It was the same song on repeat, boring into my brain and becoming my own personal theme song that I loathed.
Do we need Caellum to go home? For the ritual?
Is Arianna the one? What makes me so sure?
What if the ritual doesn't work?
All I heard was their drowned out voices while I stopped giving a shit about ten times ago.
They were all desperate to go home, but none of them remembered home. They were suffocating all their resources to find a cure for being a teenage dream. This was what everyone wanted, and we were trying to throw it away.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't want to be a fucking teenager. I was the essence of a god stuck in a skin suit that's sole purpose was to rebel, make a mess of girl's panties, and find a less serial killer way of getting my aggression out.
Home wasn't home anymore. All our gods were dead, and this world was being pulled along by something much worse than their games.
I stomped my way into his office like a fucking superhero who saw the distress signal. “What's the emergency?”
He turned from the book shelf he was pawing at, meeting my gaze, and being dramatic as always. “A book is missing from my shelf. Do you know anything about that?”
I leaned against the door frame, crossing my arms and making sure I wasn't giving anything away. Not even pleasantries.
“Nope. Is that it?”
Alba moved around his desk with a book in his hand and perched on its edge. “It doesn't matter how much you tell her, Bolton. She won't remember. It's written in her sign to be disconnected from the celestial bodies.”
I got tense, even though I forced my body to stay relaxed as much as possible.
Something about Alba always managed to put me on edge. Something about him creeped me out, and I couldn't tell if it was my teenage body or me rubbing his Virgo ass wrong.
“She's different. She's curious. She can survive it.”
He laughed, standing up from his desk like he was done explaining it to me while I threw a tantrum. “Stop forcing it. You think Cheyanne didn't think the same way you are right now?”
“I'm smarter than Cheyanne.”
He slapped his hands down on the desk, equal parts annoyed and frustrated with me. His head dipped below his shoulders, and his silence felt thick in the air.
“Finding the one takes patience. You’re human, and human error accounts for emotions, feelings, hormones… You have to stay level-headed.”
“I don't think anything based on fucking feelings, and I'm better than human error. I'm nearly a god.”
I wasn't sticking around for the rest of his pointless lecture. No one could decide if I was team Arianna or team throw her to the wolves and see if she's our ticket home.
I was deceitful and misleading on purpose. How I felt was mine and mine alone. I didn’t need validation.
The entire way back to my room my mind was a flood gate to last year when Cheyanne tried to convince me her new lover was the one. I had never seen someone fall so hard for someone else. She wasn’t swimming in the iris of his love; she was drowning with no signs of the coast guard to pluck her out of that kind of storm.
Every day she begged and pleaded with me to do the ritual because of how sure she was. I didn’t have any proof, nothing solid, except her devotion-sheathed eyes.
No one made a move without my say so, no matter how sure they seemed to be.
My instincts were right when Omari drove the blade through his chest, and we were all there still, left to gawk at the lifeless body and realize this was the price of being wrong.
I should have done more to stop the ritual, but the human part of me ached for Cheyanne falling for her first time.
I wasn't making that mistake again. I was going to exhaust every possible way to prove she was our ticket home or prepare her for the worst.
Either way, I was doing everything in my power so when I buried her body, I'd hurry the guilt too.
Classes resumed; time didn't care how we felt or the drama separating our minutes; it moved regardless. I slammed my locker, already pissed off that Ivy Prep forfeited the game tonight and now Caellum’s team was getting a second chance to rub winning in my face.
We were good enough to beat him, but not without enough practice time. It wasn't even the practice time, not really. My team needed to barb with each other, crack jokes at other’s expenses, and build up some confidence.
They were too scared of not being good enough that it seeped deeper into the confident parts of themselves too.
“What's your problem today?”
Jasper specified “today” because every day I had a problem. If it wasn't the circle, it was the fucking ritual, or Alba, or the Luna and Nyx drama… It was always something just out of my control.
I gritted my teeth through a curt answer: “Nothing.”
Jasper laughed as he leaned against the lockers with his bag dangling from his shoulder. I didn't bother carrying shit, whatever books my arms could hold, they did. I had done this year over so much I had everything pretty much memorized.
Jasper was relentless, dry, touchy, and uptight. So he pretty much fit in with the rest of the guys, minus Beau and Leo.
We weren't against them being together or anything, but their personalities were more vibrant compared to our dark hues. They were sunshine, while we were moody motherfuckers bringing the rain.
“Okay, but ‘nothing’ sure seems to have you in a mood.”
I glared at him, halting his ignorant thoughts from being silent inner monologues to whatever kind of concern this was.
He gave up quickly; his relentlessness wasn't any real match for me. I held everyone’s secrets, all the answers, as the only one who remembered home. I was invaluable. It didn't help deflate my ego.
I turned around quickly, for a clean getaway, when I collided with none other than my favorite purple-haired girl.
Arianna.
I gritted my teeth, already tipping over the edge, and it didn't matter that I had a soft spot for her under my mound of hate. She put another vex in my scale for me to weigh. My scale was broken, and only tipped one way.
“Watch where you're going,” she almost hissed.
I could hear Nyx and Jasper sneering behind me at my rage brewing.
“You're the one not looking where you're going. Pay more attention.”
Was this for leaving her in the woods?
Was she in just as bad of a mood?
Isn't anger part of acceptance?
Maybe she finally figured it all out.
I looked around the hallway, like she couldn't be talking to me, but I was the only person her gaze was locked on.
Her and I.
Hate and more hate.
King and queen.
I stayed quiet, and my silence wore her down after just sixty seconds.
“What's your problem? You hate me. I get it. Don't worry, it's reciprocated.”
I grabbed her elbow with too much force, sometimes the anger was hard to bite back, as I walked forward into her until she had no choice but to move backwards.
Now against the lockers I breathed her in; she smelled fresh laundry and morning dew. She was intoxicating, and it almost made me lose focus of my bad mood.
I barked into her, regaining composure. My fingers pushed her inked strands behind her ear, and my hot breath gave her goosebumps on her arm that I felt raise against my fingers. “You want me to like you? Try being loyal.”