Sacred Heart Academy

[XCandy and LunacyX]

((Working on the pictures...))  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Sacred Heart Catholic Preparatory Academy---Sacre Coeur, as the wrought iron letters over the gate branded it, a relic from when the city had been French territory---could not help but impress the same pomp and florid majesty as its name might suggest from first glance. It was an ancient white building of old french architecture, three stories with a central section and two wings situated in the lush, colorful gardens, the gleaming windows all floor to ceiling and the corner moldings worn but intricate. Pulling into the parking lot, conveniently located off to the side so as not to ruin the picturesque view, Antha breathed the smallest sigh glancing up at the structure. "This brings back memories..." she murmured, and it was not made entirely clear if they were good or bad.
In the back seat, his face pressed to the window, it was all Alistair could do to hold himself back. Teenagers were flooding into the building from the front gate, ambling along in uniforms matching his as they laughed and chatted to one another, and he was terribly eager to be one of them.
"Settle down," Michael laughed lightly, brushing a hand through his hair before easily stepping out of the car.
Antha was moments behind him, waiting at the hood of the car for Alistair to appear at her side as if pulled by gravity, her fingers anxiously smoothing out the collar of his blazer. "Are you certain about this?" she murmured, her gaze lifting to bore into his own, "You are technically about to turn twenty, you know."
But Alistair, in his usual good-natured way, merely smiled at his twin, the excitement sparkling in his vivid eyes. "I'm sure, Evie. I want to make friends. Normal friends, who do normal things. And I want to study things. Besides, the rest of you had fun here, and I don't want to miss out on all of that just because I was dead."
Defeated, Antha released a vague sigh and then mustered a smile for her brother, whose eyes turned back to the procession of students entering the school nearby with anticipation. So instead the girl turned to the twins---the other twins, anyways---and managed a much more reassuring smile as her hands reached out and cupped Rynn's cheeks, staring very seriously into his eyes. "Try to be nice, alright?" Briefly, her lips pressed to his forehead and her fingers moved to brush a stray tendril of hair neatly back into place. "Make some friends, it'll be good for you."
"Evie~!" Alistair groaned, bouncing on his feet with anticipation, and Antha turned abruptly on her heel to lead them across the front lawn and into the school.
Not surprisingly, the entrance hall was a glistening square room of white marble and chandeliers, plastered with plaques, trophies, commemorative pictures, and several banners emblazoned with the school's crest and motto. It was here, critically eying a small rectangle of space in the ceiling edged with guardrails from which a student on the second floor was calling to a friend below, that the headmaster waited.
"Headmaster," Antha greeted the gray-haired, imposing man, whose eyes snapped sharply to her figure as she neared him, all cordial smiles and the swish of dark skirts, "My, it has been a while...you've gotten terribly old."
"Antha," Michael sighed, hurriedly extending a hand to the headmaster, "Professor Hoffman, it's a pleasure to see you again."
"Likewise, Mr. York," the man responded gruffly, shaking the hand offered to him, before turning a sharp gaze on the teenagers in the party and then eventually back to Antha. "Mademoiselle Mayfair." His words to her were brief, thick, as if he wasn't particularly happy to see her and yet could not risk offending her. Antha smiled all the brighter to hear it. "If you all would accompany me to my office?"
Gesturing towards the archway into the hallway behind him, Antha swept easily by, laughing demurely, "Of course. Don't worry, I remember the way."
"As you should," the man muttered, his thick gray mustache bristling uncomfortably, "You were sent there often enough." Antha merely laughed and led the way.
The headmaster’s office was a prim little room, great leather-bound volumes lined neatly on oak shelves, the chairs all upholstered in fresh brown leather and arranged evenly around a great wooden desk, behind which the middle-aged man sat with his fingers steepled, quietly observing the three children seated between Michael and Antha.
"Mrs. Mayfair, I’m going to be frank with you," he said at length, his deep baritone a low rumble, "Over the course of my career, I have had a great deal of trouble from the Mayfairs that have attended this school. Not least of all yourself." Antha only smiled, dazzlingly, as if it were an achievement to be proud of. "I do not tolerate it from the Mayfairs currently enrolled here and I shall not tolerate it from these three."
“Oh, I assure you, they’re all good children.”
"Are they?" He quirked an eyebrow. "Because I will not pretend I have not heard the rumors circulating about Mr. Calais..."
"Funny thing about rumors, sir," the girl purred, eyes sharpening, and the headmaster paled expectantly. He had had Antha in his office enough as a student to know these little red flags. Alistair rather suspected, watching the two interact, that the man was afraid of her. "Anyone can make them up, rubbish or not."
'Yes, well---"
"Furthermore," she continued, sharply cutting him off, "I will remind you that, between tuition and our rather generous donations, this establishment depends upon our family to continue operating at the high standard that the community has come to expect of it. So I should refresh your memory, headmaster, that this is done for the sake of our family members enrolled here and Rynn is, as you know, my little brother by law. I would hate to imagine what would happen to you and your school if, for some reason, I were forced to pull my cousins, brother-in-law, sibling, and funding from this academy." The girl continued to smile, dangerously sweet, while the headmaster sat silently with his hands folded in his lap. Antha spoke in a language he understood, and what could he do? The Mayfairs paid his salary.
"Antha," Michael sighed, glancing wearily at her.
"Of course, Mrs. Mayfair," he murmured, collecting himself and forcing a light, professional smile, "That would be a travesty. But I assure you, your family will be well cared for here. Now, if we may proceed?" She made a gesture that he could and the man rose from his seat, rounding the desk. "Before your placement tests, I generally like to conduct a brief tour of the school."
"Of course," Michael replied amenably before Antha could get a word in, "By all means, professor, after you."

