Hey, Sunshine // S. Clearwater

01 ; princess and sunshine

If there's one thing Billie hated, it was school.

She hated the forty-two-minute-long classes, the rickety desks that had gum caked along the underside, the enthusiastic teachers, the indifferent teachers, the old hallway lockers that she had to share with a random sophomore —(they didn't have enough in the budget to buy more. How fucking stupid.)

And most of all, she hated Seth Clearwater.

When Billie hated something, she made sure of it. She learned all she could about it just to give it the benefit of the doubt and enough chance to change her mind.

It's how she could count down to the millisecond of the school bell ringing. Her eyes followed the raindrops down the path of her windshield. A sigh poured from her lips, and she knocked her head against the headrest. She was the last person in the parking lot.

Two hundred forty-seven seconds.

That's how long she had to walk across the parking lot, go to her locker, grab her model airplane project for history class, and sit her ass in a desk.

At one hundred eighty seconds, she stepped foot inside and shook the excess water off her coat. At one hundred thirty seconds, she opened her locker. And at one hundred twenty-eight seconds, she debated tracking down her locker mate Carson and murdering him.

Her model airplane lay crushed at the bottom of the locker with his enormous backpack placed on top.

She grabbed the backpack, spun around multiple times, and launched the backpack down the hallway. It slammed against a row of lockers ten feet away, and the contents scattered in every direction.

Billie took a breath and picked up her project due next period. The wing snapped off and fell listlessly at her feet.

She had three seconds to make a decision: skip or try to ask for an extension.

At the sound of the bell, she clenched her jaw and stomped to class. Her plane cracked even more under the pressure of her strong grip.

Billie opened the door, not bothering with pleasantries. She nodded halfheartedly to the teacher, who already had her mouth open with a reprimand.

"Billie," Ms. Reed chastised but said nothing further as she busied herself with paper piles on her desk.

Billie continued walking to her desk across the room. She seriously considered backtracking out of the class when her focus narrowed on Seth's arm draped on her desk.

Clearwater, Day.

Their last names almost guaranteed they sat beside each other in every class they shared.

When she was close enough, she swipped his arm off her desk. The momentum slammed his chair forward from his tilted position.

"Hey, Princess," Seth said sweetly. He stood and straddled the chair, and his arms found their way to the edge of her desk once more.

"How many times do I have to tell you?" she said, gripping his forearms tightly. She pushed at him until his arms rested on the back of his chair. "Get the fuck off."

He lasted all of five seconds before he returned to his previous position. "Maybe I just like when you touch me."

She rolled her eyes and turned her attention away from him. Ms. Reed appeared to gather her rubrics and write the students' names on them. Every kid in the class had their projects on their desk or by their feet.

"This is really nice," Seth said. He held the plane between his pointer finger and thumb. The other wing broke off and fell to the ground.

Billie sighed deeply.