One Of The Boys

Gals

Lucy had spent the past week rather lonely.

Natsu was a disappearing act. He was at school, for the most part, but spent every spare second he had sleeping. If there was so much as a lull in class, his head would droop and he'd be out. The entire lunch break, while Lucy and the rest of the boys chatted, he would put his head down, pink hair squashed onto the table, and begin to snore. He looked awful—bags under his eyes, skin pale and gray, hair a mess—and clearly, due to the amount he was sleeping, he wasn't feeling so great either.

After school, he'd leave. He didn't accompany Lucy on her walk home anymore. He'd wave at her in the halls as he jogged out of the school, dashing down the street in the opposite direction of his house, running out of sight. It seemed like he had somewhere important to go, somewhere he desperately needed to be.

And it didn't include Lucy. She tried not to look upset.

Lucy waited up for him one night, waited for him to come home so she could at least speak to him because yeah, okay, maybe she was starting to miss him a little bit. He'd come home fairly late, around midnight, and immediately flopped onto his bed. Lucy had grabbed her can, about to whisper over to him, but he'd already been snoring. She let him sleep, wondering what was making him stay out so late.

Gray picked up on Natsu's absence; he asked to walk Lucy home a couple times. Lucy always said no—politely, of course—coming up with some excuse about making her dad dinner or having a skype date with her girlfriends from the prep school.

She was sort of perplexed by her own behaviour—wasn't she supposed to go with Gray, go on dates with him and let him walk her home? Isn't that what she'd decided on? Wasn't she supposed to follow Levy's advice?

Lucy already knew the answer. Gray just wasn't right, he wasn't what her heart yearned for. And what did her heart yearn for?

The boy she'd been in love with since she was five years old. The boy that grinned at her from his bedroom window. The boy that brought her chocolate when she was on her period and the boy that hugged her tight when she cried and the boy that had absolutely, completely, irreversibly torn her heart into shreds.

But she certainly wasn't going to admit that, not to herself, not yet. She didn't want to. Because the second that she acknowledged her feelings, the moment she realized that those feelings were real and there and existing...he'd break her heart again.

She was just the girl next door, nothing more. She was his little brother. She refused to let herself be torn up anymore than she already had.

So, she tried to forget. Of course, being home alone every day, not having him there to make things fun...well, that just made her yearn for his presence more. Which made her think about him a lot. Which made it really hard to stop thinking about how cute he was, or how adorable his nose was.

Lucy flopped down on her bed, forcing her mind to focus on a different topic that was irking her: the auction.

She'd tried to get out of it. She'd marched herself down to the principals' office, about to head into a big spiel about how this entire charity thing was sort of humiliating and a real downer on human rights, considering this was the 21st century and people shouldn't be sold. She was going to hammer into him, telling him that selling women exclusively was also terrible, that it was a horrible thing for a school to condone. She was going to tell him that selling women to men for a date was perpetuating rape culture, that it was forcing girls to go on a date with whomever purchased them, without consent.

She'd figured it was harsh, but it was enough reason to lead into her excusing herself from the charity auction because she didn't agree with it.

But the second she'd walked in, the principal had lit up, a big grin on his face. He said he'd been wanting to see her so he could thank her for taking part in the charity auction. He said he'd heard the latest rumblings in the school grapevine (ugh, old people slang) and heard that the boys were pretty excited she was going to be participating. The principal continued, saying she was rumored to be the most expensive date, that she'd bring in the biggest amount of cash for the school. And then, he went on to say that the money was going to help the art curriculum, the band class, the basketball team.