Trudging down the wide, gleaming white hallways, made half of windows that looked onto the expansive courtyard through rows of columns, the headmaster explained in the usual spiel about the founding of the school, forever and a year ago, the French and Catholic roots that had shaped it, their deep and passionate commitment to education and shaping the leaders of tomorrow. The long-winded speech ended briefly with notes about the extensive remodeling in recent years to keep the building up-to-date and the distinguished alumni who owed their success to the education they had received in those very halls.
"Now here," the headmaster explained, pressing open a set of double doors, "We have the cafeteria."
As he went on about the quality of the food, Antha stepped forward and cast an appraising glance around herself at the walls plastered with posters of food pyramids and fitness tips, glancing briefly into an alcove of soda and snack machines and then turning to face the towering wall of windows that made a picturesque frame for the courtyard, in which several students still lingered, sitting on picnic tables or around the edge of the fountain. It felt like a lifetime since she had been here.
"If you go through here," the headmaster continued on, leading them down an aisle between the many rows of metal table and chairs and out a single door at the far end, "You come upon the courtyard, which students are welcome to use in any free time---Parker!" In the center of the courtyard, hanging from the arm of the statue that made the central figure of the fountain, a boy blanched and dropped hastily back onto the ground, fumbling to grab up his backpack, "That's a demerit, Parker! You too, Mayfair!"
Ignoring the headmaster, and the hand his friend clutched around his arm trying to drag him off, the other boy who had been watching beamed, waving an enthusiastic hand as he shouted, "Hi, Antha! Uncle Michael!"
Silencing a small laugh behind her hand, Antha gave a brief nod towards the boy as the headmaster continued irritably, "The last bell has just rung, to class with both of you or it's detention!" The boys vanished abruptly, dashing up a set of stairs on the far side of the courtyard to an upper balcony lined with doors, behind which they vanished. The headmaster merely sighed and continued on. "There are two sets of stairs here, as you can see. Both lead to the second floor, where most of our classrooms are located, this door here will lead into the hallway directly by the entranceway." The was the door they took, turning in the opposite direction of his own office and the cafeteria. "This first room will be the general office. If you have any paperwork to hand in, are sent for a late slip, or are issued a detention slip, this is where you will handle that business. A little further down here is the gym..." The shouts from within were audible even in the hallway, laughter and the squeak of sneakers on polished floors. "We offer a very versatile array of physical curriculum here, from fencing to dance to the more general areas of high school sports, such as basketball, football, and soccer. Now, down this hallway we only have two classrooms---the science lab and the music room. Our lab is state of the art---and dangerous, I might add, as your cousin may have already warned you."
The girl in question, smiling radiantly, simply shrugged and crossed her arms, murmuring, "I don't know what you're looking at me for, none of those explosions were my fault. I warned you not to let Claire Leonelli near combustive chemicals."
Pointedly ignoring her, the urge to sigh with exasperation thick in his voice, the headmaster sighed and continued on, pressing open the next set of doors and motioning for the group to enter. "This, of course, is the music room. We offer lessons in nearly any instrument you can imagine, in a variety of different styles and compositions---"
"Damn it, Carter, what did I tell you about tuning that cello before you start to play it?! Are you trying to summon the wrathful spirit of Beethoven to mercifully haunt our halls?! Do you want that on your head?!?!"
"Professor, I tuned it! I swear, I swear!"
"You call that tuned?!"
"Mrs. Ghast!"
The yelling ceased abruptly, along with the low murmur of various instruments warming up, as all eyes turned on the irritated headmaster standing before the door with his small group. Without warning, something from the teacher's desk in the near corner was swept into a drawer below, which abruptly slammed shut, as the woman herself---a tall and willowy thing with long brown hair artfully twisted up into a knot, stylishly dressed in a white blouse that may have not been entirely appropriate for school tucked into a tight black pencil skirt---reached hastily for a cup of coffee and downed it with purpose before turning an anxious, blindingly cheery smile on her superior. "Headmaster Hoffman, how pleasant to---" The woman faltered, her bright blue eyes turning to land squarely on Antha, and without warning, the massive, echoing room resounded with a sudden shriek and the clack of heels as the teacher flew at the girl, throwing her thin arms around her shoulders and grabbing her up. "Antha Mayfair! How long has it been? Almost two years, I think?"
"Mrs. Ghast, for heaven's sake---" The headmaster began irritably, before the door opened and a secretary stuck her head in, her eyes gleaming with panic.
"Professor Hoffman, I'm sorry to bother you, but the fountain---"
The man groaned openly, turning with a strained smile to his company and muttering a short, "I'm terribly sorry, but would you excuse me for just a moment?" And then, his eyes flashing at the desk in the corner with visible irritation. "Mrs. Ghast, you might want to do something about the apparent fire that has spontaneously started."
Glancing behind her, the woman managed a small, uncomfortable laugh at the smoke billowing from one of the drawers and merely waved the headmaster away, assuring him rapidly, "I can keep our guests entertaine din your absence. Don't worry about a thing! Go handle the whatever it is and we'll be here when you return!"
The moment the door closed on him, Mrs. Ghast ran as fast as she could to her desk, yanking open the drawer she had previously slammed closed and beating the contents with a heavy book from nearby, shrieking. One of the students nearest, who had been sorting through sheet music on a nearby table, rushed over to help, taking her cup of coffee from the desktop and dumping it into the drawer, only for the modest flames to flare.
Jumping back, his eyes as big as saucers, the boy screamed, "What was in that coffee?!"
Mrs. Ghast only shoved him out of the way, in the general direction of the half-circle of some two dozen chairs where the other students sat with their various instruments, watching their instructor with exasperation. "Never you mind, Nguyen! Go, try your hand at conducting!"
"EH?! I'm not a conductor! I don't know what to do up there!"
"You don't know how to play a saxophone either, but does that stop you?! Go!"
Moments later, with the fire quelled, the teacher dropped with a sigh into her seat and retrieved from the smoldering ruins of her drawer an ashtray, taking a pack of cigarettes from another drawer and lighting one up, blowing the smoke through a nearby open window. "Christ, the things I do to keep this damned job..."
Antha, watching the haphazard arrangement of students trying to follow their new conductor's chaotic lead, bit her lip on the pressing laughter, murmuring instead, "I do have to wonder what was in that coffee, though..."
"Eh?" The woman gave her former student a curious look, eyes flashing towards the empty coffee cup nearby, and then with sudden realization, "What 'coffee'? Who drinks coffee when there is perfectly good whiskey to put a spring in your step? I'm disappointed in you, Ms. Mayfair, you used to understand these things."
"I never said I didn't," Antha shot back, impetuously folding her arms.
"I suppose I can forgive you. I hear you spawned recently?"
"I had children, yes. If that was the question. Twins, actually."
"Bah!" the woman exclaimed, shaking her head and dismissing it with a vague gesture of her hand, "Make music, not deafening little sacks of lost dreams, that's my motto."
"Mrs. Ghast," the boy previously designated as Nguyen groaned, rolling his eyes at her from his position upon the small podium before his classmates.
"Did I tell you to stop conducting?!"
"I'm not even sure that's what I'm doing!"
The woman shook her head, rising from her chair with an exasperated sigh, and finally turned her attention on the rest of Antha's party. "Well then, what have you brought me? It had best be better than that last shipment you brought me---tone-deaf James and that." She made a wide gesture across the vast room to where two grand pianos were set up against the far wall. Atop the left one, a uniformed figure with a familiar spill of lavender hair was curled up, napping. "Thorne, get you a** up and pick up a guitar!"
The boy raised his head slightly, blinking groggy eyes at his cousins in the door, and then waved the order away, turning and falling back asleep.
"Oh, don't worry," Antha murmured sweetly, casting Thorne one bemused glance before turning instead to Alistair, her hands clapping down on his shoulders to press him forward and present him. "I've brought you my little brother."
"Oh?" The woman leaned forward, inspecting Alistair's face from inches away, "Jesus H. Christ, you are one pretty boy. Can you play anything?"
Alistair smiled, in his usual cheery, blinding way, and grabbed up the teacher's hands in his own, staring earnestly back into her probing gaze. "Teach me to dominate anything Beethoven ever wrote and I'll dedicate an entire symphony to you."
Sparing a brief moment to blink in astonishment at the boy, the woman abruptly squealed, throwing her arms powerfully around him and twisting as if he were a favorite teddy bear. "Aaaah, you're my new favorite already! Come---" One arm lingering around his shoulders, she turned and gestured majestically at the room around them, eyes twinkling to match the broad grin on her lips, "---partake of my church! The glorious temple of music, sweet music!"
Obediently, Alistair let his gaze roam the vast room, from the marble floor bearing a pattern of cleft notes, to the two towering walls of glass gleaming with dazzling sunlight, to the other two walls plastered with colorful posters of inspirational quotes, portraits of famous composers, and even a particularly massive poster of Albert Einstein in rainbow tones with sparkling stars that seemed pulled directly out of an acid trip. As the headmaster had promised, the room was crowded with nearly every imaginable instrument, some that Alistair didn't even begin to have names for, and tables cluttered with piles of sheet music and music books, little contraptions that he recognized as metronomes from various eras and several tape recorders. In particular, his eyes settled with purpose on the grand pianos situated in the two corners.
"We have Antha darling to thank for most of this," Mrs. Ghast said with great satisfaction, glancing around her beloved temple with affection, "The music program here was appalling by the time she showed up. What few instruments I had, your cousin Courtland had just broken, the little b*****d. Antha ordered the remodeling of the room, the pianos, and raised such hell about getting more diverse instruments that the headmaster had to briefly hire someone full-time just to go find more!" Her laughter following this, deep and unrestrained, echoed in the room as she slung an affectionate arm around Antha's shoulders. "I assume it was for Malakai's sake, poor thing. He cried when Courtland broke the last cello."
"Considering that he spent all of his free time either here or the art room," Antha sighed, shaking her head, "It seemed a pity that it was in such disrepair. Besides, it's a horrible world that doesn't teach its elite class the glory of music."
Glancing around the room, which he hadn't seen since his own sons had first enrolled in the school, Michael ventured to murmur, "If I'm not mistaken, you set up the scholarships for underprivileged musicians, didn't you Evie?"
"That was you?!" one of the boys sitting with the rest of his class exclaimed suddenly, lowering the flute clasped delicately in his hands, "I'm here on that scholarship, I came all the way from Boston to study music here."
"As he should be," Mrs. Ghast said very surely, "He'll be traveling the world with that flute, if I have anything to say about it." And then, glancing across the room as Alistair idly struck a few piano keys, "Thorne, get up and get an instrument before I take take a trombone to the side of your head!"
The boy groaned, flopping over and sliding down the the floor with heavy limbs. "You're too loud, Ghastly. I have science next, do you want me dealing with dangerous chemicals on a lack of sleep?"
"Do you want me to tell Professor Hoffman who put the purple dye in the water reserve for the fountain?" the woman shot back, and silently Thorne ambled over and dropped into a chair, taking up the nearest available instrument.
"Tyrant," he mumbled irritably, flipping pages in the music book set before him.
"Slacker!"
"Alcoholic..."
"Kettle!"
The door squeaked almost imperceptibly as the headmaster returned, Mrs. Ghast's cigarette flying rapidly out the open window. "My apologies for that. I trust Mrs. Ghast has thoroughly educated you on our excellent music program?"
"It was a real revelation," Alistair purred with a brilliant grin, setting the headmaster on edge with its uncanny resemblance to Antha's expressions.
"Yes, well, I'm quite glad to hear it. Shall we continue on?"
"Come and see me when you want to enroll in the music club!" Mrs. Ghast called cheerily, waving after the group as they were swept back out into the hallway and up the nearby set of stairs to the second floor, passing rows of lockers and glass-paneled doors looking into classrooms.
"We have an excellent curriculum here, no matter what you might like to study. There are a number of elective classes, such as home economics---" He gestured into the room, where a number of girls could be seen busy either cooking at stoves or engrossed in sewing machines, with two boys planted awkwardly in their midst. "---language classes, gymnastics---" Again he gestured into a room, this time filled with balance beams and mats, the walls lined with mirrors. "---and of course, perhaps the most popular, art."
They stopped at a corner room, glancing in at the students busy at easels, as the headmaster continued. "Another area Miss Mayfair has had a heavy hand in since she first arrived here.
"I'll have anything to do with the arts," Antha said simply with that cordial smile, a split second before arms shot out of the doors to the art room and seized her, yanking her inside with a small shriek of surprise.
By the time the headmaster barged in after her, she was already halfway across the room with a woman in a long, floral-print skirt with a shawl wrapped around her arms, speaking in whispers over a canvas that the older woman adjusted and readjusted beside the windows.
"It catches the light beautifully, don't you think? Sure, it's a little gruesome, but the technique---!"
"It's quite shocking," Antha agreed thoughtfully, her eyes flickering raapily over the painting, "I had no idea, really. I am thoroughly impressed."
"Mrs. Harris," the headmaster called, clearing his throat to call attention to himself, and the two women glanced up in surprise.
"Uncle Michael, look!" Antha called suddenly, smiling radiantly, "It turns out Thorne can do something after all!"
The two other Mayfairs made their way over to join Antha, inspecting the painting with traces of shock. "That is quite impressive," Michael murmured in agreement, "Look at how the fire glows in the light..."
"I like the blood," Alistair announced cheerfully, "It still looks wet! I never would have imagined Thorne was this talented."
"Oh," the teacher, Mrs. Harris, murmured airily, "No, I usually have wonderful luck with the Mayfairs that come through here. I assume by your coloring and those fabulous cheekbones that you must be one as well, young man?"
"My little brother," Antha informed her, still inspecting the gruesome painting, "Alistair."
"So that would make you part the central branch, if I understand Mayfair politics correctly?" Alistair nodded happily. "Wonderful. Your siblings have all made exceptional students of mine. Nicolae had a terrible time of sitting still long enough to get anything accomplished, but the few sculptures he did manage to finish were very good. Even Antha was a lovely artist when she put her mind to it."
"What do you mean, 'even' me?"
"But your brother Malakai...oh, I wish I could have kept him here forever. Here, look at this..." Taking Alistair by the arm to guide him, she led him to stand before a particularly massive painting that had been designated a place of honor on the wall amid other student paintings. "Mr. McClair, be a darling and pull the drapes for me, would you?" she called, and the boy obediently went to pull a cord that sent the drapes tumbling over the windows, blocking all of the light but for those stationed over a statue that the students were currently busy sketching and a footlight that the teacher switched on and placed beneath Malakai's painting, setting the white background to glowing against the soft gray of a feather that occupied the center of the painting, and further distinguishing a set of lips against the left side which blew it away. "Look at how soft the strokes are, how graceful. The figures are almost ghostly, haunting...just beautiful! Exquisite, really..."
Antha, standing wiht her arms folded as she narrowed her eyes at the painting, interrupted with, "Wasn't Malakai looking for this painting?"
Abruptly, Mrs. Harris's languid, almost dazed demeanor shattered, her eyes blinking rapidly as she glanced at Antha and then hurriedly pulled her shawl up around her shoulders, moving towards the windows to pull the drapes back up. "Oh? No, I don't think so. He left it here."
Her eyes cutting in the woman's direction, Antha continued suspiciously. "I remember quite specifically, actually, that he spent an entire afternoon running around this school trying to figure out where he could have left it because you swore that he hadn't left it here."
"Oh, was he? How strange, I found it in the lost and found and assume he simply didn't want it."
"I thought you just said he left it here."
"Did I? My, how strange. A slip of the tongue, that's all. Oh, but who are these children? More Mayfairs?" It was hard to mask just how eagerly the woman was trying to change the subject, and Antha's sharp gaze did not waver even as Michael responded.
"Somewhat. Liesse here is a distant cousin, and Rynn is Antha's husband's younger brother."
"Oh yes!" Mrs. Harris exclaimed suddenly, her voice a touch high and panicked, "I had heard you were married recently! Congratulations, I thought I would never see the day! Particularly with the way you were always sneaking off into the back stairwell or the basement with someone or another! And you had your first children recently, didn't you? My, how exciting!"
Antha was still staring narrowly at the woman as she flitted about, nervously adjusting books and trinkets on shelves and tables nearby. "That painting of the rose...I think he was looking for that one, too."
"Hmm? Oh, no, I don't think that one was his."
"It's his style," Antha murmured, stepping close enough to properly inspect the painting, "And it has his signature right here."
"Ah, well, that's...ehhhhh..."
"Good grief, woman, how many of his paintings did you steal?" one of the nearby students groaned in exasperation, throwing down a paintbrush.
The teacher finally just sighed, defeated, and shrugged her shoulders. "How is precious Malakai, by the way? Married? Children?"
"Neither."
"Oh? Well that is curious. I felt so certain he would marry right out of high school. He was never the rowdy type like the rest of you, trying to get his kicks in while he was young. Oh, and how is Melody, for that matter? She transferred before her senior year, didn't she?"
Antha visibly tensed, her eyes sharpening, and the teacher faltered realizing she had made some unknown mistake. "Gone," Antha muttered shortly, "Far, far away, never to come back."
"You don't say? Now that is strange. My memory might be a bit fuzzy on the matter, but I remember she and Malakai were practically joined at the hip. She was such a sweet girl, bright and dazzling and full of life...I'm shocked he didn't go chasing after her. He is that sort of romantic boy, I think..."
Though Michael opened his mouth to change the topic, it was Alistair who hurriedly took his sister by the shoulders, steering her towards the door before her eyes could begin shooting lightning bolts as he imagined. "We should be getting on with our tour, don't you think? It was lovely to meet you, professor. I look forward to your class. Come on, Evie."
Though she shot the door a few irritated glances over her shoulder, Antha more or less calmed once they had returned to the hallway, muttering lowly, "I'm going back for those paintings before we leave here..."
"I will have my secretary fetch them for you," Professor Hoffman assured her uneasily, clearing his throat, "Moving on, down this wing we have the optional advanced classes. Mostly it's seniors, but there are a few juniors taking them as an early start to accumulating college credits. As we are a top school and we have exceptionally high standards for our students, testing into these AP classes is very difficult."
"If I recall correctly," Michael murmured musingly, glancing out the windows as they passed, "Nicolae nearly had a nervous breakdown studying for the admittance test to AP History. But Antha insisted. Pierce failed two of them, didn't he?"
"It was quite ridiculous, really. They were hardly difficult with a bit of extra studying. Lawrence and I passed every last one of them and we didn't lose any sleep over it."
"You can't hold most people to yours and Lawrence's standards, Evie," Michael murmured with a small, awkward laugh, "Straight A's, skipping grades at will, graduating top of your respective classes even at such a prestigious school...that isn't possible for most people."
"Excuses," Antha said shortly, shaking her head, and then glancing briefly to the new students, "I expect nothing less of you all, you know. There is no substitute for a good education, you should take advantage of it while you can. And even when I can't make sure you keep yourselves at the top of your class, Lawrence will, of that you can be sure."
Alistair, smiling nervously though, as her twin, he had no concerns about his ability to succeed, murmured unsurely, "Can you really say that when you passed on a full ride to Oxford, Evie...?"
"As if I would have left," Antha murmured with a small scoff, "My situation was different from everyone else."
"Is that why you were so adamant that Lawrence go to Harvard for law school rather than staying in the city?" Michael questioned, casting his gaze down at the girl with sudden surprise. It had never really occurred to him that Antha had really and truly wanted to go to college rather than staying home to take care of the family, as she had no choice but to do as Designee of the Legacy. All of the college applications she had sent in had seemed like one of her idle amusements, a means to dumping an entire box of acceptance letters on Julien's desk and throwing it in his face, proof that she had an exceptional mind, that she could go anywhere and do anything if she chose to leave the family. It had felt like just another taunt, and indeed, Michael now suspected she had intended it to come off that way. She wanted them to think she was only making a point, that she didn't really want to go to England and study literature or history, that it didn't bother her to be confined to Osiris City, her talents wrapped up in politics for the benefit of the family. She had seemed perfectly happy in her kingdom, up on her throne with all of her limitless power...
"Evie..." the man murmured, staring down at his niece with a complicated look between revelation and deep regret, sympathy. Wordlessly, Alistair had shot him a warning glance and seized his sister's hand as if that would protect her.
"This is the student lounge, isn't it?" the girl asked in an abrupt change of topic, to which the headmaster cleared his throat and motioned through the archways to a small room cluttered with benches, couches, and vending machines.
"Yes, that's right. It's free for student use between classes and in any free periods. The doors there go out onto the balcony, from which you can access various other sections of the school. And across the hall here is the nurse's station, in case of illness or injury. You may find Nurse Latley in here from seven A.M. to five P.M. if you should ever need her. Next door is the teacher's lounge, which is expressly off limits to students..."
Fifteen minutes later, standing back in the now empty downstairs hallway, the headmaster was explaining the placement tests to the new students. "These will determine what level of classes you will be placed in for each subject based on your own personal level of knowledge. This is particularly important for you three, as you have no previous formal education or school records. So you must do your best, as this will determine the course of your education." Opening a set of double doors on a large room with blank walls and a numerous rows of desks, he gestured for them to take their seat in the front row, from which a hawkish woman with sharp eyes watched them mercilessly, dispensing three stacks of booklets and answer sheets. "You will have three hours in which to complete the tests, starting from when Mrs. Hudgins begins the timer. Afterwards, you will be sent for lunch while we determine your scores."
Antha and Michael, standing in the door with reassuring smiles, both waved at the teenagers. "Good luck!" Antha called cheerily.
"Just do your best," Michael said reassuringly, and then the door closed on them as the headmaster led them back to his office.
"You may complete the sections in any order you choose, just so long as you are careful to mark your answers in the correct slots. You will want calculators and at least one back-up pencil on your desk, as you may not retrieve anything from your backpacks once I start the timer. Eyes on your own paper, no talking, and...begin."
Cracking open the first booklet, marked 'World History,' Alistair almost immediately began marking down answers with an enthusiastic vigor, his eyes darting back and forth between the questions and answers. He was Antha's twin after all, with all of her vast intelligence and sharp mind, not to mention her eagerness for knowledge.
History---both world and U.S. as well as geography---the various sciences, English, and the very short sections on psychology, sociology, and philosophy, flew by without difficulty. Math was a touch more challenging, as neither he nor Antha had ever had a particular passion for it, rather they both hated it, but he was confident in his final answers. Lastly came the essay, demanding that he explain in no less than two pages what he hoped to do with his life following graduation, and the choice to complete it in either English or a foreign language, the latter for credit in languages classes if it were satisfactory. He completed it flawlessly in French, and asked for more paper from the woman watching them to finish it. All in all, it had taken him two hours and he sat silently doodling on his scratch paper for the last hour of it, confidently not bothering to check his answers over.
When the timer rang, marking the end of the test, Mrs. Hudgins snatched the booklets up and collected them neatly into a single pile in her arms, gesturing to the three that they could leave. Alistair, smiling in his usual carefree way, only slung his backpack over his shoulder and stepped out into the hallway where James, Thorne, and Rowan were waiting for them. James anxiously adjusted his glasses while Rowan giggled and batted her eyelashes. Thorne blinked boredly. "How’d it go, then? Didn’t fail too spectacularly, did you?"
"Not at all," Alistair responded cheerily, glancing around at the stampede of teenagers herding down the hall into the cafeteria. "Are we going to lunch now?"
"Yeah. Antha told us specifically to introduce you three around and to sit with you at lunch today, so we've told all our friends to expect you."
"Everyone is very curious to meet you," James mumbled nervously, pressing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, "It's not every day that three Mayfairs just show up out of nowhere..."
"Come on," Thorne groaned, as if he were already bored of it, "I'm starving, and everyone is already waiting at our table. All the seats will fill up if we don't hurry."
"Oh, drat..." Rowan murmured, glancing up at the clock on the wall, "I told Sid I'd meet him in the stairway by second bell..."
"Then go," Thorne said flatly, shoving her by her back towards the stairwell, "Your little boyfriend is the only one who actually wants you around, so you shouldn't snub him."
"You little creep!" Rowan hissed, pouting fiercely as she shoved Thorne in return, only to have him stumble into another girl who had apparently wandered up with the intention of speaking to the group.
"Sorry, Katie," Thorne sighed, brushing himself off as the girl hurried to recompose herself, smoothing her brown hair back into place, "Rowan's being a brat...like usual."
"It's fine," the girl said hurriedly, smiling to reassure him as she waved the sentiment away, "Actually, Ty sent me. He told me to tell you that we're not eating in the cafeteria because some football players saw a new girl with your cousin and were hassling them for information. Holt was trying to throw punches, so we moved to the courtyard before he got detention again. Or hospitalized."
"But the pollen---" James protested instantly, whining helplessly.
"The fresh air's good for you!" the girl assured him, patting his shoulder, "It's really so nice out..."
"Let me just go grab Sid," Rowan sighed, turning towards the stairway, only for Katie to call after her.
"Sid? He's sitting with everyone else."
"What?!" Rowan's face colored angrily, her eyes flashing, "That little---I can't believe he forgot he was supposed to meet me!" She was off in a heartbeat, darting daintily through the crowd and out into the courtyard where she vanished.
"We can ignore her entirely if we just go eat elsewhere..." Thorne murmured lowly, a sigh beneath his voice.
Alistair blinked despondently at him, protesting, "Eh? But I want to meet your friends! Come on, please?!"
Thorne said nothing, so instead the girl beside him smiled, reassuring him with, "Don't mind Thorne, he's always like this. Though I guess you already know, being family..." She laughed, shaking her head, and held a hand out to the boy. "Oh, sorry. I'm Katie."
Alistair flashed one of his most brilliant, charming smiles, turning her hand to lay a kiss upon the back of it before glancing up through his long, dark eyelashes and murmuring sweetly, "Alistair Mayfair. It's a pleasure to meet you, Katie."
The girl flushed as red as Malakai during a particularly embarrassing episode, her eyelashes fluttering over her astonished eyes as she stuttered unsurely, "Ah...yeah...definitely...definitely a pleasure..."
"Can we go?" Thorne groaned with irritation, rolling his eyes at the flustered girl, "There'll be plenty of time for you to fangirl later. I'm hungry."
Turning to glare frantically at the boy's back as he turned and headed for the courtyard, Katie called in a hysteric hiss, "I am not fangirling!"
"Suuuuure, Katiekins."
James, watching the exchange with a complicated look in his eyes, gave a brief sigh, muttering beneath his breath, "It's always the pretty ones..."
"Jamesie, let's go!"
"Thorne, are you listening to me?! Hey! Don't go telling everyone that I'm---" Katie vanished in the crowd after Thorne, leaving James to awkwardly gesture towards the courtyard.
"Come on, it's this way."
Alistair, picking up on the strange vibes, gave the boy a truly concerned look, asking point-blank, "Hey, did I do something?"
"What?" The boy's cheeks gave a tell-tale blush, his fingers moving to nervously push up his glasses. "N-no! Nothing's wrong! Just come on already!"
"Eh? Jamesie, you have a crush on her, don't you?!"
"What?!" The boy flushed scarlet, stuttering wildly as he moved to hurry through the crowd, "Don't be ridiculous! No! Shut up, I don't!"
"You do, you do! Wait, James, don't worry, I won't tell! James~!"
"Will you shut up and come on?! Don't yell that kind of thing where people can hear!"
Laughing excitedly, Alistair paused to motion at the twins to come along and then ran after his cousin.
The courtyard was already swarmed with teenagers all in the same cerulean uniforms, all picking at trays of food and divesting themselves of their sweaters and blazers and ties, if only for an hour. Taking Alistair and Rynn each by the hand, Thorne sat them down at a large table in the corner of the open space made of two picnic tables shoved together, nearly all of the seats filled with students. Some Mayfairs, most of them not---the younger members of the tenth generation were not as closely knit as the older ones, after all, neither did they reject the company of outsiders---all laughing and chattering over their food.
"Thornie, bro, where were you? We almost gave your seat up," a non-Mayfair called, grinning as he pulled haphazardly at the dratted tie around his neck. His eyes turned then to the newcomers, settling decidedly on Liesse as they all took their seats, but Thorne smacked him soundly in the back of the head.
"These are my cousins, they’re starting today," Thorne mumbled, sighing and taking his lunch out of his backpack.
James frowned, watching Thorne and waiting for him to introduce them, but when he instead only started eating, the boy sighed and took the task up himself. "Everyone this is Rynn, Liesse, and Alistair."
"Alistair?" one of the boys questioned incredulously, looking up from his sandwich with wide eyes, "You guys have the weirdest goddamned names in your weird little family."
Rowan, taking offense, scoffed and turned up her nose. The boy who had spoken grinned, blowing her a mocking kiss, and she turned away with a ‘hmph!’ of irritation, leaning a little closer to Rynn. James only rolled his eyes and continued. "Guys, this is everyone. Geoffrey, Allen, John, Katie, Holt---"
Holt, the one seated beside Thorne who had first set his appraising eyes on Liesse, rose straight out of his seat and leaned across the table, holding his hand out to Liesse with a broad grin. "A pleasure, I’m sure." Thorne, though he appeared wholly unconcerned, or as if he hadn’t even noticed, grabbed Holt by his untucked shirttails and yanked him roughly back down into his seat.
Rowan and James both gave him disapproving looks, but he just continued to grin at Liesse. "Real nice, Holt," Rowan hissed, scowling, "She hasn’t been here ten minutes."
Holt glanced at her, grinning a little more wickedly. "Don’t be jealous, Rowan. We can't help it that you're super uninteresting. We need new diversions."
Underneath the table, Rowan kicked him as Thorne snickered quietly to himself. "Don’t touch her, though," he said suddenly, as if it were an afterthought, "These three belong to the main branch. Alistair is Antha’s brother, and Rynn is her brother-in-law. They all live over in Mayfair Manor."
"So?" Holt questioned easily, flicking a grape at him and then motioning to Liesse, "What’s that got to do with her? I could be a proper gentleman if I wanted to, you know."
James, making the mistake of not thinking about it first, said simply, “Malakai fancies her.” Around the table, a number of the Mayfairs frowned at the boy as if he had made a grave error and he glanced up from his science textbook, blinking innocently from behind his glasses and then flushing with embarrassment. "What? It’s true! Everybody knows it anyways. Courtland was outright screaming it in the hospital the other day..."
"James, you tactless little ********," one of the Mayfair cousins groaned, kicking him under the table and then shaking his head.
Holt grinned all the wider. "So what? Makes it a little more interesting, doesn’t it?"
"Courtland will kill you if you make a move on her," Thorne sighed, idly watching Rowan pick apart her sandwich with no intention of eating it, "And Pierce. And Jack. And Antha, for that matter. You know her new husband?" The boys all around the table made small grumbles of recognition, a dark cloud falling collectively on them.
"I was almost legal, too," one of the boys sighed dejectedly, and there were a few murmurs of agreement.
"Yes, well, Liesse is his little sister."
"Wait, what? I thought---"
James interrupted before any of them could properly think it through, mumbling, "Rynn would kill you first, judging by the way my cousins talk..."
Holt still grinned, shooting Liesse a little wink. "Worth it."
"You might have to fight the football team, though," James murmured, pointing surreptitiously towards a table of unusually large, muscular teenage boys who were all staring in their direction from behind the cafeteria windows, mostly at Liesse.
Down the table, one of the boys gave a snort of laughter. "You’re pretty popular, aren’t you?" He shook his head, still laughing lightly. "What’d that take you, fifteen minutes?" Another bark of laughter, glancing teasingly at Rowan. "Looks like you’ve been replaced."
The girl scowled, again turning up her nose. "Boys like new things. They’ll settle down soon. Anyways, I’m going to go get a juice." She stood, and then continued simply standing, putting her hands to her hips and staring sharply down at one of the other boys. "Sid! Are you coming?!"
The boy designated as Sid, darkly handsome with beautifully sculpted features and black locks to rival Pierce’s, grumbled lightly, rising from his seat so that Rowan could seize his hand and drag him off towards the lunch line. As soon as they were out of sight, the entire table burst into laughter. "Poor ******** Sid, ******** a ******** little ******** like ******** Rowan."
"Is that necessary?" James sighed, glancing up at the boy who had spoken.
"Oh shut up James, you little ********. So, Rynn…" The boy folded his arms on the table, leaning forward to size Rynn up, smiling mischievously. "Seems like you’re her new flavor of the day. You hit that yet?"
Katie, seated beside him, slapped his arm with the exasperated groan of, "Tyler! Quit!"
“What? She puts out like a ******** copy machine, on ******** demand. I’m just asking.”
"Either way, she’s trying," Thorne mumbled, swallowing the last of his sandwich. "You’re a virgin though, right Rynn? That’s what my brother said, anyways."
Silence fell on the table like a plague, all eyes settling in astonishment on Rynn. "Are you ******** serious?" Tyler asked quietly, staring very seriously at Rynn, "Aw ********. Well, don’t worry about it, mate, we’ll get you fixed up all right and proper. Ain’t a virgin in the world I can’t de-virgin. Except James, of course."
The boy in question flushed scarlet, glancing up from his textbook and stuttering, "Shut up! I’m fine with it!"
"Then why are you so red?"
"Cut it out, you limey b*****d," Thorne sighed, ruffling Tyler’s soft brown locks.
"Why? There’s no ******** reason for a boy as pretty as Rynn to suffer the ******** agony of virginity. Look at his eyelashes! The group did, realizing suddenly that as a number of the boys had taken to staring at Liesse, an even larger number of girls were covertly watching Rynn and Alistair, whispering to one another as they did. "He is pretty," Katie agreed with a small, friendly smile as if expecting him to be uncomfortable, "For a boy especially. It makes sense, if he’s Cian’s brother."
"Cian is a right ******** beautiful man," Tyler agreed decidedly, only to be smacked in the back of the head by Holt.
"Can you quit ******** talking like you just learned how to cuss yesterday? Christ, Ty. Besides, you just called the enemy beautiful."
"Eh? What enemy? Cian Calais? We never met the bloke, how in the hell is he our enemy?"
"You forget," Holt said very seriously eyes narrowing as he tried to stress the gravity of the situation, "He's the reason we're never going to have a shot with Antha Mayfair. That was the dream, Ty! And then this guy comes out of nowhere and marries her! It's just not fair!"
Thorne, idly perusing a magazine that had been left on the table, murmured without glancing up, "I like Cian."
"He's a perfectly nice guy," James concurred.
"Oh, are we talking about Cian?" Rowan demanded with a sudden spark, reclaiming her seat with Sid dragging behind her, "He's really very charming, and terribly handsome. Not as pretty as Rynn, though." And she batted her eyes at the boy in question for emphasis, bringing Sid to roll his eyes beside her.
"Ro, as much as I am loathed to aid in your fruitless quest to make everyone fall in love with you to appease your vanity and daddy issues, for the record, I don't know a damned man in the world who likes to be called 'pretty'. We like to be handsome, rugged, manly men."
Her eyes cutting at Holt, the girl merely snapped, "I told you not to call me that!"
"Sorry, Ro. What’s the problem with it, Ro? I like Ro. Don’t you, Ro?"
Rowan leapt to her feet, reaching angrily for Holt as he burst into laughter, but was held back by an arm Sid pulled around her waist. "Let it go, Rowan. You’ll mess up your hair." She settled down at that, glaring at Holt as she gently brushed her fingers through her platinum blonde locks.
"Oh...right," Thorne began suddenly, as if he had just remembered, pulling a set of several keys out of his pocket and dropping them down on the table before Rynn and Alistair. "Courtland told me to give you these once I made sure they still worked. A first day of school present, he said. One goes to the boiler room, one goes to the attic, and one goes to the second floor storage room."
Hey!" Holt protested, glaring at Thorne, "What the hell, you've had these all day and you didn't even tell us?! And you just handed them over to someone else?!"
"Relax," Thorne sighed, pulling a second, shinier set out of her backpack, "I made copies."
"That's my boy!" Holt declared gleefully, slinging an arm around Thorne's neck, " Oh, this'll be great! Think of all the classes we can skip without getting caught!"
"Is that all you think about?" Katie sighed, and then turning abruptly on Alistair who was staring with dissatisfaction at his orange, holding her apple out to him, "Do you want to trade?"
"Are you sure?" Alistair asked, happily switching the fruits out when she nodded with a little smile, her cheeks almost imperceptibly flushing at the brush of his fingers. James only lowered his nose further into his book, eyes darkening.
"Did they tell you guys about the dance?" the girl continued as the boys plotted out what they would do with their new set of keys, casting a glance across the new students, "It's in three weeks. We picked the theme last month---it's 'A Night Among the Stars'. Pretty, don't you think?"
"Oh lord, not this again," Holt interjected, groaning and rolling his eyes, "It's all you damned girls have been talking about all semester. All it is is a bunch of glitter and tinsel in the gym, but we still have to get flowers and dress up and, oh my god, dates. Do you know how ******** annoying it is trying to get a date?"
"I thought we were going stag?" Tyler demanded suddenly, looking suddenly offended, "When were you planning on telling me you were going to take a date?!"
"Come on Ty, like I'm really going to put up with a formal dance when there's no chance of scoring afterwards. That's all these things are good for."
"You're disgusting," Katie sighed, shaking her head.
Almost immediately, Holt's eyes lit up deviously. "What about you, Katiekins? Why don't you go with me?" James glanced up, immediately panicked, glancing between the two as if he desperately wanted to protest.
"Not in this life or the next!" the girl hissed, throwing her hands down on the table.
"Oh, right. You'll be going with Monsieur Geoffrey, won't you? What a pity."
"I'm not going with her," a boy further down the table protested, glancing in their direction, "That's over. Really, really over."
Katie, her cheeks flushing, threw her hands again on the table and stood up, shouting irritably, "Stop acting like breaking up was your idea! It was mine and you know it!"
"Whatever," the boy sighed, rolling his eyes, and the girl really looked like she might hit him for a moment before Alistair intervened, staring intently at her.
"You don't have a date, right? Why don't you go with James?" The boy looked up rapidly from his book, mouth agape, his face red enough to astonish Malakai. "You know he won't try anything terrible. And he's a Mayfair, so he can dance."
"Wait a minute!" the boy protested, stuttering, "Don't just volunteer me for things! What if I already have a date?!"
A brief moment of silence followed, the boys all along the table staring pointedly at him with deadpan expressions until he hid himself behind his book. "It's alright," Katie dismissed the idea with a vague gesture, laughing uneasily, "Really, I'm not worried about it. Oh, but...the three of you have hardly had time to get dates, have you?" Her gaze turned, settling with concern on Rynn and Liesse. "Do you have a boyfriend and girlfriend?"
"Liesse couldn't exactly bring Malakai," Thorne murmured musingly, "He's too old. Rynn could probably bring Antha. She only graduated two years ago."
"What are you even going on about?" Rowan scoffed, clearly irritated, "Why would he bring Antha?"
"Hm? I don't know, I think they look nice together. Even if all they do is argue. What's that they say about really passionate couples arguing all the time?"
"Alistair, what about you?" Katie interrupted, hastily changing the subject, "Do you have a girlfriend to bring?" Just a hint of hope, buried deep beneath a forced air of impartiality.
"Me? Ah, hardly." The boy laughed, though it wasn't exactly clear to the outsiders which part of it was funny to him. "Though, I don't think you'll have to worry about us on that front." Without turning, he made a small gesture around them at the various eyes watching the new students with intense interest, and then laughed again.
"You're a Mayfair alright," Tyler laughed at that, reaching over to pat Alistair's shoulder, "You bastards all have that same confidence."
"You know, I think it's best if you go with me, Rynn," Rowan exclaimed helpfully, as if she had no agenda in the matter, "It really is best to go with someone you know, and since three weeks is so little time---"
"Woman, are you daft?!" Tyler yelled very suddenly, giving an exasperated gesture beside her, "Your boyfriend is literally right next to you. This shouldn't even be a shock to you, he's been there the whole time."
"Sid doesn't mind, do you Sid?"
The boy said nothing, instead letting Holt do the talking for him. "There is something deeply wrong about you, Ro."
"I told you to stop that!" the girl demanded, rising angrily to her feet and, growing flustered, rapidly fled the table.
Beside her vacated seat, Sid merely rolled his eyes and sighed. "Sometimes she makes me wish I was blind, deaf, and dumb."
"Join the club." The boy shrugged indifferently, picking up her abandoned orange and idly peeling it. "If you want my advice, dump her. And do it now, before you catch something incurable from her."
"Protection is key," the boy sighed, running a tired hand back through his hair and settling his arms down on the table.
Beside Holt, Katie gave an exasperated little sigh. "It's so gross being a girl in this group sometimes..."
"Agreed," another girl down the table called, before promptly being dragged back into another conversation.
"So..." the boy earlier designated as Geoffrey began, sliding into Rowan's vacated seat and folding his hand on the table, sharply inspecting the newbies, "Come on, tell us about yourselves. Regale us."
"Don't be a wanker, Geoff," Tyler sighed, shaking his head, "Guys, don't take him too seriously. Geoffrey is the student council president, and a calculating little b*****d. He'll get under your skin if you let him, but he's not all bad once you learn to deflect him."
"That's not true at all," Thorne muttered, his eyes unusually flashing with sparks of emotion, "Geoff doesn't like our family. To be more specific...his last name is Parker."
"Parker?" Alistair repeated, glancing between the two boys, "As in Christian Parker? The guy Evie was supposed to marry before Cian came along?"
That in and of itself said a world of things that put Alistair on the offensive, though he didn't say a word about it.
"I'm just trying to learn a bit about our new students," Geoffrey murmured in a low purr, his gray eyes flashing as he deflected Alistair's inquiry, "It is my responsibility to do so, as the representative of the student body. So please...tell us about yourselves."  

