A/N: Longer chapter, hooray
Threw in a couple new characters for this one since it wouldn't work as well otherwise. They won't be regulars in the plot, probably.
Special thank you to Kitkatkatester for the review of last chapter and getting this story to 40 reviews.:)
Enjoy!
"Do not do that ever again, Zoey. Never take a sick day when it's presenting time. I couldn't stand to interact with all the weirdos in this club for more than two minutes again. I'm just here to sit and look pretty sometimes, babysitting is not my job!" A blonde girl on her phone marched up to her as she headed for the art club's meeting location for the first meeting of the week.
"Sorry about that, Dakota, I should have really picked a VP by now to help with these situations. Gwen used to be so organized when she was president…but then again, you really didn't have to take charge like that if you didn't want to," Zoey replied. She had invited Dakota, someone she was kinda sort of but also not really friends with, to model for a drawing day once, and now she showed up to every meeting. She didn't participate most of the time, just sat on her phone and acted distant.
"Well who else was gonna do it? It would've made you look bad if nothing happened, and I'm all about making people look their best," Dakota insisted. "Mostly myself, but I already look flawless." She flipped her long hair up for emphasis.
"Well, thanks for holding down the fort while I was…not here." Zoey didn't want to lie. Lying would just make her feel worse.
At this point they'd reached the door to the classroom. Dakota had gone slightly ahead and opened it, catching the first glimpses of the people who had arrived early. "Great, that tall guy from my math class who always asks for clarification is here. Sometimes he slips into an accent and asks for style tips, very weird. Since when did he do art?"
Zoey stopped in her tracks.
There he was, sitting as comfortably as his long self could on one of the stools the art room was equipped with. He appeared to be doodling with discomfort in a notebook as another, younger member of the club looked on, chattering in his direction while he silently listened. His grip on the pen was stiff, most likely due to the constriction of the bandages and the pain that was no doubt still lingering on his knuckles after they had split open. He had his hair pushed more in his face to hide part of it, but his black eye-did he always have that?- looked visibly worse. She hadn't noticed before, but his blue hoodie had a plaid pattern on the sleeves, which were pushed up to his elbows for easier visibility. Why was she only seeing it now?
"Whatever, one more person to ignore…hey, earth to Zoey?" Dakota snapped her long-nailed fingers in front of Zoey's face.
Zoey looked at her quickly. "Huh?"
"You were spacing just now. You have a club to run, get in here!" Dakota replied with a roll of her eyes. "Hey our wonderful leader is back from her sickness or whatever, hooray!" she announced to the four people present. More would arrive shortly.
"Excellent," a freshman with purple hair commented. "Now I can show you my latest plan for evil…"
"Keep dreaming," Dakota said with great sarcasm as she found her spot in the corner not too far from where Mike was. Zoey watched from afar as the blond peeked over what he was drawing and hummed in surprise before saying hi to him. "Yeah, I'm here to be a reference image as it were, if you ever want to draw from life," she told him casually. There was nothing flirtatious in her voice.
"That's nice of you to offer that, but I'll pass," Mike replied politely.
"So you're doodling a-" Dakota squinted at the page.
"Uh, something I dreamed about last night. My dreams can get pretty vivid," he explained. "If I have them."
"Huh, so you do other stuff beyond being bad at math…good for you!" she said jokingly.
Mike just shrugged at that, unbothered by the veiled insult; maybe the two already had that as a sort of inside joke between them.
Why did my heart beat faster when they started talking? Zoey asked herself as she put her bag down at the front of the room, where she usually conducted club business from. She's joking with him and everything… She cleared her throat and watched as the clock hit their start time. "Okay, Tuesday, great day, really. I'm sorry I missed you all presenting last week but I hope to see some of it eventually. I apologize for being M.I.A on Friday, I was dealing with some things and couldn't be here. Won't happen again, promise!" She scanned for reactions. They were looking up at her, all familiar faces in the room but one.
Don't look at him. He said to keep distance.
"Anyways, enough about me! I've got a couple announcements before you all tune out for the afternoon…" She rattled off what she needed to say without acknowledging the elephant in the room, and almost got away with it too.
"Aren't you forgetting something, Ms. President?" the sophomore sat next to Mike raised her hand and asked. "New members always introduce themselves when it's their first time."
"Oh…right!" Zoey tried to play it off. "My bad, sorry. Looks like we have a new face in the room today!" She forced herself to look at him. He appeared more alert now that eyes were really on him. "Would you please introduce yourself to everyone?" she requested.
He didn't seem fazed by being asked to talk in front of people; he was more surprised by Zoey acknowledging his existence since she'd been ignoring him the whole week so far. He didn't stand up, just put a bandaged hand up and waved. "Uh, I'm Mike. Senior, first year at this school. Zoey invited me to check the club out, so I'm here." He put his hand down, looking straight at her. "If I'm still welcome."
