Be My Fool
Chapter Seven
D: No, I don't own Alex.
xxxx
Laughing, Chloe and I entered the mess hall or dinner. We were the first ones in, except for the soldiers, so we got to pick first table out of the lot. We got some food, which looked slightly more edible and actually resembled what food should look like. Chloe seemed to have forgotten what had happened earlier, which I was relieved about, because my so-called "friends" would just love to tease me about this to no end. It doesn't help when you're trying to convince yourself that you don't like a certain somebody.
"So... you know when we get back?" Chloe said, shovelling a bit of rice into her mouth and not looking at me.
"Yeah, what about when we get back?" I raised an eyebrow, blowing on a forkful of spaghetti, trying to make eye contact with her.
She swallowed, looking down at her food as twiddling with her fork, "What exactly are you gunna do? Y'know... about your new boyfriend."
For once in a blue moon, Chloe was smirking. It shocked me so much that I just sat there gawping at her for a minute.
"And who exactly," I paused for a moment, my eyes narrowing and lowering my fork, "Is this new boyfriend?"
Looking up at me, she continued, "Oh, I think you and I are thinking about the same person."
Knowing exactly what she was thinking, I kicked her as hard I could. Jolting from the force of the impact, she burst out laughing and managed to knock half of her food off her plate at the same time.
Glowering at her, I moodily stabbed at my food. I didn't really think this through, considering I'm on kitchen duty later and I'll have to clean it up. Sighing loudly, I ignored the glowers of the soldiers to the best of my abilities and tried not to think about he-who-shall-not-be-named while continuing to eat my food.
Chloe wiped at her eyes, grinning and straightening up, "Oh don't be such a buzz kill, I'm on your side. You just need to accept the fact that you want to-"
"Do I want to hear the rest of that sentence, or should I block my ears?" Tulip slipped into the seat next to me, and Leah on the other side with Fae.
I hadn't noticed people coming in, but now that I had there were quite a few people around.
I glared at Chloe, "Yes, Chloe, what has your perverted mind got in store for us now?"
She rolled her eyes, grinning, "Just because you know I'm right, doesn't mean you have to glare at me. We're here to help you! You just need to accept it and then we can start. You just have to remember that we have a time scale."
"Oh are you two talking abou- OOMF." Leah glared at Fae, who had stuffed a sock into her mouth. I hoped it was clean.
Fae shot her a warning look, "You need to learn how to keep your voice down. Do you even notice how many people are listening to our conversation?" She ended up muttering under her breath and we all looked up from our table.
There were actually quite a lot of people listening in, you could tell by the silence at their tables and how some of them shuffled around to face the people on their table. Most of them were people from our school, but there were also a handful of soldiers who had nothing better to do either. If I didn't have kitchen duty, I would have just walked out to the cabin.
I rolled my eyes instead, and said, so every one of them could hear, "Well if they feel the need to listen to our lives because they haven't got one themselves, let them listen. There isn't much to say about it anyway."
There was a split second of silence before lots of other conversation started out, most likely about who we were talking about, and I returned to glaring at Chloe who had the conscious to look sheepish.
"Well, thank you for letting everybody know Chloe, my life seems to be getting better by the minute." I gave her the scariest smile I could before shovelling in another mouthful of the food.
She looked a little upset about that and Tulip glared at me, "Just because you're in a bad mood doesn't mean you get to be mean to us. She was just teasing."
I sighed, knowing she was right, and shoved my plate away before looking up at Chloe again, "I'm sorry Chloe, but I honestly just don't want to talk about it. Okay?"
She smiled at me, accepting my apology, and after a moment of silence they started up a conversation; leaving me to my thoughts that seemed to revolve around one person.
xxx
It was only until half ten did everybody clean out, and I was shaken awake roughly. I blinked rapidly, trying to focus on what was in front of me until I finally figured out it was somebody's face. I yelped, jumping back, while Eagle started roaring with laughter. I blinked wearily at him, trying to calm down my heartbeat.
Wolf appeared soon afterwards and pushed Eagle into the kitchen, through the 'S af On y' door before turning to me. Glaring, as usual, he handed me a cloth and spray and told me to get cleaning the tables. I think he took pity on me, since he didn't make me clean the floors. Maybe it was because I could barely stay on my feet, or the fact that Eagle gave me a heart attack – but either way I was grateful.
I started at the back corner and tried to think about getting it done as quickly as possible, without making any mistakes because I knew that even though he took pity on me, he wouldn't be happy if I didn't do a good job.
"No- Eagle! Don't throw that!"
Unfortunately, I don't have very fast instincts when I'm half-asleep but I still managed to duck in time for it to miss me and just hit the wall.
"Eagle! Get back here!"
I turned in time to see one of the other soldiers start chasing after Eagle around the kitchen. It was the first time I noticed somebody else, laughing, in the corner of the kitchen. I couldn't help but stare at Cub laughing, it lit up his entire face and erased his normal dark demeanour. It really wasn't until he looked over at me that I noticed that I'd just been standing there and staring at him. Blushing to the root, I spun away as quickly as I could and went back to cleaning the tables.