[Okimiyage]

Rynn could tell that Liesse was in her element as soon as they arrived.
They had both fidgeted the entire way to school, one out of excitement and the other out of nerves. Alistair was composed as a saint, in contrast. When they exited the car, though, his sister had a new bounce in her step. It was all she could do to stop herself from twirling.
They were late—when was a Mayfair not fashionably so?—and the steps had cleared off well before Jacob handed the trio their backpacks. Rynn held his awkwardly at his side for a moment, before noticing that Liesse and Alistair had both slung the handmade leather straps of their satchels over the shoulder. Ah.
Following Antha and the others into the school building, Rynn tried not to let his intimidation show. It was just school, after all. The marble and masonry were just architectural frills, some guy in a suit trying to convince parents that his academy was worth its tuition.
Speaking of guys in suits, the headmaster was looking at them like they were poisonous snakes. He went through the usual social graces well enough, smiled and shook hands at all the right times, but the expression in his eyes was jarring in comparison with his words. Rynn suspected that he was a weathered Mayfair veteran. They were led into a handsomely decorated office space, where Rynn pulled Liesse’s chair out for her and situated himself protectively at its back, declining to sit when Antha and Michael stood. He tried not to let his irritation show at the man’s mention of ‘rumors’. Clearly, if the administration’s mind had already been made up to treat Rynn as a potential delinquent, he’d have to be on his best behavior.
Rynn didn’t often swear, but he thought the word <********> not so quietly. what rumors?
Liesse glanced over. shouldn’t be surprised. the city likes to talk about its darlings.
Nobody could deny that. Rynn simply never expected to be included among that privileged number.
It seemed he’d better get used to it; now, he’d be thrust into the thick of it. From what he had gathered, Sacre Coeur was filled with children sired by ‘respected names’ of Osiris City. For the past few generations, the Calais family had escaped notice in their cloistered halls. Now that the Mayfairs had taken the last of the bloodline under their wing, however…
Rynn could feel eyes on the little tour group as it moved through the halls. He didn’t have time to scope them out further, though—if it hadn’t been for his grip on Liesse’s hand, she would have been pulling ahead of them like a dog on a leash. In the music room, he could feel her quiver with glee, looking at the dazzling piano in the corner. It wasn’t like hers in the least—shining new, perfectly in tune, whereas the grand piano in the Calais household had been a rather dark and magnificently weathered antique beast. She’d been able to coax the most off-kilter and unsettling tunes from those scarred ivory keys.
But the piano was already taken, or else Liesse might have diverged from the group right then and there to reunite with her talent. There’d be time for that later.
When they left the music studio, Rynn didn’t try to stop Liesse from striding. He ambled along easily behind the group, glancing through classroom windows as they passed. They didn’t make it very far ahead of him, in any case; Antha was absconded with by the second of her old favorites less than five minutes after they’d left the first. Smiling at the shriek she’d given out, Rynn followed them inside the studio. The smell of turpentine and solvent met his nose, despite the wide-open and staggeringly tall windows which made a row of graceful arcs against the far wall. Aside from the teacher, the room was occupied by only two other students. One washed her brushes out while Rynn wove his way around the desks, examining the drying canvases while Antha argued about something to do with—what was it?—some lost painting of Malakai’s, it seemed. Liesse looked absolutely fascinated. She studied the pictures in question with rapt attention until Rynn had to nearly drag her out the door & after the others. It didn’t bear worth mentioning that she looked most sharply at the one which featured Melody.
Downstairs, they were ushered into a large but rather bare classroom, and isolated at three different desks. Rynn turned sharply in the doorway, suddenly realizing their intent as he noticed the stack of booklets in the room beyond. Throwing Antha a fervently questioning look, he fell back as Liesse tugged him into the room by his cuff. “You didn’t tell me there’d be a test,” he hissed.
Not that the twins would have had time to study, anyways.
The hours that stretched in-between the beginning and end of the timer seemed infinite. Rynn and Liesse struggled to scratch out coherent guesses to the questions put to them, but their education was spotty at best. They’d had governesses and tutors when they were younger, and of course the fragmented remains of their family libraries, but what they retained from those long-ago lessons did not seem to be what most curriculums focused upon these days. If Rynn had been asked to write a three-page essay on the reign of Charlemagne? Done. If Rynn was asked the name of the current president of the country? That was another matter.
If Alistair had concentrated, he might have heard faint whisperings in the room, undetectable to the ears of most mortal men. It was the sound of the twins frantically combing their memories for stray facts and dates, conferring with one another, arguing over which countries fought in which of the recent wars.
Liesse ended up drawing in the margins for the past thirty minutes, having wholly given up on achieving a good score. Her handwriting was made large and loopy in order to take up as much space as possible on the written essay portions of the test. Rynn remained hunched over his paper, but when the teacher returned to retrieve them, his pencil’s eraser was seen to have been gnawed to a nub.
Liesse seemed delighted to be released. Rynn was pale, and muted with distress.
Fragments of an internal squabble could be heard to surface occasionally as they exited the room. —it’s not ok, it’s the entire reason we’re here—
—doesn’t matter, they can’t kick us out—
—study session when we get home—
—I don’t want—
The voices stuttered into silence as they realized their audience. “Er—” said Rynn. “Hello!” interjected Liesse. She didn’t want to give Rynn the chance to be rude—besides, she was impatient to be out of that dull classroom and actually interact with people.
She didn’t have to wait long. The three cousins introduced themselves; Rynn nodded at each in turn, apparently still in a foul mood. Liesse was much quicker to recover. “I’m Liesse,” she gave her name in turn. “And the grumpy one’s Rynn. Such a pleasure to meet more of the family.” When she smiled, Rynn gave her a sideways glance. “Are you going to curtsey at them, too?”
Liesse returned the jibe with a swift swat. Rynn flinched away, then took a half-step back out of range and scowled. “I thought you were pretending to be sweet.” “Not if you’re going to behave like a brat.”
They made down their way through the hall, Liesse trying her best to take note of the gossip as it was exchanged amongst her new classmates. She had a lot of catching up to do, after all. Rynn contented himself by pretending high-minded and superior disinterest. In the cafeteria, they gazed dubiously at plates piled high with some kind of nutritionally balanced meat(?)loaf and vegetable arrangement. Luckily, the twins had been given a packed lunch, and were ushered gratefully towards the courtyard by their small entourage of greeters.
Jacob had packed the brown bags with beautiful attention to detail. The sandwiches were on a thick, home-baked bread, sliced into neat triangles and wrapped in cellophane. Rynn and Liesse had oranges as well as Alistair, but Liesse’s long, neat fingernails were perfect for picking the thick rind off of them. As a side, each had included a packet of pretzels.
Once seated, Liesse was not allowed to feign obliviousness any longer. It would have been hard not to take notice of the stares focusing in on her back. She could feel blood heat her cheeks as Rynn teased her inside her own head. Looks like you have your pick of the litter once again.
As if to spite her brother, Liesse gave Holt a warm smile—although, sensing his intent, she had refused to take his hand. “You’re flattering and all, but—sorry. I’ve got a gentleman already, and there’s a surplus of them waiting back at the Manor.” She gave a slight, coquettish shrug. “You’ve got stiff competition if that’s your game.”
“Plus, there are plenty who would kill you,” added Rynn, after Thorne had listed the main defenders of Liesse’s honor, “but I’m the only one that’s in arm’s reach of you right now.” He wiggled his spoon threateningly in the direction of Holt’s eyeballs.
Rowan was the only one who appeared entirely disenchanted by Liesse’s presence. Rynn gathered that she was the sort of girl who didn’t like ‘competition’—although she was certainly happy to encourage it, as she demonstrated upon her return, leaning over and batting her eyelashes at him. Rynn valiantly resisted the impulse to groan. Luckily, he was distracted from Rowan’s dubious charms by a much more interesting sort of toy, which Thorne dropped nonchalantly upon the table in front of himself and Alistair. Picking up the keys, Rynn turned them over curiously before pocketing the treasures. He exchanged a curt “Thanks,” with the boy in return. And then, as though realizing he should take the opportunity to invite the others, he added a hasty grin to the statement: “We’ll have a proper tour after school, then. I don’t think I can afford to skip on the first day.”
If Rynn felt awkward amongst the multitude of his peers, he was determined not to let it show. Besides, he didn’t want to saddle Liesse with his unfortunate reputation. It was important to her that this ‘high school’ thing work out.
Speaking of which, the topic had turned to one of the most important events of the season—Liesse leaned forward in rapt attention, eyes sparkling with interest, at the mention of the formal dance. It was a quaint sort of tradition, the sort of thing she’d been schooled in since youth. Rynn could already tell what sort of gown she was imagining to wear. When the rampant speculation on the subject of dates began, Liesse observed attentively as the various rivalries between beaus were more or less spelt out.
Rynn, for his part, slunk down in his seat and tried to look unworthy of escort. The last thing that he wanted to do was get caught up in some high school drama.
Unfortuately, it seemed determined to focus in upon him. As Rowan fixed him with a beguiling eye, he visibly flinched back. Diplomacy seemed the best route—save fleeing the room, the prospect of which was infinitely more appealing but also bore far too many consequences to entertain seriously.
“Your offer is generous, but I’m sure I’ll be able to make arrangements of my own,” he responded genteelly, trying to make the best of the situation. “Besides, Liesse can guarantee to you that I’d be a horrible date, she tells me that I have two left feet and my sense of rhythm is tragic.”
“It’s true,” chirped Liesse, only too pleased to corroborate his story. Rynn flashed her a grateful smile.
Although the image of Rowan laid up in the hospital with broken toes was certainly an amusing one, he had no wish to inspire competition this early on in the game. As far as he was concerned, Sid could have her. Fortunately, his opinion wasn’t being asked. Rowan bolted—the silly girl should have known better than to try to corral her prey in front of this crowd—and was replaced nearly immediately by another interrogator. Rynn sighed. He’d let Liesse handle this one. If her current track record was anything to go by, she’d have him wrapped around her little finger in under thirty seconds.
Thinking quickly, Liesse did her best to appear unflustered by the question. “It’s a rather boring story, unfortunately.” she demurred. “We’re both new to the public school system. I suppose you could say Rynn and I were
childhood friends? We were separated since I went to boarding school, but since Rynn’s lineage is now—ah—defunct—“ “Don’t say it like that,” he interjected, frowning. “—well, since you’ve been orphaned, then, we’ve come back into contact under the Mayfair family roof. It helps that Cian made a very good match with Antha. They’ll have the prettiest children in the world, I’m rather looking forward to being an aunt—er, a surrogate one, anyways.” She dazzled the table with one of her sweetest smiles, and then startled visibly as the bell for the next period sounded above them. “Drat. Is that the time? We’ll have to catch up on introductions later, won’t we?”
Rynn was already halfway to the trashcan. It seemed as though he’d been eagerly anticipating their departure. But in a moment, he had to return to Liesse and Alistair.
"Um. Where's our next class? Nobody gave me a schedule."  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

