CLICHÉ [lrh]

Dedicated to the beautiful Anastasia, after whom the lovely girl in this story is named.

(For the record, I don't speak French and used mostly Google Translate to get these phrases. If you have corrections for me, kindly leave them in the comments so I can fix it. Thank you!)

Enjoy.

-

Luke Hemmings is something of a cliché.

He doesn't want to be a cliché. He doesn't want to be that blond haired, blue eyed guy, but unfortunately, that really wasn't his choice.

But the worst part is, even with the stuff he can control, he's starting to look a little bit cookie cutter. He's a year eleven student with decent grades, a habit for hanging around town with his friend Calum, and not enough tanktops to rotate throughout a week. He wears flip flops and sunglasses and he hates feeling like he's living out a life he's seen someone else go through. He feels like every blond haired, blue eyed protagonist that ever existed.

He hates it.

So when the opportunity comes around for him to travel to another country and research, well. He's not going to pass that up, is he?

He kisses him mum goodbye, says bye to his mates, throws everything he thinks he'll need for the next two months into a suitcase and a backpack and gets onto a plane. And when the plane's wheels leave the ground, Luke feels like he's finally getting unstuck, like he's getting peeled off his mundane boring life and actually going somewhere.

-

America, Luke decides, is hell disguised as heaven.

It's got good tasting things dripping in oil and signs that are flashing bright enough to blind a man and too many people speaking too many languages and it smells like a million different things at once and Luke just wants to breathe it all in because he's finally somewhere new.

A tourism brochure was shoved into his hand the second he walked out of the terminal and now he's standing in the pleasant warmth on the sidewalk right outside of LAX, cringing as he goes through the tourism section. He's already promised himself he's never ever going to buy anything with a palm tree on it. He doesn't want to bash on the culture, but also, he doesn't want to sink into it, either. He didn't extract himself from Australia just to get stuck in America.

Besides, he's not here to tour. He's here to research.

He finds a taxi (which are surprisingly sparse; after seeing photos of New York, he'd assumed all of America looked like that, but apparently not) and manages to navigate his way to his school. He grits his teeth when his taxi driver asks him about shrimp on the barby after detecting his accent; another cutting reminder that he's just a cliché, this time an Australian. He ignores the jibe, grabs his suitcase, and slings his backpack over his shoulder, walking out into the warm California sunshine.

The school's not exactly what he was expecting, which is a relief; he's done with his expectations being met. He almost wishes he didn't have expectations just so that he could feel satisfied for once. Because there's something disappointing about expectations being met; satisfaction comes from having expectations exceeded.

"Hey there!"

Luke jumps, startled, and promptly drops his suitcase. Great, he thinks, moaning internally. Be a klutz.

He scrambles to recover his bag and looks to the source of the greeting that caused him to lose his bearings. Standing beside him on the gravel path to the school is a small girl with long brown hair and big green eyes. She has wild streaks of color in her hair; green and blue and pink and orange. Her skinny arms are littered with tattoos, and her fingers glitter with rings.