He was so not helping me get over my small... minescule, itsy-bitsy crush on him.
Especially when I could feel his eyes on the back of my head until I practically ran out of the door.
xxx
I slept like a rock when I got back, which I was sort of glad for because it meant that I didn't get a chance to dream. However the draw-back was that Eagle got to wake me up again, which is not a very pleasant experience since I screamed again, which then woke everybody else up. He was still laughing when he got outside.
I jumped down the ladder and quickly used the bathroom before anyone else got out of bed, and even though I only took a minute they were still all yelling at me to get out. And while I finished pulling on my clothes, Eagle decided to pop around the corner of the door again to remind us that we had training today. Since Leah was getting changed, she screamed and grabbed the nearest towel to hide herself and Tulip decided to fling a clock at him. Fortunately it missed, but he seemed to find it quite amusing since he laughed as if there was no tomorrow.
It didn't take long to get us out the door, but we still had to jog down to the mess hall to make it on time. People seemed to visibly relax when they saw us, and we thought we were all on time until Bison had to ruin it by pointing out that Gracie wasn't here yet.
She turned up a moment later and Oryx barked at her, "Where've you been Armstrong? You're late!"
"Oh, am I?" She looked blankly at him, "Sorry, sir." Unfortunately, sir didn't seem to think she was sorry enough and demanded we meet them where we would start, so while they took the shortcut we had to run through the woods to try and not be late.
"Ugh, I swear to god if they make us work as hard as we did yesterday I won't think twice about shoving them all off a cliff," Leah grumbled, visibly more distressed than she normally is.
Tulip smiled sympathetically at her as we started jogging, "Is it that time of the month?"
Leah grumbled what we took as a 'Maybe' and she even cracked half a smile when we all laughed at her reaction.
"Guys, we really need to hurry up, I don't like being near the back," Chloe shot looks around us, noticing that we were, indeed, near the back of the pack with the rest of the sluggish pack. The leaders were already out of sight so we decided to speed up to catch up to the middle group.
Fae was happily bouncing around, which I couldn't fathom why until Chloe told me that she'd snuck a mars bar into her jacket pocket. I was fearful for when the mars bar would stop working though, 'cause I knew that she was just going to drop like a sack of potatoes.
Fortunately, it didn't take that much longer to get there – but we were still out of breath, and sweat must have been dripping down my face because I kept having to wipe it away. My fitness had dropped dramatically since my dad died, since I wasn't pushed anymore to do daily exercise. If I hadn't stopped exercising, I probably would have been at the front of the pack and barely worn out.
Shaking the thoughts out of my head, I focused on the buildings in front of us. There were eight 'tents', make-shift buildings that were easy to put up but very useful, that had signs at the door to each one. There was French and Spanish, Italian and German, hand-to-hand combat, martial arts, shooting range, fitness training, medical training, and the last tent had no sign on it.
We were soon split up from our normal unit's (one of them claiming that the soldiers got too bored of having the same whiney kids, which lots of the soldiers sniggered at) into groups where we had one person from each unit in it.
I was glad to see some familiar faces in my group, including Farah, Ava and Nate; and we were directed over to the fitness training tent and told to partner up.
It didn't take me long to figure out that my friends had deliberately left me to be paired up with Nate, but I didn't mind – he was good company.
He grinned at me as we lined up, "Hello again."
"Hey, have a good night's sleep?" Hitting myself with a tree in my head, I sighed inwardly – why did I have to be so socially retarded? Honestly, you see other girls and they're fine with guys. See, look, there's Ava chatting with Anthony and she's perfect! She doesn't say anything that would make him think she's mentally retarded or a reject, but what do I do? I go right ahead an-
"Not really, I had to end up shoving the pillow over my head because everybody in my dorm snores," he rolled his eyes slightly, "What about you? I heard that you had kitchen duty. Did they try skinning you alive?"
I'm not mentally retarded! I'm actually making co- okay, focus Jenny, you don't want to get distracted!
I laughed slightly, "No, they just tried to cut my head off by flinging frying pans at me." It's true and funny! Hey, look at me, talking to somebody asides my friends!
He nodded, smirking, "Yeah, I heard from Leah that Eagle tried to decapitate you. I-"
"Ahem." Oopsie, Wolf didn't look quite pleased, "If you would be so kind to stop flirting, I would like to get started."
"Sorry sir," Nate nodded at him and then winked at me when Wolf started talking again.
I grinned sheepishly at him before looking back to the ground, fully knowing whose glare was digging into my skull at that moment. And I don't know why, but I felt so guilty it was almost as if I had cheated on Cub – even though we haven't even made pleasant conversation before and were most certainly not in a relationship. Well...
Shaking the stupid thoughts away, again, I tried to concentrate on what Wolf was saying.
xxx
Hey, I know it's been a while since I've updated and whatnot but it's took me a few hours to get this done. I know, it doesn't look like a few hours work, but I have re-written it all =) I prefer this version to be honest, and I hope you do too!
LoveYou
InsignificantBlimp
**[[15th March 2012]]**