skinny || h.s. au [Rewrite Now Up!]

three

"Marley? Is that you?"

"Yeah, It's me." She calls back as she closes the front door. "Why didn't you straighten the living room? I left you a note that you needed to do that today."

Marley's brother scoffs as he walks out of the room just off of the small main living area. "I'm not your personal maid."

He looks like deception and smells like addiction,  but Marley is used to that so she says nothing.

"No, but I just cleaned this last night." She says as she sets her bag on the beat up armchair. "So it's your turn."

"Well, I have a lot of stuff to do."

"And I have homework." Marley says because nothing her brother does is ever productive. Because he looks like deception and smells like addiction but Marley is used to that so she says nothing.

"On your first day?" He questions.

"Yep." She throws herself onto the couch. A small cloud of dust flies up in the room, dancing in the light of the windows before drifting to the shabby area rug on the floor.

He simply rolls his eyes before walking back into his bedroom. Where he spends most of his day getting high, getting off or trying to be a writer.

"Jax, when I graduate you won't have me here to clean up after you." Marley calls after him. Gets up from the couch. And knows he won't be of much help for the rest of the evening as she steps into his room to see him shooting up again. "Seriously? This is why we're fucking broke."

But Jax is too far gone and too high to hear or care about Marley's words. And he looks like deception and smells like addiction,  but Marley is used to that so she says nothing. To anyone. Ever.

After all, he's always too high to care if she eats dinner or not. And she's okay with that because Marley is all cold fingers and half-crazed minds.

She sighs and grabs her bag from the living room before climbing the stairs to the only tidy, dust free room in the entire house.

With a simple box-spring and matress on the floor in the corner, a desk and an old, beaten bookcase, Marley's room is anything but glamorous.

Dull grey-blue sheets--that were possibly, probably, maybe, white at some point--cover her matress. A quilt which is nearly as old as Marley, lays with them.

She walks inside and closes the door. It sqeaks loudly. But not as loud as the silence, so Marley says nothing.

The desk is possibly even older than her quilt. With chipping white and pink paint that now is only a ghost of her childhood bedroom. And then the old, beaten bookcase is stained a medium brown. Or possibly closer to orange. But it holds tales and trials that used to captivate Marley before Maria.

And now there's no room in her head for such nonsense.

Back then seemed like a simpler time to Marley but that was before she could truly see and understand her body and the world around her. Back then she was blind. And now Maria helps her see.

Because Marley is all cold fingers and half-crazed minds.

____________________

Harry steps through the front door of his new home just a mile down the road from his new high school.

He kicks off his boots. Sets them by the door. And as his sock-clad footsteps make the plastic covering the fresh carpet crinkle, he thinks about Marley.

Because she's the girl with the crystal blue eyes that remind him of icicles and frost-bitten noses.

Harry doesn't call out to his family, but rather assends the staircase to disappear in the room he is supposed to consider his--but doesn't.

This is not his home. Harry's home is back in New York where the lights shine brighter than a billion stars. Even from Harry's old bedroom window, five miles outside of the city.

The door clicks and swings soundlessly open as he steps into the room to find his mother already unpacking his boxes for him.

"You don't have to do that, mum."

"Oh, hi honey. How was school?" She purposely ignores her son's protest.

"It was okay." Harry shrugs.

"Did you make any friends?" She continues as she starts unpacking his underwear into his drawers.

"Mum."

"Okay, okay. I'll let you unpack, then." She smiles before kissing his cheek and leaving the room.

Harry rolls his eyes but can't help the smile that spreads across his face. Even though she dragged him and his sister out here so she could be with her new, rich husband, Harry loves his mother. With her quirks all the same.

He notices that she had made his bed up with crisp white sheets and a navy comforter with more decorative pillows than any teenage boy would ever need.

Harry finishes unpacking the few things his mother had set on his bed before tossing the unnecessary pillows on the floor and flopping onto the matress.

He stares at nothing in particular on the ceiling. Gazing upward as if the answers to all his questions were scrawled there. And he merely has to look hard enough to find them.

Harry didn't understand girls very easily, and Marley was no exception.

He considered himself crazy to be thinking about a girl this much after knowing her for only a few hours. But Harry knew there was something special about Marley. He just wasn't sure what that was. Yet.

But he would find out, he has to.

Because she's the girl with the crystal blue eyes that remind him of icicles and frost-bitten noses.

And if her eyes are that beautiful, he thought, maybe her soul could be too.

But he didn't see the disaster between the shades of blue.

No one ever does.

__________________________

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-Lena xx