"O-of course you are, anyone's welcome to join!" she said rapidly before clearing her throat again. "I hope you enjoy yourself here, Mike, we really have a lot of fun stuff we do." She looked at everyone else, picking up a small stack of papers. "I have the prompt for the next two weeks' piece ready to go, for anyone who's interested. Otherwise, I have nothing left to say." She left the stack of papers on the table. Three people took one.
She sat on one of the stools at the table and pulled her sketchbook out, turning to the last design she'd worked on. It was going to be a dress for the winter, a nice replacement for some of her old ones that didn't quite fit right anymore. She peeked up every so often to see that yep, he was still there, right across from her. He had started something on a piece of the scrap paper provided for the club's use by the art teacher, switching to colored pencils.
"What was that about?" Dakota asked as she slid onto the stool next to her. "You sounded like you wanted to run away to like, I don't know, anywhere but here." She glanced at the sketch. "Ooh, that would look great in pink!"
"No I didn't, I'm fine," Zoey retorted. "Go back to your social media scrolling, I'm trying to concentrate."
"On what exactly? You haven't put a single line down on that page in the last ten minutes," Dakota observed, noticing what was directly in the line of vision Zoey had.
Zoey looked at her with a small frown. "You know everyone can hear this conversation, right? I don't want to talk about it in front of everyone. Why do you even care?"
"You never shake the confident-art-kid shtick unless you're angry or competing. It's fascinating seeing it break," Dakota replied honestly. "No one's listening in on us, they're all in their own heads now. It always happens around this time of the club." She leaned in a bit closer. "So are you two, like, old exes or something?" she whispered curiously.
Zoey's face immediately flushed red as her hair. "No! No, we're not exes, what makes you think that?!" she denied in an aggressively anxious whisper.
"You kinda looking at him but forcing yourself not to at the same time, and there's this very visible tension between you two, plus you looked shocked earlier, even though he said you invited him," Dakota rattled off the reasons. "I don't know the guy at all but I've been with guys and they don't act like that unless there's some history."
Zoey sighed dramatically. "We were neighbors when we were five, okay? There's never been a thing- we've never been a thing. I hardly know him, anyway; I didn't think he'd really join the club when I invited him." So many details omitted, she sure sounded like a terrible person, huh?
Dakota raised an eyebrow and smirked. "I think you might like him and just don't want to admit it. Which feels right for you, you've never really been into the guys at this school from what I've seen. Can't say I blame you, most of them just want girls for their good looks." She tilted her head a bit. "Probably a lot to process, or whatever the term is."
Zoey groaned. "You don't know the half of it," she muttered.
"Ms. Authority Figure that I will never obey because evil never obeys! The new minion has fallen asleep! How disrespectful to the creative atmosphere!" the freshman from earlier announced. "We should send him straight to the incinerator that I am drawing plans for right now. Yes, perfect…" He went back to scrawling on a piece of blue paper with a white crayon.
"No one's getting incinerated, Max," Zoey sighed. "Maybe… he's just had a long day."
Mike had his head down buried under his arms. His drawing lay just in front of him, his pencil still loosely on his hand.
"Sometimes he goes out like that in math class. That's when he tends to start talking different, after he wakes up. My money's on him being from Europe," Dakota said unhelpfully. "Accent slips in and out."
"I don't think so," Zoey said carefully. She knew that wasn't the case.
"What else could it be?"
"Nothing, I don't know, let's just leave him be," Zoey decided for everyone. "Go back to your work." She peered down at her own art; Dakota was right, it still looked the same as it had when she started.
She didn't look up in time to see Mike exit the room on quick feet several minutes later, backpack in hand and leaving behind the picture he'd started work on.
She only heard Dakota's reaction. "Told you—definitely European. Them and their short naps. The premature exit's new, though. That's weird."
Zoey's first urge was to go after him and make sure he was okay, standing up when Dakota started talking, but…
Her eyes slowly targeted the art that had been left behind.
"I don't finish a lot of my drawings."
She reached across the table and picked up the paper.
Her breath caught in her throat. Her hands curled around the edges of the page.
"What could he have drawn in so little time-" Dakota wondered aloud as she looked over Zoey's shoulder.
Zoey turned and ran out of the classroom, drawing in hand.
"The authority has fled! Huzzah! Now the time for evil has arrived-"
I realized that this arc is bringing the whole story kinda full circle. If you reread chapters 1 and 2, you'll see what I'm talking about. I didn't even plan that as I wrote this chapter.
Lemme know thoughts about the chapter, how I wrote Dakota and Max(I've never written him), etc.
Laters *zooms off in a rocket car*