Eden and Bea (LGBT+)

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As a gentle breeze drifted in through the window of my English literature class, my eyes looked towards the clock to see exactly how many seconds left, of my teacher's Macbeth lecture, I had to endure. 

"Now, can anyone remind me if I set homework for you yesterday?" he asked the room. 

If anyone dared to move a muscle, or utter a single syllable, I was going to create a makeshift bow and arrow out of an elastic band and a pencil and fire it at them. I was ready. 

I glanced at the pencil and elastic band on my desk and waited, holding my breath. 

Fortunately, nobody said anything, not even the 'most perfect' girl in the class- Eden Thorne. 

"It would appear that I did not," he said. 

He probably had, but I was as forgetful as he seemed to be, as far as homework was concerned. 

Well, there was that and the fact that I simply didn't want to do it, but I wasn't about to get into all of that. 

Could time slow down anymore? If Mr. King didn't tell us what he needed to soon, I swore that I was about to lose my mind. 

I watched as the wind blew a scurry of green leaves past the window and then looked up again when he said my name. 

"I hope that you are paying attention, Miss Hazel," he said. 

I met his gaze with eyes I assumed shone with surprise, but I quickly tried to force my face to display an interested expression. 

"Yes, Mr. King?" I replied casually, as though I had been hanging on to every word that he had spoken during the seminar. 

I had not. 

"There will be a school trip taking place next week. Now, I know it is short notice but I apparently forgot to say anything about it until today. Anyway, that's besides the point. We're going camping! I think there's no better way to learn more about how to write about nature than actively exploring nature for ourselves. Hence, I have come up with this fantastic plan," he said. 

God, I was going to die. 

I really hoped that I would be paired with my best friend, Axel West. I needed that to happen. 

"So, I'll go down the class list and say who everyone is going to be paired with," he said. 

If I got a bad partner, maybe it wouldn't be the end of the world. Perhaps he would simply fail to remember anything about the pairing. 

After he had gone through surnames A-G, he got to my name. I was the only 'H' surname in the class and I loved that for me. 

"Hazel- Bea Hazel?" he called out to the class, as though he had forgotten where I sat in the past fifteen minutes that he had been speaking for. 

"Here, sir," I said clearly and he quickly caught my gaze. 

He smiled at me. 

"Ah, there you are! Right, time to pair you up," he said. 

Please not Eden. Please not Eden. I thought over and over inside my head, as though it was a spell. 

"Eden Thorne! Bea Hazel and Eden Thorne," he stated it casually, as if he hadn't just said the worst thing in the world. 

It could have been worse, I supposed. 

Eden may have not been the best choice of partner, but there were worse people, like Ren Grey. 

I felt bad for Ren because she might not have been that bad a kid, but she was weird. 

She barely talked to anyone and she often ate lunch by herself and her pet hamster, Otis. Not that there was anything bad about that. You know, I suppose that everyone had to have a hobby. I wasn't sure how she had snuck her pet into the school, mind you, but she had accomplished things others could only dream of. 

Nevertheless, I shall return to my main point: in all the time that Eden and I had attended the academy for, we had barely spoken to each other, and that was with good reason. 

When we were eventually dismissed from class, I looked around the hall to see if I could find my best friend in amongst everyone else who darted to the cafeteria at this hour. 

"Hey, buddy," he said, nudging me gently from the side with his elbow. 

I turned to him and sighed. 

"This is awful. Who did you get paired with?" I asked him. 

He gave me a weird look. 

"I sort of lost track of the name list, when the doom of being partnered with Eden sank in. So, who'd you get?" I asked. 

"Me!" a similar-sounding voice spoke and I turned to find that Owen, his twin brother, had come to stand beside him. 

"Now, that's just so unfair. Who'd Ren get paired with?" I asked, as we started to walk down the hall. I grabbed some sugar-free gum out of my bag, unwrapped it, and popped it into my mouth. "I'm just curious." 

"I don't know...guess we'll have to wait and see," Axel said thoughtfully. "Anyway, look on the bright side, Bea," he told me. 

There was a bright side? 

"This is an awesome chance for us to be able to make new friends! You know, hang out with people we don't usually get the chance to talk to- take care of the local wildlife," he said. 

I frowned at him, unconvinced. 

"You could do with thinking a little more positively, here, my friend," he said. 

That was just the thing, though, Axel had always been the optimistic one. Not me. 

"Put on a brave face," he said. 

"He's right," Owen chimed in, then, "You really do need to simply relax. That's the whole point of camping, is it not?" he reminded me. 

Axel continued to stroll down the hall with the perfect expression of confidence on his face. 

God. 

"What if she makes fun of me again?" I blurted. 

Axel looked tempted to laugh.