Everyone thinks they know the whole story even when they had no part in it.
This year, Lillian Rose is driven to prove her ex boyfriend's hands aren't wrapped around her throat anymore. She's digging up parts of herself she's long forgotten about...
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Estelle Montero has a knack for many things, but Calculus is not one of them. I watch her sketch out a wolf on the back of her notebook in blue ink as Mrs. Lancaster teaches the next lesson. Her frazzled expression gives way to the Starbucks coffee hiding in the ceramic bottle next to her.
Matte-black tables set up the entire room. Ironically, but not that surprising, the four others sitting at my table are the people I hang out with every day: my brother, Axel, my best friend, Estelle- more known as Stella, and her twin, Damian, Axel's best friend.
Our "twin table" is positioned in the back of the room by the window side. They're open, and the second floor breeze hits my back. Axel stands up across from me and pauses. I raise my eyes to him when he lets out a disturbing sneeze into his arm, coughing up an apology while moving to get a tissue. I suppress a laugh and Damian chortles. "Why did you stand up?" The teacher shakes her head from the front and announces the homework questions.
Mrs. Lancaster, bless her soul, is thirty years my senior and teaches like she's one of us. Determined to help all her students, her lessons are easier to learn and simplified enough to get the basics out.
As the class begins talking, daily conversations mixing into the problem-solving ones, I turn my head in time to watch my twin piss off Stella. Slouching in her chair with her foot on the edge, knee leaning against the table, her mind is oblivious to the attack.
With a pen being all that holds her brown hair in a bun, Axel plucks the item and lets it all cascade down her head.
"You asshole." He snickers, skipping around to his seat. She pulls her reading glasses from the bridge of her nose to the top of her head, holding the strands from falling forward. The straightened locks begin to reshape into their subtle curls.
"Stella," the teacher's voice echoes from the front. "Language."
"Sorry." Her lips thin into a line while she looks at Axel. He gives her an unapologetic smile and uncaps the pen with his mouth to scribble equations onto his paper. When Mrs. Lancaster moves to the door, she darts her hand out from beside me out to smack him upside the head. I snicker and he scowls.
"Dumbass," Damian says, laughing when Axel yanks his baseball cap down. Their textbook pages get flipped with the wind, and Stella mutters something about karma.
"Lukas is switching classes," my brother informs us, changing the subject.
"Kempton?"
"Yeah," he responds, handing Stella back her pen and pulling one out from Damian's bag. "Something about his schedule changing."
"They're still doing that?" I wonder out loud. The admissions office is usually done with schedule changes after the second week of school, not the end of the second month.
He shrugs his purple and grey letterman jacket off. "Guess so. We can ask," he nods towards the dirty blond at the doorway. Standing at the 5'10 mark of the height measurement at the entrance, Lukas Kempton bounces on his heels. The jeans he wears are ripped at the knees and thighs, showing off the fabric of his pajama pants underneath.