"Is that so?" Around their end of the table, multiple eyes flashed with varying levels of intrigue towards the twins. But it was Geoffrey's eyes that were dangerous, his eyes that glinted darkly with veiled knowledge and quiet calculations. But he said nothing more until the bell rang, only watching the three with a trace of a smirk. "If you'll excuse me," he pardoned himself shortly as he stood with the distant ringing, adjusting the impeccable knot of his tie before casting a single narrowed glance at Alistair, proper as could be with his parting words, "Do give my regards to your sister."
Thorne made what for him was likely a scowl at the boy's back but said nothing on the matter, instead turning his focus towards the figure that closed in on the table with an armful of papers.
"I trust your cousins have helped you to settle in?"
"Of course, headmaster," James murmured with a traitorously sincere amount of respect.
"Good, good. Your schedules will be finalized tomorrow, all that's left is for you to decide your electives. Mr. Mayfair, as your linguistic abilities render you exempt from a foreign language class, you may choose two. Mr. Calais, Ms. Mayfair, you must choose an optional class and a language. We offer French, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, and Latin. For electives, our classes with available spots are art, music, theater, mythology, computer lab, choir, and study hall."
"I'll take music and theater, please," Alistair said without hesitation, beaming, and the headmaster made a quick note of it on his paper. When he had given the twins sufficient time to think it over and voice their decisions, he then added quickly, "How did we do on the tests?"
Glancing over several other sheets of paper, the man remarked with approval, "You'll be enrolled in all AP classes, Mr. Mayfair. With the exception of math." The boy grinned guiltily. "To be honest, I spoke with your sister when the results were tallied and suggested you might skip a year, it's fruitless to keep you here the entire two years, but she declined."
"Oh no, I wouldn't want to do that."
The headmaster said nothing in particular about Rynn and Liesse's scores, only offered instead, "These tests, of course, are not only designed to test your retained knowledge but to gather a sense of a student's aptitude. Mr. Calais does show some intellectual promise---"
"I don't know why you look so surprised, Evie told you he did," Alistair interrupted hastily, and appeared genuinely irritated by the professor's dismissive attitude towards Rynn.
"---and Ms. Mayfair, I believe your results lent you towards the arts. Your schedules will reflect these results. For today, the three of you will accompany Mr. Mayfair---"
"Which one?" Thorne murmured.
"---Thorne. You will accompany Thorne to his two remaining classes. Tomorrow morning, report to the office and the secretaries will have your schedules and locker assignments."
A hazy sigh blew through Thorne's lips, eyes glancing at the clock tower. "That's cruel. Your first class is gym."
"Aw, cheer up, laddies!" Tyler piped up, grinning as he slung an arm around each of the new boys' shoulders, "Most of us have gym together. We plotted it all out."
Meanwhile, James had gone very pale, staring both at the ground and nothing at all. "But...it's dodgeball today..."
"Oh yeah, it is, innit? Well, don't worry, I'm sure no one will pick you guys last."
"Nobody ever picks a Mayfair last in gym," one of the other boys, earlier named as Allen, scoffed in passing, "They're graceful and terrifying."
Trailing just at his heels with a meaningful glance at James, another boy smirked. "Except for James."
"Blaine!" Katie pouted in disapproval, laying a sympathetic hand on the pale boy's shoulder, but the perpetrators were already gone.
"Well, whatever." Tyler shrugged once, carelessly, shoving his hands into his pockets before turning halfway to Liesse with a slow little grin, promising nothing but impure thoughts. "Katie can show you to the girls' locker room. Now don't be afraid to ask her for anything. Anything at all."
He was silenced by the rapid, heavy stomp of the girl's polished black shoe upon his own, scowling as she clasped her finger's around Liesse's to tug gently on her arm. "Why are boys so disgusting?"
While Tyler laughed, Alistair gave a small apologetic smile, assuring her kindly, "It's not all of us, really."
The girl's cheeks flushed, gazing at the sparkling boy as if she could believe him. And then abruptly she tugged on Liesse's hand and fled back into the building, merging with the procession down the hall. "Hey," she began the very first moment they were out of earshot, glancing carefully over her shoulder, "Alistair....um, what's his story? I mean there's no way he really doesn't have a girlfriend, right?" She laughed lightly, the sound forced and unnatural, running with hopeful currents.
The locker rooms were situated directly across from the gym, side by side, marked definitively with a blue sign for boys and a pink sign for girls. The inside was all tiles and benches and a wall of half-lockers running down the middle, lined with massive mirrors nearest the door and touched off with a row of showers in the very back, half-hidden behind frosted glass walls.
Rowan was already present, prancing shamelessly about in only her lacy designer underwear and addressing the adoring, fearful throng surrounding her. Katie ignored her, trudging instead to her locker some ways down and spinning the dial of the combination lock. "You can borrow my spare uniform for today, I think we're about the same size," she said easily, reaching into her red metal box and handing the folded clothes over to Liesse. In truth she was a little taller and had more of an athletic build, being a soccer player, but the differences were minor. "Don't worry, it's clean."
The l had hardly gotten her blazer and shirt off before she felt a presence at her back, one she was determined to ignore even when it began speaking to her. "You know Katie, it really was smart of you to get rid of Geoff." She could almost feel the irritated twitch of her eye but ignored it, forcing herself to keep her composure. Rowan continued heedlessly, as if they were the greatest of friends. "He's on the student council, for one, and you know they're all terribly dull." Still nothing, no snapping that he was the president and at the very least, that should make a difference. "Besides, he's such a handsome guy, It could only end badly for you. And you know, his family is one of the top names in the city. Behind mine, of course. You really made a wise decision cutting it off yourself while you could."
Still Katie said nothing, only rolled her eyes and yanked her gym shirt down over her head, white with dark blue trimming and the school crest printed on the front. So Rowan turned instead to Liesse, her expression perfectly innocent as she continued, "We were so worried about her, you know? A girl from an upper-middle-class family with the second son of the Parker family and all." She said the words as if they were poison, shameful and unbearable, 'upper-middle-class'. "But she never learns from her mistakes. I mean look at her, drooling all over the brother of our Designee of the Legacy!" Around her, several other girls watching on nodded in solemn agreement, none of them Mayfairs.
Katie took a moment to finish dressing herself, then spoke calmly as she tied the drawstrings of her dark blue shorts, printed with the school crest again in a small badge over the left leg. "Actually, I'm glad you said something, Ro." Rowan's jaw clenched with irritation at the unwelcome nickname. It sounded coarse, unrefined. "I've been worried about you too, I just didn't know how to bring it up." Smoothing down her completed uniform, Katie glanced up with a little frown, as if her concern were genuine. "That underwear makes you look cheap. All the boys were saying so."
Begrudgingly, some of the nearby girls---most of them rummaging around in their lockers or else trying to put on their uniforms as quickly as possible, a few in the small posse surrounding Rowan---couldn't help but show some flickers of satisfied amusement, though they tried not to. For her part, the girl in question gave a scowl that marred her pretty face and promised retribution, turning on her heel and stalking off.
When she was gone, Katie only acknowledged the confrontation as far as sighing, "Just ignore her, Liesse. Rowan isn't a normal 'mean girl', she doesn't do anything but talk. She'll try to humiliate you as much as she can, but they're only words."
As if to agree with her, one of the girls from the other end of the lunch table ambled up to Katie and Liesse, dressed in her gym uniform and leaning her back against the lockers with arms folded. "What a b***h."
"Liesse, this is Gretchen," Katie introduced them briefly, gesturing at the tall ginger-haired, fair complexioned girl still scowling after Rowan.
"I mean where does she get off?" Gretchen continued heedlessly, "One of these days, I'd love to find that cousin of hers---the important one, what's her name?"
"Antha," Katie sighed, slamming the locker closed and dropping down onto the nearby bench to tie her sneakers, explaining to Liesse as she did, "Gretchen isn't from Osiris City, she came here from New York last year."
"Yeah, Antha," Gretched continued, "I'd love to find her and tell her all the s**t Rowan says about her. And then she has the nerve to act like she cares about you hitting on her brother?"
"I was not hitting on him!" Katie hastily corrected her, cheeks flushing.
Gretchen threw her hands up innocently, proclaiming, "Hey, whatever. I saw him down the table, he's ******** pretty. He's like a fairy or something, all sparkly. I'm not sure I could handle him, he looks all innocent and pure and bubbly, but if you're into that then go for it."
"Shall we go?" The attempt to change the subject was apparent and Gretchen let it happen with an easy shrug, turning and following the other girls out.
Returning to the hallway, which was mostly empty now that classes had begun, the girls found Tyler leaning against the wall between their respective locker rooms, fully clad in the same gym uniform. "Hey!" was his immediate cry for attention, turning to their group with eager eyes. But the attention was all for Gretchen, Katie and Liesse were merely peripheral. "Go to the dance with me."
"...excuse me?"
Katie bit her lip, tactfully turning away though she did not dare continue moving and miss the conversation.
"Oh come on, it'll be fun! We'll dance and spike the punch and whatever else the ******** you Americans do at school functions. I watched it in a movie once."
"You must be out of your damned mind," Gretchen scoffed, turning moving towards the gym with a motion to the other girls to follow.
"Gretch, come on, I need a date. Holt ******** me over, we were supposed to be bros going stag together---"
"Good! Then just take your stupid boyfriend as your date and leave me alone!"
"It was not a date! He's my bro. We were going to be bros at the dance together, doing bro stuff---"
"Making out?"
"Dammit, Gretch, throw me a bone here!"
"I'm not going to any stupid dance!"
Snickering, Katie pushed open the doors to the gym, a bright cave of highly polished surfaces and furnished with sports equipment and scattered students in their gym uniforms, and one girl in her regular uniform sitting on the bleachers with a folded sheet of paper clutched in her hand. "The boys aren't here yet," she murmured upon a sweeping glance of the floor, as if that were something unusual.
(In fact, as Tyler could have but did not tell them, the occupants of the boys' locker room had been delayed on two occasion. First there had been the boys picking on James and the verbal fight which had ensued when the members of their group had been forced to stick up for him. Then, very briefly later, there had been the football player who had sneered at Alistair, speculating on whether or not he was really a girl and how easily he could be broken in half like a twig. Rather than letting his new friends take up for him, as they had been preparing to do, Alistair had given a blinding smile all of sugar and sunshine and rainbows and knocked the boy over the bench behind him with a heavy thud. His following expression had been so sweet and innocent that no one had quite dared to pursue the fight any further for sheer confusion. And also because of Thorne's murmured reminder that Alistair was a mainstream Mayfair, for even if none of them consciously believed in magic, they knew there was something dangerous and downright wrong about the central members of that family. All in all, with the exception of the few jocks present, the boys had found themselves impressed with Alistair. And oddly beguiled by him, but that was something none of them were about to admit aloud.)
Gretchen, knotting her orange hair up on the back of her head, briefly cut her eyes at Tyler. "I'm going to beat the s**t out of you in this game."
The boy gave an uncertain half-laugh. "What if we're on the same team?"
"Doesn't matter."
"...don't think I won't belt you in the face with a dodgeball just because you're a girl. Or you're supposed to be."
"Don't think I won't aim straight for your family jewels. If you actually have any."
"Oi! You do not threaten the little fellas! That's a basic understanding of humanity!"
"It's not like you have any use for them anyways."
"Don't be jealous, Gretch. Just because I have more girls than I can count---"
"Two girls is nothing to brag about, Tyler."
"Don't mind them," Katie murmured meanwhile to Liesse, her face bright with amusement, "They're always like this. They can't stand admitting that they both want to jump each other's bones more than anything else in the world."
"I heard that," Gretchen scowled, turning away from Tyler who clearly hadn't.
"I didn't say anything."
"b***h, I will punch you so hard in the---"
"Ladies, ladies," Holt purred, appearing from nowhere to clap an arm down around either of their shoulders. Behind him, the other boys were all filing through the doors. "Don't fight, it breaks my heart. Now let me see you kiss and make up."
"With tongue or it doesn't count," Tyler added helpfully.
"Go to hell," Gretchen hissed, her elbow coming swiftly into Holt's abdomen at least hard enough that he doubled over, but not seriously enough that he couldn't snicker. "Say your prayers, boys," she declared as she took her backwards steps towards the bleachers, her fingers split into a 'V' that indicated first her eyes and then Tyler and Holt, "You're dead as soon as this game starts."
"That ******** hurt," Holt whined through his grinning lips, straightening up and rubbing the point of impact, "What's up her a** today? Did the Junior Women's Lumberjack Committee of Osiris City disband or something?"
"You're not funny," Allen offered flatly, shaking his head.
"You pig," Katie added, frowning, "Just because she doesn't want to ******** doesn't mean she's gay."
"She totally wants to ******** me. But she's still probably a lesbian. I'm just that good."
"Jenkins! McClair! Conner!" Instantly the party was on alert, turning towards the booming voice that shook the towering walls. The source seemed to be a man in his fifties, tall and broad-figured with a square face and bristling salt-and-pepper mustache, a whistle strung about his beefy neck. Standing before the group, his eyes swept critically across them for a moment before that booming voice called, "McClair! State the purpose of the unauthorized personnel in my gymnasium!"
Dutifully, rubbing the back of his neck, Tyler answered in a loud, stiff voice, "They're new students, coach! Shadowing Thorne for the afternoon, sir!"
The man seemed to regard the three for the first time then, eyes narrowing beneath his thick brows before barking, "Present yourselves!"
"Sir, I'm not sure---" Katie began hesitantly, before being abruptly cut off.
"That's insubordination, Jenkins! I addressed the new grunts!"
Rather than see the situation get needlessly out of hand, Alistair stepped forward and stood straight, heels snapping together, throwing his hand up to touch his forehead. "Sir! Mayfair, Alistair, reporting for duty!"
The man regarded them for another moment when the twins were introduced, eying Alistair's surprisingly precise military form with approval. "Line up, grunts! We begin at thirteen hundred hours sharp! And Conner! Remove your jewelry immediately or else report to the office!"
"Sir!" came the loud, if weary, responses before he turned on his heel.
Holt, scowling at his back, busied himself irritably removing the single silver bar stuck through the top of his ear. "Coach was in the army," he mumbled, assuming the coming question, "He's a real hard-a** for a high-school coach. Everything's survival of the fittest with him. But be careful not to set him off. Coach was in 'Nam, he has issues."
"One time he made us hide from the Vietcong under the bleachers," Katie sighed, shaking her head, "I got a leg cramp and tried to stand up and he started screaming about how I was dead now. He got spit all over me."
Across the gym, a whistle rang shrilly in the echoing cavern and the entire class dutifully congregated in a semi-orderly line on the side of the court. "The game is dodgeball!" the coach announced when they were all in place, his voice particularly loud so that no one had any chance of not hearing him, pacing up and down the line with a red rubber ball in hand. "If you don't know the rules, it's simple: Two teams, each picked by their captains. You line up on your respective sides of the gym and wait. This line here is the boundary between turf. All the balls are set here in the beginning and when I blow this whistle, you grab them if you can. Throw 'em at members of the opposing team and if they're hit, they're out. When a ball falls into your team's court, pick it up and throw it. If you catch a ball being thrown at you, you're safe. If you step outside the boundaries of the court or across the center line, you're out. Last grunt standing wins! Now, captains!" He gave one short, relatively soft blow of his whistle, gesturing at two opposite ends of the line of students. "McClair! Mayfair! You're team captains, take your sides!"
While Tyler stepped forward and claimed the northern court for himself, the various Mayfairs present glanced amongst each other. "Which Mayfair, coach?"
The man gave a deep and rumbling groan, shouting irritably, "Christ in heaven---Mayfair, Ezekiel! Get your a** to your side of the court and pick your damned team!"
The designated Mayfair boy---familiarly he was known as Zeke, though likely Rynn and Liesse had never so much as set eyes on him, a tall and lanky boy with an unusually strong build for a Mayfair, his coloring dark but for his skin, medium-toned from spending his days in the sun---went silently to his side of the court and turned to face the rest of the class. "McClair, you take first pick."
"Holt!" Tyler called without hesitation, the boy having already expectantly started towards him. He was followed in the second round by Gretchen, whom Tyler called with a spitefully gleeful grin, and then by the more physically sturdy members of his usual posse, excluding the ones Zeke had claimed for himself. Three minutes later, Allen and Rowan were on Zeke's team and James, Thorne, Rowan, Rynn, and Liesse were still waiting on the sidelines with another less desirable athlete, implacable to most of them by name.
"Rynn," was Tyler's next selection, after a split second of consideration.
Carefully looking the lot over, Zeke hesitantly called out, "Thorne." The boy moved slowly, begrudgingly, and his cousin instantly seemed to regret his decision.
"Liesse."
"Rowan." The girl was none-too-pleased to be so near to the end of the pickings, and scowled to show it.
Tyler mulled his options for a few moments, one logically being better than the other, but in the end gave in and called the less logical of his two options. "James." By the looks of it, the fact that the boy didn't cry with relief was nothing short of a miracle.
A sharp blast of the whistle later, the two teams were drifting over to their respective sides, only Tyler and Ezekiel remaining in the middle as the coach shouted, "Captains, shake hands!"
The boys did so begrudgingly, the friction nearly visible between them as they clenched their hands together as if each was trying to break the other's bones.
"I'm going to beat you into the ground, Tyler."
"You know, Zeke, you're really the only Mayfair in existence without a whit of charm. You must be a b*****d."
Turning irritably on their heels, each headed for the gatherings of their respective teams as they offered their parting shots over their shoulders. "I hope you break something, McClair."
"Your mother was a whore, Mayfair."
"That's my aunt you're talking about..." James muttered unsurely, brow furrowed, but his concerns were abruptly cut off by the sharp, lingering blast of the whistle and the sudden stampede of feet as everyone ran in two frenzied masses for the balls.
Thorne was the first out---it happened immediately, the boy standing very still amid all the activity until he could loaf his way back to the bleachers and curl up, done with the shenanigans. James followed soon after, shrieking in pitches that were sure to torment him for days when the ball clipped his side and fell.
Surprisingly, Tyler was quite good at the game. He had more grace in the dodging aspect of things than anyone would have given him credit for, and his aim was precise. There was some question in the beginning of whether the balls Gretchen hurled like cannons at his back counted, but the coach made no remark on it and Tyler continued on heedlessly. Alistair, too, was shockingly adept at the game and when worse came to worst, his puppy dog eyes managed to deflect a few balls originally aimed in his direction.
The first ten minutes of the game was enough to eliminate all but a handful of members on each team, Tyler, Zeke, Gretchen, and Alistair among them. It was in this condensed state of the top players that Gretchen grew very serious, eying her opponents as if she were truly picking them off for death. Over half of the game was spent this way, the players being eliminated very slowly, until the coach blew his whistle and announced it was time to hit the showers and Tyler took the distraction as an opportunity to strike out his last remaining opponent.
"You can admit I'm the best now," he declared with a smug grin as Gretchen passed him, scowling, "It's difficult, I know, but I believe in you." The next moment saw him narrowly avoiding a swift kick directly between his legs, though he laughed as if it didn't faze him.
"Someone should save Alistair," Katie murmured with true anxiety, eyes narrowed at the boy.
No one moved to do so, and Holt even bothered with a derisive snort. "He doesn't need saving. We need saving from him."
The boys glanced briefly back at him, mobbed from every side by girls cooing over the small, blossoming bruise on his arm, using it as an excuse to find some way to touch him and a lead in to praise his superior athletic skills. If he minded, he didn't show it, tactfully interacting with them as if he didn't know they had ulterior motives, all sweet smiles and a sheepish composure. "I'm fine, it's not even a scratch..." In the end, it took the combined strength of Tyler and Holt to drag him out of the throng of girls, dragging him towards the locker room.
While the locker room was less eventful for the boys the second time around---watching the way Alistair threw a ball, no one felt any desire to pick on him or his poor, scrawny cousin---the same was not true for the girls. As if showering did not cause enough anxiety, every inch of their bodies exposed for scrutiny and their faces washed clean of makeup, Rowan was still furious that she had been one of the last picks for teams and on an outright warpath because Gretchen had struck her out early on, hard.
"We've got to talk to Hoffman about this showering situation," she complained to those around her, loudly, as she slipped on her clothes. Her wet hair was piled high and tight on the back of her head, a blowdryer sitting on the bench next to her, "It's just not right, letting those kinds of people shower with the rest of us."
"What kind of people?" one of the other girls questioned, genuinely curious.
"You know, those kinds. The ones that like to see us all wet and naked." Her eyes cut, quite conspicuously, at Gretchen who was dressing nearby. "Honestly, I just don't feel safe. Something needs to be done."
"Gretch---" Katie murmured, her voice full of indignation on her behalf, but the girl held up a hand for patience.
"Gimme' a minute," she whispered, shimmying her pleated skirt over her legs and shrugging on her shirt as if she hadn't heard a thing. And it really only was a minute, long enough for Rowan to prance further into the room with her blow dryer to the mirrors and plugins, at which point Gretchen switched into ninja mode. The makeup bags the girls had left on the benches or directly in the doors of their lockers were scooped up in seconds, cradled roughly in Gretchen's arms as she hopped onto one of the benches lining the wall and pressed open one of the small, high windows, dumping all of the expensive beauty items out onto the lawn behind the school. With that done, she fetched the scissors from the front pocket of her backpack, taking up the few curling irons present and hacking through their cords. Her final piece of work was in fetching Rowan's skirt, left behind in her locker, and cutting the threads of the buttons before neatly placing it where she had found it, returning to her own locker to finish dressing.
Katie, eyes cast sidelong, stifled her grin, only whispering, "You're terrible."
"That's nothing," Gretchen sneered, buttoning up her shirt with satisfaction and then stepping very close to Katie, whispering in utmost secrecy, "I ******** Sid Saturday."
"No!" Katie squealed, throwing a hand over her grinning lips, "You really, really are terrible! Why didn't you tell me?!"
"I didn't mean to," the girl shrugged, still grinning with wicked satisfaction, "It was at Blaine Rodgers' party, I didn't think I'd see anyone I knew. But I was bored, and drunk, so we did it in the laundry room."
"In the laundry room?!" The girl fell into peels of stifled laughter, eyes sparkling. "How was it???"
"Pretty good, actually. Not that I'm too surprised---I was hiding in the boys' locker room once and I caught a glimpse of him."
"Why were you hiding in---"
"Not important." Suddenly, her face fell and expression went very stern, eyes turning sharply on Liesse. "You tell anyone about this----anyone---and I'll punch all the pretty off your face, okay?"
"Chill out, Gretch, who's she going to tell?"
"She's the b***h's cousin."
"So? None of Rowan's other cousins like her."
"Or anyone at all."
"We should go," Katie suggested hastily, slamming her locker shut, "Before they get back."
"Fiiiiine," Gretchen sighed, pouting that she was going to miss the result of her handiwork, and let her best friend drag her out by the arm, giggling.

The frantic cries of despair were still sounding inside the locker room when the entire group met back up in the hall, the girls grinning as the boys cast the door uncertain glances.
"Thorne, what class do you have next?"
"English," he mumbled quietly, yawning.
"That should be fine, then. Sid's in there with you, right?"
"Yeah. And Gretchen and John."
"Have fun, then," Katie called in parting, already several steps towards the other end of the hall, "We'll see you after school."
Tyler, who was also headed the opposite way, took Liesse by the shoulders and planted a loud kiss on her forehead. "Cheers, mates. I hope you're in my classes tomorrow. All of my classes."
"Step off it, Ty," Gretchen groaned, rolling her eyes.
But the boy smirked with an unusual sort of deviousness, haughty eyes narrowing at her. "You jealous, Gretch? I'll kiss you too, if you want it so badly. But first you have to kiss all the wounds you gave me. Every. Last. One."
They were both gone in the next moment, Tyler slipping through the crowd as Gretchen gave chase. Cocking his head, Thorne bothered to sigh, "Gretchen reminds me of Evie. If Evie just didn't give a ********, I mean." But rather than stand and ponder the idea, he turned and began up the stairs, slinking through the hallway and finally into one of the larger classrooms.
Evidently the teacher had been informed of Thorne's tag-alongs and barely spared them a glance, thumbing instead through a copy of Le Morte d'Arthur heavily marked with bright tabs. Thorne didn't say anything about it either, merely settling into a desk in the back corner by the windows and dropping his head on the desk. Sid entered shortly afterwards, and being a man of very few words he offered none up, only setting out his notebook and pen and book and sitting quietly, waiting. John, only briefly noted to the newcomers earlier, followed and made polite conversation with Sid for several moments, until the latter stopped responding verbally. Gretchen just barely arrived with the bell, skidding breathlessly into the doorway with the color high in her cheeks and dropping irritably into a seat beside Liesse.
"Why don't you just ******** him and get it over with," John offered in a thinly veiled taunt, not looking at her or even considering that he might have mistaken the situation.
"Shut the hell up, you little asian b*****d. Like I would."
The room resounded abruptly with the slam of a book against the teacher's desk, the man himself calling sharply, "The next use of profanity in this classroom is a detention." The two fell silent, preparing their supplies on their desks as the teacher turned to mark several words up on the dry-erase board. "All right everyone, books out." Thorne, making a flexible translation of the command, retrieved his book and tossed it onto the desk in front of Rynn before setting his head back down on his own. "Yesterday we discussed Arthur's attitude towards the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere. Does anyone want to summarize our discussion?"
Few hands were raised, and with a defeated sigh, the teacher called on one of them. "Arthur was like 'dude, bitches come and go, but Lancelot's my bro. I totally knew he was banging my queen, it's not a big deal, but now here Mordred goes making a big deal about it and I gotta' think of my honor and stuff'."
Blinking in exasperation, the teacher offered a hesitant, "...riiiiiight...well, that is the general idea of it. Can anyone else put it in more...precise terms?"
A moment passed with no takers until, cautiously, Alistair's hand snaked up and the teacher quirked an eyebrow. "Yes, Mr....?"
"Alistair Mayfair," the boy introduced himself politely.
"Yes then, Mr. Mayfair, care to elaborate?"
The boy nodded, taking a careful breath before he began. "Arthur wasn't particularly in love with Guinevere, but he knew Lancelot was and Lancelot was his closest companion. It goes back to the concept that Arthur was an incredibly just king, and since he didn't consider himself particularly high above Lancelot, who was only a knight, he merely looked the other way and let them carry on. But since Sir Mordred, Arthur's b*****d son, was so intent on creating a scandal big enough to bring Arthur's kingdom down, there was no way to conceal it anymore and Arthur was forced to concede that they were doing something wrong and as king, it was his duty to punish them. If, of course, Mordred could provide concrete proof. And even then, Arthur gave the other knights ample opportunity to warn Lancelot. But even when they did warn him, he ignored them and went straight to Guinevere's room. In the end, Arthur was left with absolutely no choice as a figure of the law but to have them sentenced, and he spends the entire time bemoaning the fact that he has to do it. He just wanted peace and harmony in his court, but that was no longer an option. Even when Lancelot slays his fellow knights to save Guinevere, Arthur isn't even mad at him, he's just upset that things have come to this."
When Alistair stopped, a moment of silence reigned before the teacher, eyes wide in shock, began slowly. "...good. Very, very good. Now, today I'd like to discuss Lancelot's attitude concerning the situation in comparison to Arthur's..."
Lifting his head a half-inch from his desk, Thorne whispered simply, "Evie?"
Alistair paused briefly in thought, smiling guiltily. "Mmmm...partially. We take different stances on the text."
"Oh?"
The boy laughed soundlessly. "She despises Guinevere. She thinks anyone who shows so little discretion deserves to get caught and anyone so dependent on other people deserves to get burned."
"...that sounds like her."
"But I hate Lancelot. He should have done better by everyone. Instead, he gets everyone killed and leads Camelot to ruin."
"Seriously? Everyone dies?"
Again that silent laugh. "Almost. A few survive, though their lives are terrible. Didn't you read the story?"
"I meant to. Never happened."

