Wrong Side Of The Bed

prologue.

dedicated to northtowns

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      JANNAT RAY-WALTER had always admired her golden boy of a classmate -- Lucas Turner.

   But in third grade, the admiration turned into a full blown heart-gripping crush, when Jannat accidentally lost grip of her chocolate bar and it fell on the floor. And being the gentleman Lucas was, he became the knight in shining armour and offered his chocolate bar to the damsel in distress.

   Jannat would grow to not be very fond of that situation because she wasn't the one to usually ask or look like she needed help, but at least the wrapper had Lucas' touch. She had read that the skin cells re-generated every twenty-eight days, so she kept the wrapper as a souvenir of that incident. Her skin cells wouldn't hold the memory for more than twenty-eight days, but her mind would. She is still in the possession of the wrapper, by the way.

   Fourth grade was pretty much spent with her staring at the back of Lucas' head in environmental science. In her environment, the only environmental science that caught her attention was the homo sapien named Lucas.

   Fifth grade, unfortunately, wasn't as peaceful for Jannat. Words on the street was that Lucas had gotten his first kiss, and that too from Ava, the girl with the finest golden locks in the whole school. Her jealousy knew no bounds, and as much as she wanted to punch Ava in the face till one of her perfect teeth fell off, she held back.

   But that wasn't the only person in the school who Jannat wanted to punch badly, with every ounce of force her five feet four inch body could muster. The new boy, Christian Sinclair, who arrived in sixth grade, with his very thick British accent and icy grey eyes -- was also one of them.

   Jannat had expected a lot of things that Christian would say when he would walk up to her, noticing that she was quite popular and that she had caught Christian stealing glances at her on several occasions. She had expected things like "God, you're so stylish, let's be friends?" and phrases on the like of it. But that day never came. Neither did he invite her to his birthday party, and neither did they became friends -- instead, he became Lucas's best friend. But never had she ever thought that he would collide with each other in the hallway and that he would walk away without even much of a 'sorry', but not without sparing her a glare. Seventh grade wasn't much great either, and word on the streets was that he hated her guts.

   She wondered forever what she had done wrong, but found nothing. But Christian persisted and kept showing a rash attitude to Jannat -- much to her and her friends' wonder, and then he finally ticked her off. One such day at a cafeteria, in eighth grade, when Christian had even resorted to name-calling and had called Jannat "a wannabe diva with no brains", she had punched him in the face and broken his nose. He still has the scar on his face, a faint horizontal mark on the bridge of his nose, a crescent moon glistening amongst a bed of freckles.

   Christian resorted to only glaring towards Jannat for the rest of the eighth grade, and ninth too -- much to Jannat's amusement. He had been still healing from the blow of Jannat in the middle of the cafeteria.

   Tenth grade wasn't as fair to her, unfortunately. The school captain was elected by the student body, and Jannat had little to no trouble getting elected in the ninth grade as the head of the debating club. But in tenth grade? Christian decided that he wanted to participate in the elections too, and wanted to run for the position of the school captain. Jannat knew very well that Christian would definitely be elected, seeing as in how popular he was for being the best friend of the golden boy of the school -- and even though she knew chances of her losing the competition were rising, she wasn't the one to back down. By the end of the election season, Jannat was sporting an awful shade of electric-pink dyed hair -- a dye that wasn't going away any soon, and Christian had a broken finger. And both were declared as co-captains of the school, because the school authorities saw potential in both and their popularity amongst the masses.

   Eleventh grade was an even bigger nightmare for Jannat -- when she walked in on Lucas and Ava getting it on under the bleachers -- a place where she often used to get away to, for some peaceful time during her off-periods. And over that, somehow Christian had gotten a whiff of her crush on Lucas and would often leave notes in Jannat's locker -- saying that he wouldn't let Lucas get with her, because she was a brainless twat. Christian would get notes right back in reply, tucked in his locker -- which always told tales of how much of an asshole he was.

   But no day could come closer to being a catastrophe than the last day of school before the junior prom. A time when Lucas broke Jannat's heart for the first time, unknowingly -- a consequence, of none other than Christian's remarks -- an incident due to which Voldemort's sidekick, named not-so-gracefully by Jannat, was under the threat of not only losing his nose, but also an eye, or two.

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