thought we were freaks and not geeks," Chris mused. "Or has our status changed?"
"Splitting hairs," Bridget said shortly, finally letting go of the invitations and laying them out on the table. She tried to smooth them flat but the thin cardboard was rumpled and creased from where she had held them in her fist.
"It looks like we were desperate enough to fish them out of a trash can," Nixa fretted, scowling at them as if it would make them flatten out.
"You were desperate enough to fish them out of a trash can," Chris reminded her, opening his own bag. He'd wrapped pizza from the fridge in Clingfilm this morning to eat for lunch. Any junk food in the house was worth savouring and he had made sure his first morning task had been to snag the last slice.
"That's not the point," Nixa told him, her eyes narrowing as she slid a Tupperware container filled with salad from her bag. There was a fork concealed behind a clear sliding plastic piece in the lid. "Are you actually going to eat that, Chris?"
Chris looked down at his pizza. The topping was a little smeared across the clear plastic, but otherwise it was fine. He looked back up at her, confused. "Yeah… Why?"
"It looks like a truck ran over it."
The witch-whitelighter rolled his eyes. "It's been in my bag." He stopped and thought. "Which is the equivalent of being run over by a truck, I guess."
"It's still not good for you."
"No! Stop with the healthy eating lectures! You sound like my mother. Look, it has vegetables on it, okay?"
"Where?"
"Tomato paste is a vegetable," Ben said, touching on something wrapped in tinfoil.
"It's a fruit," Bridget corrected him.
Ben pulled a face. "Whatever."
"It's barely a fruit," Nixa said, spearing a square of chicken and then some lettuce with her fork.
"I don't care. This is the backup to Aunt Paige's cooking. And it's good. So nyah." He poked his tongue out at her and unwrapped the pizza, biting into it.
"What did she try to make this time?" Ben asked, finding some sandwiches hidden under the foil. He prodded them and the bread was still soft so he peeled off the top slice and looked at it. Peanut butter. It would do.
"I don't know. But it was blue."
"Ooh. Yum," Ben said sarcastically, biting into his sandwich. It tasted okay. Maybe he'd packed it that morning and forgotten?
"And you," Nixa said, pointing at the sandwich with her fork. "What is that?"
"It's a peanut butter sandwich," Ben said, holding it out and looking at it from different angles. "At least, last time I checked. Why?"
"It looks like it's about two years old," Nixa said with distaste, stabbing a tomato and some cucumber and bringing them to her mouth.
Ben didn't answer her, just took another bite, chewed, and swallowed defiantly as Nixa huffed at their lack of concern for their diet and tilted the container to drizzle dressing down one side of her salad.
"Does anyone have two bucks?" Bridget asked, looking at them hopefully.
"You still owe me eighteen dollars," Ben said, shaking his head. "Nope."
"Chris?" she asked, the wheedling in her voice emphasised by a hopeful pout.
Chris sighed and rolled his eyes. "Uh…" The witch-whitelighter delved into the pocket of his jeans and felt some loose change there. He grabbed it all and pulled it out, slamming it down on the table. He counted it quickly by shoving it about with his finger. "I have… a dollar and nineteen cents."
Nixa frowned. "Is that all? There's got to be more than that there." She looked at the large pile of coins. A couple of them had some fluff stuck to them and she pulled a face, picking it off and sprinkling it onto the ground next to the table.
"Nope," Chris told her with a shake of his head. "I may not get the grades you do but I can count."
The blonde counted it for herself, simply not believing that the sheer volume of coins on the Formica top could add up to anything less than three dollars. One nineteen. She sat back down and sniffed. "Fine." She reached into her bag and rummaged about, pulling out two one dollar bills and handing them to Bridget. "But you owe me like twenty bucks now."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Bridget said, waving a dismissive hand. "I know, I know. I'm practising for my student loan sharks." She suddenly put on a very sincere, confused and apologetic face. "What do you mean my transaction didn't go through? I transferred all the money yesterday. Oh no, I can't think of what might've happened to it."
Ben applauded and put his thumb and middle finger in his mouth and whistled loudly. Most of the population of the quad turned to look at the source of the noise.
"Why do you do this to yourself?" Bridget asked, never for a second denying that she didn't want the attention. She took the money and stood up, putting it down her top. "Geek."
"Freak," Ben reminded her with mock anger. "Can't you get anything right?"
Bridget cocked an eyebrow at him. "Benny, darling, you to-may-toe, I say ew, gross. What is with people and actually eating those things?" And with that, she walked off towards the cafeteria.
All ideas welcome.
Twisted Flame.