When the bell rang at three o'clock, the students all rose in a great wave of motion, the teacher calling loudly over their sudden chatter, "Remember, your papers are due Friday! Come speak with me if you need help!" And then, checking a window on his laptop, called more directly as the rest of the class filed out, "Mr. Mayfair, you'll be in AP Literature, correct?"
"I suppose so, though I don't have a concrete schedule. Professor...?"
"Fitzroy."
"We just call him Fitz," Gretchen offered helpfully, Sid nodding beside her.
"And Mr. Calais, Ms. Mayfair, you'll both be in my standard English classes. I'll have a handout for you tomorrow, but the assignment is five pages on Le Morte d'Arthur. Choose a topic and explore it. Since you're new, I'll give you an extra week, so turn it in next Friday. Mr. Mayfair, the assignment for AP Literature is ten pages on Notes from Underground. Are you familiar with Dostoyevsky?"
"Somewhat. My older sister is a fan, you see."
The man---and really he was unusual for a teacher, thin and a bit on the short side, hardly thirty, and vaguely handsome with casual work attire and thick-framed rectangular glasses---quirked an eyebrow as if he were genuinely interested. "You're a Mayfair, right? Who's your sister?"
"Antha Mayfair, sir," he proclaimed proudly.
The responding look the professor flashed was complicated, to say the least, and that was all Alistair needed to understand completely. "Ahhhh...I should have guessed. A difficult student, that one. You could never teach her anything, as far as she was concerned she had all the answers and they were better than yours. The real trouble was that she really did."
Alistair flashed that little endearing guilty grin that he employed so often, murmuring in amusement, "Was she really that bad?"
"Hmm...I wouldn't say bad, just difficult. Her last year, she was in my first class and one day when I was running late because of car trouble, she got up in front of the class and lectured on Finnegans Wake---universally regarded as one of the most difficult texts to understand---for half an hour and declared all of her classmates idiots for having trouble with it. She openly argued with me in class about the meaning of various texts, even though I am required to teach the standard views of them and reminded her constantly of that fact." Despite himself, a small laugh trickled from his lips at the memory, shaking his head as if he were still at a loss. "But regardless, the paper is due Wednesday after next. If any of you have any trouble, just come see me after class. Oh, and Ms. Mayfair, Mr. Calais, the test on Le Morte D'Arthur will be the Monday after next---don't worry, I'll grade you on a curve, considering the circumstances---and our text following that will be The Canterbury Tales, which will polish off most of the remaining time in the semester. We might finish off with some Kafka or Shelley, something light..."
As the man muttered to himself, attention focused raptly on his computer, Thorne gave a great yawn and ambled out of his seat. "Finally. I need a nap."
Alistair, beaming, turned his attention on Liesse. "Do you want to go check out some of the clubs? I want to join at least one. There are so many new friends we could make!"
"Eh?" Thorne mumbled, glancing at them, "No way, Antha made me promise to walk you home and I'm not sticking around. Go look at them tomorrow."
Gretchen, gathering up her backpack and already desperately unknotting her tie, offered offhand, "Liesse, you could join the soccer team with me and Katie. You're not particularly athletic by the looks of it, but you could pick it up."
Sid, in his first words directly to the newcomers, offered shortly, "Creative writing club."
"The student council could always use new members," John threw in, since everyone else was doing it, "It's better to get your foot in the door if you want to run for a post next year."
Thorne's eyes uncharacteristically sharpened for a brief moment. "Alistair, Rynn, one of you please beat Geoffrey for student council president next year. I'm sick of his stupid face."
"Geoff's a great president," John hissed in response.
"I hate his stupid face. And it's not good to have an anti-Mayfair faction in control of the student government. There's too many of us here, it's a conflict of interest."
"That doesn't even make sense!"
"Let's go. Everyone'll be waiting outside."
"Hold the ******** up," Gretchen interjected, standing steadfast in the doorway and glaring at Thorne, "Are you kidding me? How long have we been trying to get into that damned attic? And now that we have a key, you just want to walk on home? ******** no, gimme' your keys."
"Hey, those are mine...where are you touching?!" Growing a touch frantic, the boy swatted at her hands as they surveyed the contents of his pockets and then reached for his backpack, seeking his shiny new set of keys. "Geez, stop already, we'll go."
The girl stepped back, nodding with satisfaction. "Should I text the guys?"
"No. Too crowded," Thorne mumbled, turning to slink down the hallway and into a more deserted corridor where a narrow stairway cut into the wall, leading sharply up. Glancing briefly around for witnesses, the teenagers slipped up one by one into the rising darkness.
"Ow!"
"It's me, Gretch."
"I can't see s**t up here!" Fumbling for a moment, a pale illumination soon flashed from the screen of her phone, turning the cracked walls and worn stairs a glowing blue as Thorne struggled to turn his bright and shiny new key in the ancient, bulky lock.
"Give it here," John groaned at length, squeezing past the other bodies with some difficulty to grab for the key, but Thorne shooed him back as he continued to jimmy the key.
His success was announced by a very low thud and rusty metallic clank, the door squeaking open into cavernous darkness pierced by two glowing rectangles of sunlight from either end. There was only the one door, situated near to one of the far windows, and the bulky clutter draped with yellowed tarp was sparse and pushed back against the far wall.
Ambling into the room, the floorboards creaking lightly under his step, Thorne quietly observed the dusty open circle of mixed seating around the nearby window, plush and refined pieces fit for the Mayfair Manor parlor alongside rusted metal chairs and cheap, splintering wooden tables with peeling paint.
"It feels like looking at ghosts..." Alistair murmured in a soft, vague sort of reverence, daring to take the first step into the circle.
Indeed, those present were all in agreement. They had stumbled half-wittingly into an earlier version of the Mayfair family court, abandoned it seemed in the course of one afternoon. There were still cigarette butts in a cheap plastic ashtray, drowned in dust, magazines and books cast aside on the floor and tables. A large piece of sketching paper tacked to the wall bearing a crude stick figure labeled 'Dorian' was still stuck with darts.
"This is going to wreak havoc on my allergies," John whined, covering his nose with his sleeve.
Gretchen shrugged, idly lifting a tome from the floor and brushing off the dust to reveal the title 'AP British History' before cracking it open. "These are my kind of notes." Her finger trailing along the margins, she listed off quotes, "'******** King John and his taxes,' 'Vikings>Celts,' 'Scots are suicidal ******** idiots,' 'Virgin Queen, yeah right'...dude, look at these in the back. 'Claire, you daft little ********, you burned my hair,' 'I'm skipping fifth, meet me in the back stairwell,' 'The demon lord is going to be out tonight, let's wreck the house.' "
"That has to be Evie," Alistair exclaimed with a brightening of his eyes, seizing the book to glance at the handwriting before confirming, "Yeah, that's Antha's handwriting. And some of Courtland's here, in the back."
"And Jack's whiskey," Thorne added, lifting a half-empty bottle from the floor.
"Wonder if it's still any good?"
"I like this place," Gretchen declared, passing the textbook over to Alistair and plopping down on a particularly luxurious loveseat---or what had once been such, before the cloud of dust that rose around the girl had settled in, "It's creepy and secretive. I wonder how they got this pretty sofa in?"
"Looks like a throne," John mused, inspecting the fine, gilded craftsmanship of the antique, "It's at the head of the circle and everything."
Without glancing up from their respective preoccupations, Alistair and Thorne both murmured very surely in unison, "Antha."
"Holy s**t," was Gretchen's next exclamation, having pried open a small drawer in the nearby table to inspect its contents and pulling out scores of little shiny squares in various colors, "What the ******** did your cousins do up here?" Laughing, she turned one of the little packages around in her fingers.
"We're Mayfairs, if it's at all feasible to do it somewhere, then we're going to do it there."
"This is utterly disgusting," John whined, standing at a distance and carefully not touching anything, "God...and one of these people was the student council president!"
"Two," Alistair corrected him sharply.
"Disgusting...Gretchen, don't do that!"
"What?" the girl purred, pressing open a partially emptied pack of cigarettes from the drawer and searching around her for a lighter, "It's not like I'll be the first, from the looks of it."
"We're going to have to do something about all this dust," Alistair murmured thoughtfully, running a finger along the table, "But otherwise, it's a pretty ideal hiding place."
"Primo," Sid agreed quietly.
A ringtone sounded, Gretchen fumbling for her phone and then answering irritably, "I told you not to call me. (...) I don't give a ******** if you're waiting on Thorne, call him. (...) Then maybe he doesn't want to talk to you. No one else does. (...) Go ******** yourself." With that she hung up, visibly irritated. "You'd better go before he comes looking for you, Thorne. If I see him again today, I'm going to slug him."
"Gretchen and Tyler, sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G."
"Shut it, Thorne, or I'll shut it for you!"
"You really should work on getting laid, though," John murmured indifferently, "It shouldn't be hard for a girl."
Sid, feeling unusual vocal in the intimacy of their new sanctuary, added quietly, "It'll mellow you out."
"Go mellow yourself out, both of you!"
Thorne, his attention span hitting a brief plateau, bothered to gesture briefly at Rynn. "Do it with Rynn. Holt wanted to remove his stain of virginity anyways." He turned away as he spoke, but this was proven an incredibly unwise decision in the next moment as Gretchen slammed into him, both of them falling to the floor where she was free to shake him to her heart's content.
"I ******** knew it!" In the midst of all this, the door slammed open with a swirl of dust, Tyler and Holt tromping up the stairs in a storm of indignation, arms crossed. It didn't take long for that feeling to deepen to truer levels, at least for Tyler, his brow furrowing with concern and jaw subtly tightening as Gretchen and Thorne became still, the former straddling the latter on the floor, her fingers knotted in the lapels of his blazer. Though they only blinked in surprise at the sudden intrusion, the others all stepped abruptly out of the space between the two parties, pressing Rynn, Liesse, and Alistair to the outskirts of the room with them.
"Oi! What the ******** is this?!"
Unperturbed, Gretchen answered easily. "Punishment." Thorne only laid still, blinking boredly at the sudden confrontation.
John, in a weak attempt to break the tension, gave a vague laugh. "That does look suspicious, coming in on it. But do you think we'd be standing around here if they were doing anything like that?"
But Tyler was far from mollified, irritably brushing off the hand Holt laid on his shoulder to calm him and tromping up to the circle of furniture. It was only then, the color faint and high in his cheeks, that the real problem burst from his lips. "I'm supposed to be the one you beat up! What in the bloody hell do you think you're doing wailing on Thorne like it's all good and ******** fine?!"
It was Gretchen's turn for her cheeks to color angrily, climbing off of Thorne to stand facing the boy glaring at her with murder in his eyes. "What, you want me to beat you up again?!"
"What 'again'?! You can't even throw a punch to save your---"
The conversation---or screaming match, more precisely---ended abruptly with Gretchen's fist making contact with Tyler's face, the boy sprawling out on the floor before she was on him, their arms struggling against each other in mixtures of offensive and defense.
"Should we do something..." Alistair murmured, at a genuine loss, glancing to his cousin and Holt who had both carefully made their way to the rest of the group.
"Nah," Holt responded without hesitation, shaking his head, "They're happy as clams. More importantly, I can't ******** believe you guys left us out of the first trip into the attic! And poor Jamesy, standing outside all anxious and jittery, wondering if you'd left him."
"s**t," Thorne muttered shortly, checking the time on his phone, "Antha's going to murder me, I promised I'd bring them straight home today."
"Take me with you!"
"Hell no."
The pout spread to Holt's lips before the refusal was even fully uttered, dramatic and childish. "You selfish p***k. I blame you, you know. How long have I been begging you to introduce me to your hot cousin? But you never would, and now she's married and I'm not going to get a chance like that again until she's divorced or widowed and I should deck you for that."
"Give up, it's over, Holt. Cian won. He is the official king of all the Casanovas in the entire city and there's nothing you can do about it."
"I refuse to accept that. He's old, he'll lose his looks before me."
"He's a Mayfair now. Mayfairs never lose their looks, blood or no."
"Then I wish wrinkles and yellow skin and a hunchback on him."
"You do realize you're in earshot of his siblings, right?"
Alistair, brow furrowed with distaste, nodded emphatically at this reminder. "Don't wish bad things on Cian, I'll curse you with acne and a lisp and eternal bed hair." Knowing Alistair's abilities, as well as his regard for Cian given his bond with Antha, the threat wasn't empty, but Thorne didn't mention that aloud. Even if their very closest friends might have an inkling that the wild, terrifying rumors about the Mayfair witches might have some truth in it, for the most part it was dismissed as the city's oldest urban legend, all nonsense. It was always a point with the family never to mention anything to the contrary.
Making a point to show that he didn't like any of the interactions taking place around him, Sid turned to the new students and, in an unusually long string of words for him, asked, "How did you like your first day?"
But Alistair wasn't paying attention anymore. His eyes were focused on the circle of furniture, moving as if following the play of dust motes. Only Thorne, watching curiously and following his gaze, could see what had intrigued his cousin---the little shade of days past, a slip of a girl barely into her teenage years with a wild mass of scarlet curls, her uniform disheveled as she turned on battered old converses to some tune they could not hear. It was a time he could barely even remember, an age where Nicolae was young and careless and bore the flush of blood beneath his cheeks as he laughed, his little sister collapsing with a grin into his arms.
Cocking his head, Thorne made a musing little sound as he watched, the pure humans present staring at the nothingness upon which the Mayfairs gazed in confusion.  

[Okimiyage]

Rynn studied the papers fanning out in front of him. Liesse’s voice entered his conscious as she peeked over his shoulder, putting her hand on top of his as his finger scanned the schedule. Oh, don’t take Latin, it’ll be dead boring. Besides, no-one ever uses it anymore. At least we’d be able to use French at home.
She felt her brother stiffen underneath her breast, and realized too late that she’d said the wrong thing. The Mayfairs weren’t a ‘home’ for them yet, at least not to Rynn. Liesse had already accepted her fate, but then—she’d always been the more adaptable twin. She spoke aloud in desperation, attempting to smooth over the grotesque faux pas. “Art sounds like it’d be nice to take together, don’t you think? I’ve always wanted to learn how to paint. You’d be wonderful at it, I’m sure, you have such an eye for color—“
Rynn shrugged her off his shoulder, and glanced up. He knew what she was trying to do, they were twins—how could he not? He was canny to her tricks by now. “I’ll need study hall more than watercolors if I’m to get through the semester, Liesse.” His tone was mild, but the words were sharp. “You remember how the placement test went, right? Can’t start slacking off before the semester’s even started.”
Liesse blanched a little, but tried to smile through it. “Oh, I’m sure it won’t matter. Nobody expects me to be a straight-A student. And anyways—” as she gathered up the papers with a sweep of her hand into a tight sheaf, “—I’m sure we can ask one of our housemates to help us study.” Sure answered Rynn. Malakai would be a favorite, right?
Liesse refused to dignify this with a response. Looking up at the headmaster, she gave him a tight smile that was oddly professional for a high-schooler. “We’ll take art together. You can give him Latin, I’d prefer French for myself.”
With that—and Thorne’s pronouncement, naming their first class together as gym—Liesse took her leave of the room, while Rynn…
Well, his brow furrowed a little, as though he was surprised by what had just happened, but he followed in her wake with little more than a shrug in protest.
To be honest, maybe it was time that Liesse started being a little more assertive. He’d thought of the two of them as twin souls, bound by fate, for so long—but the body she was in now housed different bloodlines, different allegiances. What did it matter that they’d be apart for a few hours each day? Certainly, she wouldn’t forget him that easily.
But as Liesse strode off down the hallway with Katie, already laughing and giggling in the distance, in the infuriating way girls did, Rynn became less and less sure. She was going to meet a lot of new people here. He couldn’t protect her in the way that he used to.
In the locker room, Liesse was trying ineffectively to explain about Alistair. “I suppose he’s single, at least I’ve never seen him—um—seriously engaged with a female. But I don’t know that I would recommend him, at least not for longer than a date.” The word stumbled off Liesse’s tongue like an unfamiliar language. “He reminds me too much of Cian, and he’s not…I mean, he’s married and all now, but we never thought it was possible. Honestly, the Church ought to declare it a miracle—with his track record and all. He used to come home at two in the morning with a girl on either arm—“
Liesse’s spilling of the details was only interrupted by Rowan’s intrusion. The Calais girl turned on the interloper, at first bewildered by the unnecessary intrusion. Then she caught on. Rynn used to play the same ‘games’ with the brothers, all with their tongues sharpened to knife-point.
Luckily, Katie didn’t need Liesse to play on her team. It seemed like she’d held her own in these battles before.
As Rowan sauntered off, Liesse murmured under her breath, “Is the only thing to do ignore her?” Retribution in their family had always been so much harsher. If only they could still shut Rowan in the maze for a night or two…
Then, her eyes flicking up in a precocious curiousity—“What does she say about Antha, exactly?”
And wasn’t the Designee above reproach in her old stomping grounds? Especially now that she’d settled down respectably. “I’m sure Cian would be curious to know.”

In the meantime, Rynn found himself escorted to the men’s locker room along with an entourage of Mayfairs. His new gym uniform was baggier than he would like. Frowning, Rynn tugged at his hemlines while Alistair brawled with the local color, and looked up as though the altercation had scarcely been noticed. “So—what does gym class involve? Calisthenics? Weights and laps?” he asked sidelong to James. ‘Dodgeball’ had been mentioned, but Rynn didn’t know how that exercise was performed.
Unfortunately, he was about to be introduced in the most merciless way possible.

The silver lining was that Rynn was struck out relatively early on. It was an easy way to avoid playing the game altogether—in fact, Rynn ‘sacrificed’ himself, calculating the perfect time to throw his body in the place of Alistair’s, who had become a primary target of the football team by his display in the locker room earlier.
What a ridiculous game.
Liesse, however, didn’t seem to get the point. Her goal seemed to be to play for all was worth, despite her inexperience. Rynn couldn’t help but smile, watching his sister lob balls ineffectively towards her targets. She was perhaps still less than adjusted to her unfamiliar body. At least, that would have been a good excuse for her lack of hand-eye coordination…

In the locker room afterwards, Liesse was surprised to find herself peripheral to a slightly aggrandizing crime.
Actually, she wasn’t all that concerned.
Rowan deserved it, for all she knew.
Gretchen seemed concerned that Liesse would tattle, but the Calais girl in her knew how to keep a secret. She knew the value of loyalty. With the same tight lipped smile that she had offered the principle earlier, Liesse nodded her compliance to the crime and tried to feign nonchalance when the topic turned to romantic concerns. At least she wasn’t expected to contribute to the gossip, being new—not that she’d have anything juicy to speak of, at least in comparison to the other girls. The idea of Liesse’s sex life was something of a joke. (Although the way that the Mayfairs had cattily alluded to the origin of this body, she had no idea whether or not she still could call herself a virgin.)
It’d be amusing, besides, to see the look on Rowan’s face when she came to class afterwards—if she came to class at all, and didn’t just excuse herself for the rest of the afternoon. The girl had looked on the verge of pitching herself into hysterics over a minor slight earlier in the day.
In English class, Liesse picked up the copy of Le Morte d’Arthur and began to consume the text while the discussion around her carried on. Neither Rynn nor herself would be expected to contribute, at least not today. (Rynn, for his part, was less than attentive—if he half-focused he could hear Liesse’s conscious voice as she read through the opening pages, occasionally stumbling over an unfamiliar phrase or lingering on a particularly romantic deed, which made the rest of the class rather like listening to a podcast than attending to a lecture) When the class came to a close, she was enraptured enough that she hardly looked up from the battered paperback. Rynn had to elbow her in the ribs to demand her attention, and she was slow to collect her assortment of notebooks and pens. “Should’ve known you’d love this. There’s even a class in sentimental English love stories—“ “It’s an epic saga of chivalry and adventure, you cretin,” Liesse protested, swatting him lightly across the chest with her copy. “Sure, epic saga, if you say so. It sounded like a soap opera for fairy-tale buffs.” he teased her. This time, when she tried to swat him, he skipped lightly back out of reach.
Alistair seemed to be done chit-chatting with the teacher. Liesse thanked him for the class politely when they passed the desk—eliciting a monosyllabic grunt amidst the muttering—and Rynn grabbed her hand to hurry her along. He practically had to push her along to get her to catch up with the rest of Alistair’s entourage.
Rynn could already see Antha’s thumb-print on the boy.
If the physical resemblance wasn’t enough, Alistair’s qualities and talents mirrored that of his sister as well. Sure, they might’ve disagreed on certain literary subjects, but he drew the other children—their factions, their drama and disagreements and power—around him in the same way: like moths to a flame. Rynn supposed this was what people were talking about when spoke on subjects like ‘natural leadership’ or ‘star quality’—it was the kind of charisma that built Versailles. It was only a matter of time before Alistair learned to wield it like his sister, too.
Catching up to the rest of the group, Liesse and Rynn were just in time to find themselves bombarded by suggestions for their after-school activity. Rynn had already made up his mind that he didn’t need the trouble, and would tell anyone who asked, but this was a serious choice for Liesse. She’d never played soccer before, and if dodgeball was any indication, she was more of a benchwarmer type than the sort that would be any use on the field. Still, it’d be fun to be with her—friends, was that what she could call these? It seemed odd. She’d known them for such a short period of time, after all—but wasn’t that the point, to get to know them better? Anyways, it’d be an excuse to get out of the house and have fun. Oh, but creative writing sounded like fun, too—
Rynn tugged her gently along as she weighed the various merits of each choice (and numerous more) in her mind. With her concerns, she hadn’t seemed to notice all of the hubbub and excitement about Alistair’s inheritance. Thankfully, Rynn’s head wasn’t quite as far gone in the clouds as hers. The boy had gotten an entire secret clubhouse, for mercy’s sake. Who needed those after school activities now?
Liesse began to gather that something was up, however, when they gradually progressed into the more derelict area of the school. These corridors looked like they hadn’t been touched in years.
Upstairs, Rynn glanced around the dusty furniture and gave out a small, triumphant ha of a heave. He didn’t have to wonder what Antha had gotten up to in this room. Wandering over to the velvet couch, he inspected a stain before settling unaffectedly onto the arm of the sofa. “Well, it doesn’t look like much, but she’ll clean up nice.” Liesse sneezed three times in rapid succession. “Aren’t there windows or something up here? It’s so stuffy.” Looking down, she rubbed the toe of her shoe against a half-faded chalk sigil on the floor. Murmuring half to herself—certainly nobody else was paying attention, Gretchen and Thorne’s scuffles were quite enough to draw attention away from her rambling. “Someone ought to bring some cleaning supplies up here—these classrooms are quite nice, aren’t they? I wonder why they don’t use these areas anymore.”

((…
Ellie.
I love your beautiful novel posts, but jc write shorter snippets of time. It is so much harder to respond to several hours worth of activity rather than five minutes or even an hour. ;-; ))  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Glancing with serious consideration around himself at the dark, dusty attic, it was Thorne who finally mumbled, "We could clean it up."
Holt was quick to agree, sensing justification for his usual activities. "We could skip fourth tomorrow and get it done. Who's with me?"
From the floor, her hands still clenched in Tyler's collar as she shook him with all the delicacy of a rag doll, Gretchen turned bright eyes to Holt and called, "I'm in. Screw math."
Tyler's arm shot out following this, calling in wavering, stuttering tones as his head snapped back and forth, "Mee~Eee~E!"
Sid simply shrugged and then nodded as Alistair ecstatically offered to join the project, leaving only John to scoff his disapproval and James to frantically insist that he couldn't possibly, science was very important.
"We'll all meet here, then," Holt concluded finally with a smirk of satisfaction, glancing around himself. But as if he had come back to his senses, his shoulders stiffening and features setting firmly, he wheeled around to face Sid with one finger pointed in accusation. "Don't invite your b***h. I'm serious this time. I'm not afraid to punch a woman."
The boy in question gave another, albeit more uncomfortable, roll of his shoulders, glancing off towards the windows with his hands buried deep in his pockets as he muttered excuses. "She just finds me."
Finally allowed to lay still and reeling, Gretchen having risen to crack her fingers and take deep, calming breaths, Tyler managed a broad grin and even a small rumble of a laugh. "Slut magic."
Again only that shrug and the rest of the group dropped the subject, falling instead into their usual inane banter as they trudged back down the stairs. The halls were still teeming with life, half of the student population still milling around lockers and the courtyard, some drifting into classrooms for club activities. They passed a gaggle of student council members in the main hallway on their way out, hoisting a banner heralding the spring dance under Geoff's strict guidance. Though John was quick to make his way over to him, the student council president's attention was not on his friend. He was looking instead at Alistair and the Calais siblings, his eyes dark and unnervingly focused as they followed the three.
"You know, I've noticed this before, with Thorne and James and stuff, but..." Holt muttered as they continued across the foyer, drawing close to Alistair and seeming to look for a good way to phrase what he wanted to say. When he could not find it, he instead settled for nodding in Geoff's direction and blurting, "What's that about?"
Of the Mayfairs present, all three produced very different reactions to the question. James paled nervously, glancing down to his feet and tightening his grip on his backpack strap; Thorne rolled his eyes and groaned as if he had hoped no one would ever bring it up, as if he were already monumentally tired of the subject; and Alistair glanced briefly over his shoulder at the offender in question, tsking his irritation before turning back and answering with corresponding bluntness, "Oh, that? It was a secret, but his brother was set to marry my sister before she up and married Cian, so they hate us now."
A split second passed in silence, the other students considering that surprising bit of information before finally Holt stifled a laugh. "I believe it. A place in the Mayfair family is a hell of a thing to lose."
"Antha was certainly happy to be rid of him," James muttered in response, still staring down at his shoes, "And the rest of the cousins. They all hate Chri---" He was cut off abruptly by a metallic snap and a loud thump, a flurry of motion so quick that by the time anyone had processed it, the boy was flat on the ground with his hands over his face, the blood already dripping down his chin.
"The hell?!" Holt proclaimed loudly, he and Alistair both dropping to their knees to inspect James, prying his hands off of his face to inspect the damage. He whined, the tears quivering in his eyes as his nose continued pouring blood. A crowd had formed meanwhile, inquiring if James was alright and expressing incredulity at how the door had simply slammed shut that way. The chain holding it open had snapped, a few of them observed. But still, that was no excuse for the way it had slammed...
Dispersing the crowd with assurances that James was fine, helping him to his feet as he clasped a handkerchief someone had produced to his nose, Alistair's gaze traveled over the heads of his classmates and locked very certainly to Geoff's calm, dark eyes. Now this was a development. He shouldn't have been surprised, he knew that, they should have figured it out before, come to think of it.
But what could he do right now? He couldn't just up and blame Geoffrey Parker for the door slamming into James when he had been clear across the room. After all, those old stories about magic and witches were urban legends to the people of Osiris City, and the Parkers had never been involved in any of them as far as he was aware. No, for them it had started with Christian, and now it seemed it continued with his younger brother. But such were secrets that Alistair was not at liberty to betray and retribution seemed petty.
Petty was alright with Thorne. Petty was just dandy, and that was how in the next moment one of the boys who had been trying to tack up the banner---a heavyset creature, equally bulky with muscle and fat---suddenly lost his footing on his chair and tumbled down onto the ground, landing straight onto Geoff with a series of startled yelps and resounding crashes. The banner fluttered, draping itself across the heap of the two boys' bodies, Geoff screaming with irritated authority for the larger boy to get the hell off of him.
Alistair stifled a laugh despite himself, Thorne openly grinning like the devil himself, and while the student body was preoccupied in a frenzy over the second accident they gathered up their cousin and the Calais twins and slipped out the front door. Carefully shepherding his wounded cousin through the confused students who lingered on the front stairs, Alistair spared a brief glance over his shoulder and then at Thorne.
"This doesn't bode well for us," the latter murmured as if to voice what their bandied glances conveyed.
"That it does not," Alistair concurred quietly, and then abruptly snapped his mouth shut as the rest of their group hurried to catch up with them.
Having had a moment to overcome the shock of the successive incidents, most of them were laughing about it, joking even as they patted James on the shoulder.
"That ******** place really is haunted," Holt crowed, shaking his head.
"The wanker deserved it," Tyler agreed with a broad grin, offering only briefly afterwards, "Geoff, I mean. Not you, James. Though you're still a bit of a wanker."
Another figure approached them meanwhile, streaking across the yard and vaulting over a bed of perfectly manicured tulips to run erratic circles around Thorne, waving his arms and doing his best imitation of ghost noises. "The Mayfair witches strike agaaa~in!" he called shrilly, cackling even as he did so, "Watch out, watch out! When darkness falls and the city stills, the Mayfair witches seek their thrills!"
Trying ineffectually to escape the center of the boy's rapidly paced circle, Thorne gave a great groan and finally halted, determined to weather the insults until the boy got bored. "This again? I thought everyone outgrew that damn rhyme when we were in elementary school."
Despite his amused laughter, Tyler stepped forward to shove the newcomer, standing between him and Thorne. "Sod off, ya' bloody tosser."
The boy didn't still for a moment, stumbling to regain his footing and then smashing his shoulder against Tyler, the grin still plastered across his face. "Limey Red Coat b*****d!"
His backpack dropping hastily to the ground, mirroring the grin he was given, Tyler braced himself and then reached for the other boy's arm, pulling it behind his back and attempting to flip him. "Yankee plonker!"
The impromptu wrestling match was abruptly called to an end before the other boy could whip up a retort, signaled by Gretchen's fists smashing down on the crowns of their heads in unison. "You're both idiots and you're getting on my nerves!"
His grin never wavering, the newcomer scoffed at her as he rubbed the point of impact beneath his suavely coiffed golden locks. "Better watch it, Gretchen. You still owe me a new washing machine. My parents had a conniption when they saw all the dents you put in it."
Sobering almost immediately, Tyler cocked an eyebrow. "What'd Gretch do to your washing machine?"
But the girl would not have it, hissing instead, "I will end you, Blaine."
But the boy laughed as if he didn't think she was serious, throwing his hands up in surrender. "Fine, fine...but you have to bring hot friends to my party next week if you ever want me to forgive you. Or help me put dents in the new washing machine." He winked at her for emphasis, his sharp grin waxing suggestive.
Gretched finally groaned, snapping violently, "Get!"
The boy obeyed with a wild cackle, running off bellowing the rest of the nursery rhyme warning children of the dangers of the Mayfair witches.
"What'd you do to his washing machine, Gretch?"
"I said shut up!"
"Did not!"
"Well I'm saying it now! You want to get punched, Ty?"
Quickly growing exasperated by the banter, Thorne released a heavy sigh and turned his gaze towards the front gate. "I'm leaving. Antha's going to kill me as it is, taking so long getting them home."
But Alistair gave a thoughtful 'hmm' to that, glancing innocently off as they resumed out the front gate and onto the sidewalk. "I wouldn't worry about that..."
"What do you mean?"
The boy gave no answer and Thorne didn't press for one, instead clapping a hand down on James's shoulder to steer him out of the road while he ambled along with his head tilted, letting the blood drain down the back of his throat. Katie had joined them meanwhile, locking arms with Gretchen and leaning over to whisper secretly amongst themselves, finally falling into conspiratory giggling.
"I don't trust that," Tyler hissed, watching them sharply, "What are you broads whispering about?"
"Dresses for the dance," Katie answered hurriedly, giggling just to be sure they knew that wasn't the case, "Liesse, you should come shopping with us. Gretch is no fun, she hates all of that fun feminine stuff, it ruins my good time."
"I believe 'girly s**t' was the phrase. Don't change my words."
"Oh, whatever," Katie dismissed it easily.
"Don't get your knickers all in a bunch yet, Katiekins. You still don't have a date," Tyler snickered, which earned him a swift kick to his shin from the usual perpetrator, downing him for several moments.
"I'll find one," the girl muttered meanwhile, uneasily fumbling with the strap of her backpack, "Worse comes to worst, Geoff said he'd still go with me. We'd made the plans and everything, before...well, before."
"Before you came to your damn senses?" Holt offered in a sneer.
"Oh shut up! Who are you going with anyways?" Katie shot back, hoping to trip him up.
Far from the intended purpose, Holt's sneer turned a great deal more satisfied, the boy proclaiming smugly, "Jessica DiMarco."
"How in the bloody hell did you manage that?"
"Because I'm a ******** stud, Ty. Control your jealousy."
"Jealousy? As if. I'm going with Gretch."
"Stop making things up on your own!" the girl in question hissed, turning instead to Alistair as if to ignore her own frustration, "Pretty boy! You got a date yet?"
Alistair said nothing for a few moments, glancing around as if uncertain who her question was directed at. "What, me? It's my first day."
Holt, leaning over to Gretchen's ear, whispered not so quietly, "He got asked by four girls after gym."
"I don't know any of them!" he protested quickly, ears turning red but a small grin still touching his lips, "I think I might just be really lame and take my sister."
"Antha Mayfair?" Holt was at once all sunshine and rainbows, his eyes sharpening with dire purpose. "Do it. It's not lame at all! You should totally bring her. Totally. Bring her. Please."
"Calm the ******** down," Thorne muttered irritably, casting the boy a single glance over his shoulder, "It's not like it matters to you."
Alistair, chuckling in something oddly between sympathy and amusement, patted Holt's shoulder. "Sorry...but you're no Cian."
His mood violently soured, Holt managed to grumble, "What's so great about Cian Calais anyways? Isn't he just some junkie or something?"
"Cian's charming," Alistair piped up quickly in his brother-in-law's defense, pouting slightly at the accusation, "And pretty."
"And strange," Thorne murmured, "Good strange. Mayfairesque strange."
Even James, swallowing the bit of blood still trickling down his throat, managed to add in, "He's a good guy. I mean, he married a girl when he knocked her up."
Quietly, Tyler snickered, "Knew it was a shotgun wedding. Called it."
"He is pretty," Gretchen agreed somewhat begrudgingly.
Beside her, Katie nodded enthusiastically. "I saw the wedding pictures in the paper. He's dashing, he looks like a prince or something."
"He is," Alistair confirmed with a little grin, "A Mayfair prince for the brat princess."
Unconvinced, Holt only scoffed. "If the feathers make the bird..."
Finally, his patience worn thin with the subject, Thorne gave a great, heaving sigh. Turning to Holt, he first whispered strictly near his ear, "Don't insult Cian around Alistair. They're close." It was all he could think of to explain that strange bond, Alistair being the other half of Antha and sharing some odd semblance of her affection towards her husband. Then, with another sigh, continued more generally, "Look, if it shuts you up, I'll go ahead and tell you. Antha will be there anyways. She and my cousins Courtland and Malakai are going to be chaperones." He scoffed with the word, trying to convey all the wrongness associated with Antha and Courtland being expected to keep teenagers out of trouble. "She just told me, see?" He produced his phone for evidence, displaying a text from that afternoon bearing Antha's name in the 'Sender' line.
Thorne, darling~! Don't be mad, but I ran into the vice principal on the way out and he talked me into chaperoning your school dance. Also, I signed up Courtland and Malakai. Love you~! Make sure to get Alistair, Rynn, and Liesse straight home or I'll murder you! <3
(His short reply beneath it---I hate you. ---as well as Antha's preceding text from long ago---Your mother's here. Did you know your mother is here? I'm going to stab her in her stupid throat and cram one of these dresses through the wound. And then do the same to you if you knew she was coming here.---were very pointedly not commented upon.)
"Definitely Antha," Alistair confirmed with a little nod and accompanying grin upon glancing at the text. "Are you really surprised? Evie loves this kind of thing. She gets to dress up and corrupt innocent teenagers." And then, smiling happily to himself, "Ah, but this is great! I'll definitely have someone to dance with!"
Gretchen and Katie, meanwhile, were exchanging sly looks. "Malakai and Courtland Mayfair, you say?" the former murmured thoughtfully, "That might change things..."
"Aren't they both supposed to be, like, really charming?" Katie questioned Thorne in turn. When the boy only shrugged, irritated at even being asked, she simply continued musing. "They're both really pretty, anyways. Ah, Gretch, we'll have to find really pretty dresses now!"
"Speak for yourself, I'll only be there as an observer. I'm curious about these supposedly terrifying, charming Mayfairs."
"Lay off Malakai anyways," Alistair whispered to Katie with a little grin, flashing a surreptitious glance in Liesse's direction, "He's more or less spoken for, and I don't want to see the kitten turn into a lion."
The girl frowned for several moments, trying to catch his meaning, but when it sunk in she outright squealed, seizing Liesse's hands and bouncing eagerly in place. "You have to go shopping with us, then! We'll find you a really pretty dress, and shoes, and figure out how to do your hair, and coordinate makeup, and---"
"Katie!" Gretchen shouted, slightly in alarm, laying a hand on the girl's arm, "Breathe! Or at least stop pulling on her arm!"
"I can't help it!" the girl squealed, instead taking Gretchen's arm to dance a little circle around her, "It's going to be so much fun! You can just feel the magic already!"
"Except you still don't have a date," Tyler cut in with another teasing grin, only to be hit again. Harder.
It was at this point that the Mayfair boys finally rounded on their cousin, Alistair elbowing James while everyone else was distracted as Thorne pointedly pinched his arm. He flushed immediately, eyes gleaming with panic as he knotted his bloodied handkerchief up in his hand, furiously shaking his head 'no'.
"Come on, Jamesie, it's your last shot," Thorne hissed quietly in his ear, but the boy only continued to shake his head, wiping ineffectively at the dried blood between his nose and upper lip.
"If you don't ask her," Alistair joined in very seriously, whispering in his other ear as the two boys held him fast between themselves, "I will. I'm my sister's twin, Jamesie, do you want to take that risk?"
James both paled and reddened at the same time, crimson to the tips of his ears, eyes pinpricks of sheer terror. "I can't do it! Guys, stop, there's no way---"
"Just ask her!" Thorne continued hissing, exasperated.
Softening just a little to counterbalance Thorne's harsh words, Alistair added, "The worst she can do is say no. At least you'll know you tried."
"Come on, man up!"
"Just do it! It'll take five seconds!"
"Ask her!"
Somewhere between the coercing whispers that went on around frantic James and the teasing that was steadily irritating Katie more and more, the boy broke. Shaking his cousins desperately off of him, his eyes squeezing fearfully shut, he finally blurted loudly, "Katie, you want to go with me?" The others all fell quiet, each blinking in astonishment at James. His face scarlet, the horror of his actions quickly dawning on him, he continued loudly and erratically, "As friends, you know? So Tyler will shut up and you don't have to go with Geoff and...and..."
Katie, being the only one who was confused rather than astounded, recovered first, a slow smile spreading across her lips as James lost his breath and his steam and fell silent. "Okay. Yeah, that works out perfectly."
The general shock was almost palpable, though it only further confused Katie. The effects were mostly felt on James, whose jaw fell open and eyes nearly rolled back in his head but for the hand Alistair clamped around his shoulder, squeezing lightly. Tyler and Holt were almost at the end of their ropes trying to hold back their laughter when, finally, Thorne saved the entire lot of them with the vacant murmur, "This is us right down the street. See you guys tomorrow."
The non-Mayfairs present all halted and carefully began to backpedal. It was a brave soul who ventured within twenty feet of Mayfair Manor.
"Think about the soccer team," Gretchen said in farewell to Liesse.
"Oh, that would be fun!" Katie commented, smiling broadly, and then after a brief pause to make sure the boys weren't listening, leaned in to whisper to the girl, "You'll tell me all about Malakai Mayfair tomorrow, right? And Courtland Mayfair and Antha Mayfair, and Alistair..."
"You don't always have to add the last name, she knows who you're talking about," Gretchen said.
"It seems wrong otherwise. Like calling Queen Elizabeth just by Elizabeth, or just calling the pope Francis!"
Meanwhile, Holt had taken hold of Alistair, entreating him pointedly, "Put in a good word for me with your sister, alright?"
Alistair smiled in his usual way, all sugary innocence and disarming cheer. "I could tell her that you're the direct reincarnation of Casanova and your reproductive parts house a genie and grant immortality, it wouldn't matter. Evie's devoted to her husband."
"When she and Rynn aren't blowing up the house with sexual tension," Thorne murmured, and was only silenced by a sharp pinch from Alistair. But all of that escaped the notice of their friends.
Holt groaned helplessly meanwhile, turning to administer a swift punch to Thorne's shoulder. "I blame you, you should've introduced me to her before she got married."
"She would have broken you," Thorne muttered, rubbing the point of impact, "Or else laughed at you."
As the girls turned, heading back down the street, Tyler and Holt dragged behind them, the former offering James a thumbs-up as he cackled wildly in silence. The latter made more lewd gestures, but halted when Gretchen shot him a sharp glare over her shoulder.
When they were out of sight, James outright collapsed onto the curb, dropping his head between his knees. "Can't breathe...did I really just do that?"
"You did, you did!" Alistair cried gleefully, patting his head, "I'm so proud of you!"
"I think I'm going to be sick..." the boy moaned meanwhile, despite the dazed grin on his lips.
Thorne merely sighed, shaking his head. "You're worse than Malakai. I'm a little embarrassed to be related to you right now."
Ignoring Thorne, Alistair continued spiritedly, "We can go shopping together! Pierce and Evie were going to take me anyways, to get new clothes. I mean, I love Nicolae and all, but he has no style. I can't keep wearing his clothes. And Liesse can run espionage for you! She can tell you what color dress she's wearing and you can get a matching flower thingy."
"That's actually somewhat clever," Thorne murmured, a little surprised.
Alistair just rolled his eyes at him, repeating with exasperated gestures towards himself, "Antha's twin, remember? Seriously, why are you guys always surprised?"
"Speaking of Antha, I believe there were threats of murder involved..."
"I told you not to worry about that," Alistair brushed away his concerns, laughing slightly, "Tori drugged her again. She was supposed to sleep all day, but then she popped back up and no one can get her back down. She hasn't even noticed we're late."
As Alistair darted through the yard and into the house, calling for his sister, Thorne gave his trademark sigh and roused James from the curb, quietly cutting his eyes at the twins. "How are you faring in there anyways?" he murmured with a small nod towards the house, "You can tell me. I hate that house. It's loud and weird s**t is always going on. And the power running through it is nauseating."
Steadying himself on the sidewalk, James bothered to cut his eyes at his cousin. "I don't think I've heard you talk as much as you have today...well, ever."
"Don't get used to it."
"Don't let him fool you," James said to the twins meanwhile, "He may act like a useless lump, but Thorne is a pretty powerful witch. And he sees everything. Everything. When you think he's napping, he's listening to the inconsistencies in your voice. When you think he's staring off into space, he's watching all of your nervous little gestures. And he knows what all of it means."
"You make it sound intentional," Thorne mumbled irritably, "It's not. People are just easy. Even Antha, for all her composure, has her tells." The boy shook his head, dismissing the subject. "Go get Uncle Michael to sort you out, James." James obeyed like a good boy, leaving Thorne to stare up at Mayfair Manor with a sigh as heavy as a wet stone. "While we're on the subject..." A breeze ruffled the gauzy white curtains over the open parlor windows, carrying the murmur of voices from within upon it. It was a jumble of Alistair's excited chatter, Antha's wispy laughter, and Courtland and Jack's vibrant banter. "...you're not as discreet as you think you are." His eyes watched both of them sidelong, without judgment. Thorne wasn't that kind of person, he simply didn't care enough to pass judgments. It was what it was. "Either of you. You pretend you're open books, that you can't contain your secrets. But it's a facade, and what hides underneath it..." Again that trademark sigh, a roll of his shoulders resembling a shrug. "But that's none of my business. It's no one's, until Antha and Malakai notice, as they always eventually do. And then you never get to hide again."
That seemed to call an end to the musings, Thorne trudging heavily through the gate and up the walk to the house, dropping his backpack by the door. As he said, it was none of his business, and he really didn't care either way.

((That's, like, half an hour, tops. >.>' ))  

[Rynn Calais]

Rynn and Liesse, who didn’t know what it was like to have an entire day’s worth of time eaten up by classes, didn’t understand why all the other students agreed so readily to what seemed like housework.
For Liesse’s part, she was used to it. The great dusty old manor of Llyr’s Court had been her home for years, and while she had never quite manage to keep it sparkling—that was too much of a task for one person—she had often imagined the days when the family had kept a hundred servants, and what it must have looked like, gleaming beneath the polish of their effort. The rosewood staircases swept, banisters and mouldings oiled and gleaming, chandelier alive with candles instead of cobwebs. It must have been grand.
And while not quite the barren, if lavish, interior that her home had been, there was a kind of satisfaction in cleaning up this space, as well. And Liesse was good at cleaning. All that it required was the ability to put your mind elsewhere, whilst you scrubbed floors or beat rugs or washed dishes, to memorize whatever motion you must perform until it was second nature. To be honest, Liesse was rather looking forward to it. Having a clubhouse of their own sounded much more interesting than the rest of the proposed after-school activities.
Rynn was less enthused, to put it mildly. Housework was beneath the heir to the house. Or at least, it had been.
And perhaps there was a reason why this part of the school was closed off. The air in here didn’t smell quite right—somehow acrid, burning…Rynn tried to convince himself that it was paranoia, but he was a notoriously bad judge of his own mental state.
[…]
Beneath, Geoffrey Parker made his grudge against their clique apparent. Rynn, and by correlation Liesse, all but saw swift lines of magic strike across the room like lightning.
Rynn’s eyes narrowed, like a cat which had suddenly caught sight of it’s prey. So this was the Parker boy’s way of announcing his intentions? It was rather poor form.
But before anyone said a word in criticism, Alistair did something about it. Rynn was one of the first to whoop with laughter, as Liesse turned puzzled eyes upon him, but the rest of the room soon joined in—however briefly, as Geoff fought his way upright through the banner and turned a snake-blooded stare on the rest of them.
But Rynn was still chuckling as the Mayfair gang herded off once again, even if Liesse was elbowing him ferociously in efforts to keep him quiet. It only seemed to serve to amuse Rynn more. Eventually, under Liesse’s reproachful glance, he managed to settle down—just in time that she might turn away to discuss whatever frill-bedecked creations occupied the minds of teenage girls.
A dance. Well, well.
It seemed so frivolous. But who was Rynn to judge? He had very little experience of frivolity. He would have much rather given a ginger laugh and avoided the subject all-together. Especially once Cian was introduced—beautiful, tousle-headed Cian, with all his charm and wit. Of course it made sense that the girls would all love him. He sounded like he had quite a cadre of support within this city. At least he had that going in his favor. Cian had always been a popular sort.
Rynn simmered, but managed not to say anything too disgraceful. Besides, Liesse was waxing poetic about the dress of her dreams to Katie—
“with three tiers of ruffles, all venise lace, and a sweetheart neckline—bell sleeves to complement it, I think—”
which sounded like an absolutely ghastly expense, but the Mayfairs had the money to expend, didn’t they? Let her wallow in it, three tiers of lace and all. Liesse had gotten all of her ideas about fashion from her mother’s yellow-paged patterns, holed up in the attic for a good twenty years too long—it was finally time that she realized some of those tacky dreams. It was unlikely that they’d find anything along those lines at the local mall, but that was what tailors were for—and besides, Liesse would enjoy the chance to socialize with some of her peers for once. Being around all these tall, grave, wizardly types all the time couldn’t possibly be good for her.
Rynn resisted the impulse to comment on the girls doting on Cian. He didn’t quite remember what his supposed relation to the new Mayfair lord o’ the manor was supposed to be. Although, if that was Katie’s type, he was surprised that she accepted James—bloody nose and all—when he finally blurted out his somewhat pathetic invitation to the dance. Come on, boy. Rynn thought, and was surprised to see James’s eyes flick to his. He hadn’t meant to broadcast, but he continued on. None of those excuses, yeah? Just say it straight. You like her, after all.
But then James blinked and looked away, ‘round the room, and Rynn thought he had imagined it after all. Rynn did not have experience with high school. Perhaps he was doing the whole ‘social interaction with peers’ part wrong.
Liesse petered out about her dress just in time for the rest of their female companions to depart. She left them with a beaming hug and air-kisses, which she had seen once in an old movie and loved the idea of. (Cian had sold the VCR and television set shortly after he’d brought them home, presumably for drugs. Fallen off the back of the truck, etc. But the memory of that film stayed with Liesse for years.)
And the twins continued on, in their mis-matched bodies, swinging clasped hands and walking in perfect unison without thought—as they had always done, since childhood. It was a little too perfect to be real. “I’d be happy to help,” piped up Liesse, cheeks still aglow with a dreamy blush, thinking of childhood dreams come to fruition. “And it’s a corsage, Alistair.” she noted. “You have to get her one, too. I hear white is traditional…oh! and I could ask her favorite flower, too—“ Liesse lapsed into muttering and plotting under her breath.
But Alistair and James weren’t listening anymore, and it was only after a second lost in her own gltiter-bedecked fantasies that Liesse realized that they had gone. Rynn was stony-faced beside her, and she could sense tension in the air like the taste of iron. “…don’t let him fool you.” James speaking. There was dried blood on his face still. Most of it had been cleaned off, but there was a little caught on his upper lip.
“People aren’t easy for some of us,” said Rynn—mildly, but Liesse could hear the stiffness in his words that belied his state of mind. “You’re good at it, that’s all.” Their magic dwelt amongst the living. Rynn’s—that of the Calais— was amongst the dead. The dead didn’t need such coaxing and subterfuge as the poor mortals of this city.
But as quickly as it came, the thought vanished, chased away by an immediate threat. Thorne’s eyes met Rynn’s—in the light, for a moment, they flashed as tawny as a fox’s—
and the boy made an expression that was like the ghost of a smile, slipping across his lips. “You’re quite a keen sort, aren’t you? They were right.”
But Thorne did not seem intent on making a big fuss over the twins and their—however ludicrous—origin story—and so Rynn did not take offense. Liesse was a different matter. Her cheeks had turned from a daydream blush to the steaming pink of indignancy. “How rude,” she remarked, crossing her arms. “As if we had anything to hide.”
“Hush, darling.” And Rynn petted her head, absent-mindedly.
For a moment, as if they were children again, she leaned into his shoulder.
Then, with a sigh, the lean turned into a step, and she moved past him brusquely and went indoors.
Rynn stood outside for a good moment afterwards, feeling the chilly wind batter his cheek. He had a good coat, and the contrast—the sharp slap of cold against his skin—was somehow relaxing to experience.
So this was ‘high school’.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

While Alistair chuckled to himself at Rynn’s very typical reaction, Katie hummed to herself, checking the schedule in Liesse’s hands. “Oh, you’ve got English last, see? It’ll be fine, you can borrow someone’s notes during lunch.”
“I have a better idea,” Alistair hummed, grinning, and then turned towards the entryway, calling enthusiastically, “Hey, Fitz!”
The teacher paused in the hall, his arms full of books and stacks of paper neatly organized with paperclips and colored tabs, his glasses sliding down his nose as he tried to discern who had called for him. “Ah, Alistair,” he said when the boy waved, expertly pushing his glasses up with the corner of his shoulder, “Did you need something?”
“Not me,” he answered, pointing over his shoulder, “My cousins. There’s a test today, right?”
“Ahh…” He glanced at the papers in his arms, which were no help as the one he needed was buried in the middle, and then rolled his eyes thoughtfully before looking back at them, announcing decisively. “No, tomorrow.” Thorne quietly diverted his gaze, glancing innocently in every direction but at Rynn and Liesse. “Today is review. For you two, I’ll give you…” His brow furrowed, the teacher mumbling to himself, “Test is tomorrow, the paper is due Friday, and today’s…Monday? Monday. So…” He glanced up again, gaze flickering between Rynn and Liesse. “Thursday? You can take the test Thursday. I’ll go over everything with you in class later.” Glancing at Alistair, he asked with notably more concern, “How’s Dostoyevsky? You good with Dostoyevsky?”
“It’s fine,” Alistair assured him, as chipper as ever, and Mr. Fitzgerald nodded with deep relief.
“Good, good…I have to get to class, the bell’s going to---” He paused, eyes narrowing suspiciously as he swept a gaze across the entire lot of them. “Shouldn’t you be getting to class?”
Immediately, the students all began to scatter, Thorne calling stiffly after himself, “I wasn’t going to skip class, if that’s what you’re thinking. That’s ridiculous.”
The teacher sighed, rolling his eyes at the boy’s nervous, guilty laughter. “Go to class, Thorne.”
But Alistair waved his concerns away, laughing lightly. “It’s music class, Mrs. Ghast will come after him if he skips.” Turning slightly, he waved at the considerably smaller group still left, heading off the way Thorne had gone. “I’ll see you guys at lunch. Gretch, take care of Rynn for me!”
“Yeah, yeah…” the girl in question sighed, throwing an arm around Rynn’s shoulders. “Come on, pretty boy. To Latin.” Katie proved much more enthusiastic concerning her charge, linking arms with Liesse as they all bid each other goodbye and very nearly skipping off down the opposite hall.
Once they were away from the rest of the group---which Gretchen checked with a shifty gaze around the hall---she dropped her arm from his shoulders and lightly thumped him on the side of the head. “You should be nicer to him,” she sighed, shooting him a glance, “Or one of those frilly, giggling idiots is going to steal him away. Is that what you want?” She stopped him by pinching his sleeve, pointing out his locker, and busied herself shuffling around in her own several rows down. “You want Rowan to take your boytoy? Come on.” Slamming her locker shut again, she leaned her shoulder against it, giving Rynn a long, flat stare. “Come on. You’re better than that.” But then she shrugged, nodding in the direction of the classroom, and waited for him to follow. “Then again, he’s pretty single-minded when it comes to you. So…I don’t know. You do you, I guess.”
On the way into the classroom, Rynn was stopped by the considerably aged teacher, gray and wrinkled and slightly stooped over, who handed him his textbook and a number of study sheets to help get him caught up. “You can ask James if you have any trouble,” he concluded, gesturing at his cousin in the front row, buried in notes.
“I can look out for him, sir,” Geoff stepped in instead, sitting on the opposite end of the first row, with a markedly suspicious smile as he patted the desk beside his own.
“Ah, good,” the teacher answered, a little startled, gesturing for Rynn to take the empty seat, “Very kind of you, Geoff.”
“It’s nothing,” he purred, watching Rynn sharply as he sat down, muttering beneath his breath once the teacher wasn’t paying attention, “You know what trouble mongrels get into when they’re not kept on a leash.”
Behind them, there was a slight commotion as Gretchen physically kicked one of their classmates out of his seat, firmly planting herself in it instead. Sid, intrigued by the drama, hesitantly took the one next to her, directly behind Rynn, blinking curiously at Gretchen as she glared at the back of Geoff’s head.
“Traveling in packs now?” Geoff murmured surreptitiously, giving a half-glance over his shoulder, but only received a kick to the back of his chair in response. His eyes narrowed, jaw clenching and the very corner of his eye twitching, but did not retaliate. His record was too immaculate, he couldn’t jeopardize it. But Gretchen had given Alistair her word that she’d look after Rynn, and she intended to keep it.
Opening her book, she hissed covertly behind him, “You’re not pretty enough to be that sadistic, it’s not excusable.” Actually, that was a lie. Geoff was pretty enough to get away with just about anything, but she had hit him where it hurt and he all but snarled at it, eyes flashing dangerously.
Behind Rynn, Sid sat calmly and comfortably back in his seat, murmuring as he pointed at a picture on the indicated page, “Hey, look…snakes.”
That at least quieted the feud for the rest of the class so that they could focus on the lesson (or in Gretchen’s case, text behind the cover of her book). As soon as the bell rang, Geoff grabbed up his things and fled without even properly putting them in his bag. Gretchen wanted to credit herself with his sudden and uncharacteristic stroke of fear, but rather thought it had more to do with Alistair sticking his head in the door moments later.
Rolling his eyes, Sid sighed, “I was wondering who you were texting so furiously.”
“Hey,” Gretchen began in her own defense, throwing him a sharp look, “I said I’d look after Rynn. I never said I wouldn’t b***h about it. And when Geoff Parker’s involved, I’m going to b***h. It’s just going to happen.”
Tactfully, Alistair didn’t mention any of it. He only smiled when they joined him in the hallway, in his usual sunny disposition. “We’re all going the same way, right?”
Behind him, Thorne dragged himself to the group in breathless exhaustion, half-falling against Alistair as he wheezed, “You run too fast…”
But Alistair slapped a hand over his mouth, smiling that bit of information away. Gretchen just snickered. “Shall we go? Gretch, what do we have next?”
“English. Then chemistry, theater, and lunch. And Rynn had art next, so our classrooms will be on the same hall.” To Rynn she said, “I don’t know how you have the patience for art class, I have to move around.”
“It’s a good chance to nap,” Thorne murmured, dragging along behind the others, “I didn’t get my usual sleep in music class, Airi kept waking me up and insisting that I do things.”
“All I said was for you to get off of my piano. I couldn’t play with you sprawled across it.”
“The piano?” Quirking an eyebrow, Gretchen shook her head, pronouncing with dread, “I just figured it out, you’re a prince character. A legit prince character, straight out of a shoujo manga.”
Thorne gave a little jolt, glancing over at his cousin with bright eyes. “Egads, you are. You totally are.”
“I am not,” Alistair mumbled, his cheeks briefly flushing, but couldn’t even manage to say it with conviction. They were probably right.
Running into Katie and Liesse in the second-floor hallway, Gretchen greeted her immediately with, “Alistair’s a prince character.”
While the boy in question pouted, Katie clapped her hands together excitedly, eyes sparkling. “Oh my god, you’re right! Can we make him wear a tiny little crown?”
“We need glitter and rose petals,” Thorne added, with devilish glee.
But Alistair whined---adorably, they all noted---darting to hide behind Rynn. “Stop projecting your weird fantasies on me!”  

[Okimiyage]

In light of the foul time he’d had of it in class—Rynn knew very little Latin, that had always been the forte of his older brothers, and his pronunciation could be kindly described as ‘atrocious’—the Calais boy had to admit that he was…appreciative to see Alistair at the door. He came out clutching a sheaf of ‘recommended study guides’, as the teacher had put it, more than a little wild-eyed and muttering, “Conjugations, ha! Right. How hard could it be?” in the sort of manic tones normally associated with people entering lunatic asylums.
Stuffing the sheaf haphazardly into his school bag, Rynn wrenched the zipper shut with a tearing of paper and looked up, resolutely adopting a chipper grin with no small measure of desperation. Liesse had tried to explain that having a good attitude was important; Rynn figured that he could at least fake it until he made it. The Drama Club would not miss his talents. “Now what? Just as long as it doesn’t involve that Parker kid.”
He unfolded his creased schedule from his jacket pocket and glanced over it without waiting for an answer. Art class. Well, that would be fun. Rynn couldn’t remember if he’d ever even held a brush before; finger-painting seemed much more appropriate for his current level of experience. “Art class,” he repeated aloud, dully, as Thorne confirmed it. “Isn’t that all—scribbling and cubes and—“ he tried to recall some of the terms Aedan had been prone to use. “—deconstructionism, these days?”
He didn’t get an answer. Presumably, the question went unheard amidst the choking noises as Rynn found his neck suddenly encircled by vise-grips of death. “Rynn! I made a friend! Her name is Jacquelyn and she sits next to me in first period and she has the most marvelous handwriting and her schedule is full of stickers! See?”
Rynn’s vision was on the verge of going black, so he was weakly grateful when Liesse released him long enough to push her hair back and display the tiny, glittery heart stickers, in varying shades of blue and green, that had been adhered to her cheek.
Then, blinking, Liesse took a moment to assess the conversation that she’d walked into. As usual, her mouth had been way ahead of her brain. Skipping to the side of her brother while he massaged his throat, wheezing slightly, she shunted his school bag off to the side and clasped her hands behind her back. “What’d I miss?”
“Airi’s a prince,” came the thin, strangled response from Rynn, who was now being used as a human shield by the aforementioned aristocrat. Liesse’s eyes lit up at this. “Ooh. Yes. I can see that. He’d look wonderful in the proper regalia, wouldn’t he? White gold, I think, for the crown, it’d stand out so well against his hair. And the roses could be all shades of cream, like old parchment.” She looked hopefully at Gretchen and Katie. “Is there a Prom Court at the dance? Anything like it? We could hold a contest—“
“Liesse, leave the poor boy alone—“ “—hush, or we’ll put you in the family tiara, next—“
Rynn put his hands over his ears. “Don’t threaten me, woman, I’m your elder—“ “—not in this body, you aren’t.”
It could get really tiring being a twin. On the one hand, they could finish your sentences. On the other hand, they could interrupt them just as easily. Liesse knew how Rynn thought, and, Rynn was beginning to suspect, exactly how to handle him. It was like having a nagging old housewife at his side, and he was only sixteen.
With a dramatic sigh, dripping with feigned offense, he turned about on his heel. “I’m going to class,” he announced. “I don’t have time for these shenanigans.” Besides, he really didn’t care to draw attention to Liesse’s slip of the tongue. Better to pretend as if he had no idea what she was talking about.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Thoughtfully, his eyes darkening, Thorne murmured, “If you want to see Airi cosplay…hmm. He’d do it for Rynn, don’t you think?”
At Liesse’s question, Katie gave a very sudden start, lighting up with excitement. “Ah! That’s right, they crown a Spring King and Queen at the spring dance! Alistair’s totally a shoo-in, don’t you think?”
“He would be even if he wasn’t shiny and new,” Gretchen agreed with a sigh (this was not her thing), “You could probably even win Prom King next year, Airi. Geoff Parker would be your only real competition.”
Again lighting up, suddenly bright with excitement, Katie turned on Liesse, bouncing slightly on her feet. "Hey, you might be able to win Spring Queen, don't you think? Rowan always wins Homecoming Queen and she'll probably win Prom Queen, but the Spring Queen is always cute and sweet and refreshing, you know? She doesn't have a chance, but you totally do!"
"And then there'd be no threat from the queen when Alistair's king," Gretchen added quietly, so the boys wouldn't hear, shooting straight to the heart of Katie's fears so that she flushed vaguely in embarrassment.
"Ehehe...ah, even so! It's not like either of us have a chance, Gretch, and it'd be nice if we could cheer for one of our friends..."
“Courtland was Prom King, wasn’t he?” Thorne questioned meanwhile in a thoughtful hum to Alistair as the girls murmured and conspired amongst themselves.
“Yeah, his senior year. Nicolae was Prom King the year before that, and Evie was Prom Queen for three years.”
“I thought only juniors and seniors could be crowned?”
Alistair snickered, amused that Katie didn’t seem to know how his sister operated. “That’s true. Everyone voted for her anyway, and none of the faculty dared to call foul. Same thing with Homecoming Queen.”
Still thoughtful, Thorne continued, “And Malakai was Spring King for two years, right?” Airi nodded, tactfully not mentioning that Melody had been the Spring Queen. “And Mary Beth and Julien got all of those same crowns, right?” Again, he nodded. “…so you’d be a failure to your bloodline if you didn’t get crowned, right?”
Alistair froze, a look of horror dawning on his face as he shot Thorne his most hurt, betrayed eyes. Immediately, Katie and Holt were upon him, petting his hair and murmuring fretfully that it would be fine. Even Gretchen and Sid were somewhat moved by the sad puppy dog eyes, and Thorne scampered off down the hall before anyone could punish him for his grave misdeed. Immediately when he was gone, Alistair was bright and shimmery again. “I’m not even worried,” he laughed, “It’s not a big deal. But even so…I’ll definitely win.”
“Eh?” Gretchen blinked at him, confused. “Why’s that?”
For most of them, it was the first dark glimmer they’d ever seen from Alistair, flashing for the briefest fraction of a second deep in his eyes as he answered with a thin smile, “Because I’ll kill Geoff Parker before I lose anything against him.”
Katie seized up, grabbing Liesse by the arm as a terrified expression swept over her face that absolutely did not match the lustful sparkle in her eyes. “Black prince character…”
Gretchen flicked her in the forehead, groaning. “You’re creeping me out, otaku.” Shaking her head, she pointed down the hall, glancing to Alistair. “Come on, we’re this way.”
Smiling, Alistair threw his arms around Rynn’s neck in an affectionate stranglehold. “I know you’ll be lonely without me, but it’s only three more hours until lunch, so stay strong.”
Holt tilted his head uncertainly. “…you guys are close, huh?”
Airi stilled, his eyes narrowing at Holt as he said flatly, “He’s mine, hands off.”
While Holt blinked at the words, uncertain, Katie’s eyes went wide and sparkling, ecstatically tugging on Gretchen’s sleeve. “BL! Is it BL?! Am I dreaming?!”
But Airi just smiled, releasing Rynn and patting the top of Katie’s head. “That was just for you, okay?”
Before he could muddle the situation any further---because he was clearly enjoying the chaotic confusion---Gretchen dragged him off while he ecstatically waved goodbye and Holt was left staring between him and Rynn, muttering uncertainly, “I don’t get it, so it was a joke? What just happened?”
Poking his head out of the art room door, Thorne interrupted with, “Don’t overthink it, just get in here before the bell rings.”
Shrugging, he dropped the entire thing and obeyed, following into the room as Katie gave a shriek at the time and bolted down the hallway. Once inside, the decidedly dazed art teacher welcomed the Calais siblings warmly, pointing out the various stations and supply cabinets. “You can sculpt, draw, or paint,” she explained languidly, gesturing here and there, “There are art books on the shelves there if you need to look anything up, and you can always ask me if you need help. Today we’re focusing on scenery and the color blue.”
When she had drifted off back to her desk, Holt rolled his eyes, proclaiming shortly, “She’s useless, don’t bother. The whole class is useless, unless you just want a break. Or…” He glanced towards the corner where, very quietly, Thorne was wildly splattering red paint on a canvas, an alarmingly unusual look of intensity and razor focus on his face. “…you know. Sometimes you just have to kill a bunch of people on a canvas to stay sane, I guess.” He shrugged, slinging his blazer on the back of a chair and grabbing a smock hanging on the wall. “Hey professor, aren’t you missing some paintings?” he called then, pointing at the blank spaces on the wall where some of Malakai’s paintings had been.
Her red-rimmed eyes immediately teared up, hastily turning away as she whined, “I don’t want to talk about it!”
Holt sighed, shaking his head. “Whatever, I’m going to make a clay battle ax…”
Nearby, one of the other students piped up, “But we’re working on scenery today, shouldn’t you make a tree or something?”
“If I want a battle ax, I’ll make a battle ax!”
The boy watched him tromp off blankly, announcing once he was out of earshot, “…he can’t make a battle ax.” It was then that he turned his attention on Rynn and Liesse, brightening. “You’re Mayfairs, right? Liesse and…and…”
“Rynn,” one of the girls nearby supplied helpfully, before blushing to the tips of her ears and retreating behind her canvas.
In the corner, Thorne called to her loudly, “Don’t even think about it.” He really didn’t want to take even the smallest chance of invoking black Airi.
“I wasn’t thinking about anything!” she squeaked, panicking badly enough that everyone in the class knew she had been.
Meanwhile, the wall around the new students had been broken just enough by the exchange that the other students all began curiously inching closer to them, some of the bolder ones venturing to ask them questions that very quickly veered off into the usual sort of Mayfair gossiping.
“So you guys like, live in that house, right? The house? In the Garden District, with the ghosts?”
“Don’t be stupid Mike, there’s no such thing as ghosts. It’s just urban legends.”
“No, he’s right! My grandfather told me he went to that house once when he was a teenager and he started talking to a girl in the garden, and then she just vanished right before his eyes!”
“My uncle said he saw he saw them carrying a dead body out once in the middle of the night…”
“They say Julien’s a vampire, he never ages.”
“I heard he’s been every head of the family for centuries, he just uses different names.”
“Okay, that’s really stupid. They all look really different. And besides, he and Stefan were clearly different people. And I went to Stefan’s funeral, he’s definitely dead.”
“Oi!” Thorne called abruptly, glancing up from his canvas with furrowed brows, “Can you leave the dearly departed out of your gossip, please? Or else I’ll tell Antha on all of you.” The teenagers all abruptly froze, silenced with terror, before all darting back to their respective stations, heads bowed. Thorne snickered to himself at that, muttering, “Works every time…”
On everyone but Holt, who perked up ecstatically at the name, like a puppy. “Eh? Antha?!”
Thorne sighed, his expression flat. “Down, boy.”
Glancing at his canvas, the boy next to him gave a sudden jolt, stuttering fearfully, “Are you…are you killing her?!”
He blinked at his own work, admiring the wet gleam of the blood puddles. “No, she’s killing Julien. I was going to do it, but…that’s just unrealistic. So much effort.”
Inconspicuously, the empty space around Thorne expanded and the rest of the class grew more cramped.
“Here,” the boy from earlier offered congenially, all smiles, gesturing at the easel beside himself as he looked at Liesse, “You can work here if you want, it’s available. Ah, by the way, I’m Colby.”
In the corner, Thorne rose on tiptoes to glare over the top of his canvas, observing for a moment before announcing, “…you should kill him, Rynn.”
Flinching in shock, Colby called back at Thorne, “You’re frightening when you paint!”
“Art brings out the voices in my head…”
Quietly, the space around him grew a little larger again.
“But seriously,” Holt continued for him, already covered in wet clay up to his elbows, “Colby, you shouldn’t hit on his cousin. There’s too many Mayfairs at this school.”
Thorne nodded, still glopping red paint onto his canvas. “We’ll kill you over Liesse, you don’t even know. Well…not me, because effort, but Rynn and Courtland and Pierce for sure.”  

[Okimiyage]

Rynn choked only a little “Liesse, gerroff—“ before turning his head to find the current assault was coming from an entirely unexpected assailant. He made a half-hearted attempt to struggle. “I’ll be fine,” he said, stiffly. “It’s just art class, right? What could go wrong?”
Actually, maybe he shouldn’t tempt fate with that question. Drawing himself together, he gave Alistair a wavering, slightly frazzled attempt at a smile. “Anyways, Liesse will be there.” Noticing that Katie was about to go into a paroxysm of glee, Rynn leaned around Alistair and narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know what ‘bee ell’ is, but just don’t go around spreading it, you hear? If I hear Liesse squealing about—about crowns and ‘black princes’ by next period, I blame you.”
With a warning finger pointed in her direction, Rynn back menacingly down the hall again—menacingly, at least, until he bumped into an open locker door with a clang.
The art teacher gave off the decided impression, as the other students would have put it, of being ‘high as a kite’. Or maybe that was just her personality—Rynn wasn’t sure yet. Once inside the classroom, Liesse immediately claimed a space for the both of them at one of the long, narrow tables that lined the room, easels at each seat, and went to raid the cabinet for her medium of choice. She came back with an armful: pencils, crayons, oil pastels, watercolor tins, tubes of acrylics—all in varying shades of blue—and a array of brushes precariously balanced between her fingertips. “I couldn’t make up my mind,” she explained, unceremoniously dumping the burden on the table between them, then holding her hands out in a helpless shrug. “All she said was ‘blue’. And they all looked so nice.”
This was true. One of the benefits to attending a private academy was that they had a much larger budget for their extracurriculars; other schools made do with frayed and paint-encrusted brushes, or paints so old that they had mummified inside their containers, but not Sacred Heart. Despite himself, Rynn was intrigued, picking up a brush and twiddling it between his fingers while Liesse fetched aprons for the both of them. “Holt, a ceramic battle axe isn’t very practical, it’ll shatter as soon as you try to use it on anything—“ Holt wasn’t paying attention, or was out of earshot, or both. Rynn sighed, tapping the end of his brush against his lips, before he caught his name shuffled quickly amidst the conversations around him. “Huh?” Coming back to earth, Rynn realized that he was surrounded.

Quote:

“So you guys like, live in that house, right? The house? In the Garden District, with the ghosts?”
“Don’t be stupid Mike, there’s no such thing as ghosts. It’s just urban legends.”
“No, he’s right! My grandfather told me he went to that house once when he was a teenager and he started talking to a girl in the garden, and then she just vanished right before his eyes!”
“My uncle said he saw he saw them carrying a dead body out once in the middle of the night…”
“They say Julien’s a vampire, he never ages.”
“I heard he’s been every head of the family for centuries, he just uses different names.”
“Okay, that’s really stupid. They all look really different. And besides, he and Stefan were clearly different people. And I went to Stefan’s funeral, he’s definitely dead.”

Rynn was caught completely off-guard. There didn’t seem to be space to interject.
Liesse, on the other hand, was in her element. Coming up from behind the group, smocks clutched in hand, she pitched her voice perfectly to carry through the hubbub.
“Well, there aren’t any vampires or ghosts that I’ve seen, and presumably if any bodies have been carried out after dark, it was to take them to a morgue, but we do live there. And as nice as it would be to keep Oncle Julien around for all of eternity, I don’t think he could be a vampire, he doesn’t burst into flames in the sun or turn into a bat or anything interesting. He is a bit old-fashioned, so I suppose I could see how those rumors started, but honestly—“ Liesse flipped her hair over her shoulder in an unconscious imitation of a L’Oreal commercial, “—do you believe everything that you hear about that house? Next thing you’ll be accusing us of being pod people, or having—having zombies in our basement, for heaven’s sakes. We’re really not as horrid as you all seem to imagine.”
It was well-played, Rynn had to admit. There was just the right balance of light-hearted denial and sarcasm, and the delicate implication of slander at the end would be enough to keep any more questions from being posed. Plus, the way she turned her limpid blue eyes around the circle at the end, like some plaintive victim of rumor—well, Rynn had to put his head down and struggle to maintain a straight face.
Anyways, Thorne’s comment was enough to have them all sprinting back to their work stations like frightened rabbits. “You should join the Drama Club,” Rynn muttered, as Liesse took her seat between Colby and himself once more. “They need talent like yours,” Liesse primly picked up her brush, dipped it in blue watercolor, and made a thickly haphazard stroke across the canvas. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“See? You’re a natural.”
Luckily, before anyone could notice their whispering, Colby interrupted the conversation. “Liesse,” Rynn’s sister answered warmly, stretching out a hand that was already smudged with cerulean blue. “But you already knew that, didn’t you? Nice to meet you, anyways.” Her grin was unapologetically genuine. “So do you actually paint in this class, or is it more of a glorified study hall?”
As she spoke, Liesse had been busy tying up her hair in a high ponytail, to keep it from dripping into any of the paint. She might as well have not bothered; at Thorne’s comment, her head whipped around so fast that the end of her ponytail smacked the still-wet paint on her canvas. “Thorne Mayfair, saying things like that, it’s no wonder everyone in school thinks we’re living with vampires or some other nonsense. And Rynn doesn’t need any of your encouragement to commit cold-blooded murder, thank-you-very-much.” “Not that I could do it in class, anyways,” Rynn added, in a much milder tone than his sister. “I think she can handle this one by herself.” Getting up, he circled the rows of tables to stand behind Thorne for himself. “…I thought the theme for today was ‘landscapes and blue’, not ‘murder and cadmium red’.” he said, thoughtfully putting his hand to his chin. “That stuff drives you insane, you know? Cadmium. Red, too. They say that if you sleep in an all-red room, you’ll go nuts. Something to do with color psychology, I think.”
Liesse waited for a moment, to make sure there were no further outbursts from Thorne, before she turned back to Colby. “Anyways. Don’t pay any attention to them, they’re all bark and no--" She reconsidered that statement, and amended it to, "--very little bite. What are you working on?”  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

While Liesse scolded the rest of the class, Thorne gave a heavy sigh to himself and then stood still, waiting.
Once their classmates withdrew, it happened as he knew it would, with furtive glances and whispers behind the cover of their hands, the usual keywords---‘Mayfair’, ‘ghosts’, ‘murder’, those sorts of things, a great deal more vicious than anything they would say to a Mayfair’s face. Shuffling up beside Liesse under the guise of looking at her work, Thorne whispered inconspicuously, “They’re going to talk. They’re always going to talk. If you try to deny any of it, to stop them, they talk behind your back and they say even worse things. You can’t deny it, you have to ignore it, terrify them, or amuse them, because then it’s just a joke, an urban legend.” He laid an affectionate hand heavily on the top of her head, careful not to ruffle her hair. “‘The lady doth protest too much.’ When they think the gossip bothers you, it turns into a big deal.”
Honestly, that was how he had made friends with his group, and why James had so naturally gravitated towards them, despite the fact that Thorne and James had very little in common with the rest of them. They didn’t care. Holt and Tyler liked to tease them about the rumors, but none of them actually cared, and they sure as hell didn’t pounce on all of the vicious gossip like everyone else in the room was doing at the moment, shooting furtive glances at the three Mayfairs present.
“Hey, do you think I could give someone a concussion with this?” Holt called across the room, needlessly loud, displaying the heavy lump of clay that somewhat resembled a battle ax.
“I think Antha would bury you in a shallow grave if you tried to hit Cian with it,” Thorne answered flatly, to which Holt guiltily pursed his lips, caught.
“…what about Tyler?”
“Eh? Yeah, sure, go for it. I didn’t see a thing. Did you guys see anything?” Distracted, the rest of the class quit gossiping to snicker at the exchange, all agreeing that they weren’t witnesses to the possible future crime. “But for real,” he continued then, seriously, “You’ve got to stop conspiring against Cian. You’re never going to get Evie.”
He pouted, whining pathetically, “But she’s so hot, and she smells nice, and she scares the living hell out of meeeee~!”
The chatter around the room all stopped abruptly, one of the boys suddenly exclaiming, “Wait, Holt…did you meet her?!”
“I did!” he squealed, instantly reinvigorated by the prospect of bragging, as the entire class instantly rushed to crowd around him, “She smiled and talked at me and everything!”
“She…talked at you?”
“He totally clammed up,” Thorne explained before Holt could brush it off, “He didn’t say a damn word to her, she thinks he’s mentally challenged.”
The group all burst into laughter at that, simultaneously cajoling and comforting him as his mood visibly soured. “Maybe it was a love spell, you just got caught and you’ll never be free again.”
“If there was any love spell, it was her eyes! Her beautiful, beautiful eyes!” Holt snapped gruffly, offended at the suggestion.
Thorne, shuffling back over to his own easel in the corner, sighed, muttering to Rynn and Liesse, “These people are all idiots. Just steer into the skid.”
Colby, meanwhile, was chuckling to himself, making gentle strokes that turned the green blotches on his canvas into trees. “It’s the view of the lake from my family’s summer house,” he answered as easily as if he’d practiced it a hundred times, sweeping back a lock of fair hair with the corner of his wrist so as not to get paint on himself, “Lots of blue, right? Sky, lake, flowers…it seemed like the right choice.”
Meanwhile, Thorne scowled at him inconspicuously in the corner, glancing around his canvas. It wasn’t that he hated Colby in particular, just that he was exactly the same as half the other guys in the school and Thorne hated their type the most, self-entitled rich playboys with a polished veneer and little pits full of ichor and spiders where their souls were supposed to be. He could almost forgive them their ways when they were honest about it, but ones like Colby had the charming, angelic façade down to an art and Thorne despised the conniving duplicity of it all. It reminded him too much of his mother.
Irritably, he said nothing more to him. Rynn was right, Liesse could probably handle it herself, and she was going to have to get used to handling it anyways, in this school. Instead he stabbed at his canvas with red paint, muttering to Rynn beneath his breath, “Don’t let them fool you, they know. Everyone in this city knows. How could they not, with the s**t that goes down around here? But their brains can’t handle it, so they all pretend it’s ridiculous.” He sighed so deeply that his entire body sagged, dropping his paintbrush with a clatter onto the little table beside him. “Everyone knows exactly what you are Rynn, don’t ever forget that. They talk themselves into not believing it because they can’t handle it, but everyone knows. You can’t deny it, but you can’t directly admit to it either. All you can do is play along, or else you’re the enemy and they’ll all gang up against you. Because they’re in denial but they love it, the mystery and drama and danger.” Wiping his hands together, he stood up and shrugged off his smock, looking with admiration at his depiction of Antha stabbing Julien in a giant, bloody mess. “Tyler and Gretchen and their group are just about the only people in this school that won’t nag us incessantly about it, they’re the only ones that just don’t care about it.”
Taking up his wet painting to hang it on the drying rack, he glanced across the room to where Holt was adamantly ignoring every question his classmates threw at him about the house and the Mayfair witches in favor of talking about Antha’s voice, or Antha’s smile, or any of his creepy stalker obsessions with Antha. “Are you starting to see their appeal as friends? They’re freakin’ idiots, but they’re the only ones here who are ever going to look past the witch stigma.”
“Who’s an idiot?” Holt questioned, joining them to look at Thorne’s painting as he delicately cradled the blade of his clay ax in his hands, waiting for it to start drying.
“You are, you dolt,” Thorne sighed, drifting off towards the drying rack.
“I resent that!” he hissed, holding up the mushy ax blade, “You just wait until this is finished!” But he rebounded quickly enough, turning his attention instead on Rynn. “You’re not going to paint today? It’s fine, just draw a stick figure on the canvas. That’s the great thing about art class, Mrs. Harris isn’t allowed to grade us on how good our work is, just that we made some kind of effort. Oh, and speaking of being irresponsible, are you coming to margarita Monday with us tonight? It’s great, we get Tyler sloppy drunk and he gets ultra-British and sings terrible karaoke. Of course that means he’s probably going to try to choke Alistair…with his tongue…” He paused, pursing his lips. “His drunk crush on him is really awful. You think he called just to chat last night before he broke into Gretchen’s room?” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t be surprised, he used to get pretty bi over Miles when he was drunk freshman year. Should I be offended that he never got bi-curious on me? I mean…I’m hot, right? Right?”  

[Okimiyage]

Liesse took a deep breath, and let it out all at once in an aggravated whoosh.
“Well, they wanted to know. I’m sorry that it’s not all the mystery and skullduggery that they expected. Would it be better if I tried to invite them all over for a Halloween party and let them decide for themselves?”
Not that that would end any better for the Mayfairs.
Rynn found himself hastily trying to stifle his own smile, as Liesse settled into the seat next to him and shot him a mean side-eye. “Don’t laugh about it, for heaven’s sakes. Honestly, it’s like you want everyone to be scared of you…”
“Well? If they are, at least they’ll leave me alone.” he shrugged off the criticism.
Liesse gave a slight smile. “They’ll never leave you alone, Rynn. You’re too pretty.”
Rynn’s cheeks turned a dull red as he glowered, picked up his paintbrush, and abruptly devoted his attention to painting instead of responding.
Liesse, deprived of entertainment for the moment—unless she wanted to add her voice to the throng currently cheering on Holt’s murderous ambitions—globbed another stroke of electric-blue paint onto her canvas.
“This is my first time painting,” she admitted to Colby. “I figured I’d do some kind of flower-bush or something. Yours is looking great, though! The image must be fresh in your mind—did you go there this summer? Where’s it at?”
Rynn, meanwhile, was careful to keep his conversation with Thorne on low volume, as he drew his long, narrow lines of blue paint across the canvas. “It’s not that I never saw the ‘appeal’ of Tyler and Gretchen’s friendship,” he admitted. “And I don’t think they’re idiots, either. Not entirely, anyways. I just…”
His brush paused, blue paint dribbling down from its tip before he withdrew his hand. “It’ll be harder for them if we do make friends. They’re not exactly…well-equipped for the sort of lifestyle that your family leads, are they?” Another long, calculated stroke of the brush. “It’s really kinder this way, if they don’t get involved.”
Cocking an eye at Holt, as he bounded up with infallible enthusiasm, wodgy ax clutched in hand, Rynn added, “And I am so going to paint.” Regarding his work, he couldn’t help but feel a tinge of pride in his chest. “It’s a maze.” Rynn explained. “As seen from above. Technically it’s a sort of landscape, isn’t it? Just a different perspective.”
The heart of the maze was a great whorl of a vortex, a blue so deep that it seemed almost black, and thin washes of gouache in the same cyclical patterning emanated from it nearly to the edge of the canvas. “Rynn, isn’t that a bit like cheating?” Liesse admonished. “It’s not a proper landscape at all, where’s the horizon line and—“ she glanced hastily at the blackboard, where vocabulary terms could be discerned with effort amongst the sea of doodling, “—vanishing points and everything?”
“It’s abstract, Liesse,” Rynn responded, with no small amount of self-satisfaction. He’d been paying attention to the blackboard, too. “Anyways, what’s that on your canvas? I thought that you were going to draw Alistair in his little prince costume.” “Cosplay, Rynn,” Liesse corrected him, rolling her eyes as though it was embarrassing to be related to him. She’d probably gotten this from Katie, Rynn reflected grimly.
“It’s…flowers.” For once, Liesse looked embarrassed. It had started out as flowers, anyways. Roses, to be precise; Liesse liked roses. And from a certain angle, it did bear a certain resemblance to her beloved rose bushes. If you squinted. And perhaps stood back at a good distance. The paint had been practically trowelled on in places, it stood out so thickly—like the reverse of a trompe-l’oeil, with carved trenches delineating the shape of petals and leaves. Rynn almost wanted to laugh, but it would have offended her pride. “You could always take lessons,” he suggested. “I’m sure Malakai would help if you wanted to get a bit more…representational with it.”
Liesse couldn’t exactly balk at this idea. She’d take whatever excuse she could to spend more time with Malakai, Rynn knew.
Smearing blue paint across his smock as he wiped his hands against his thighs, Rynn stood up and walked around the edge of the desk to glance over the rest of the class’s easels. Thorne’s stuck out from a sea of pastel washes like a sore, bloody thumb. “Mystery, drama and danger, huh?” he murmured, unthinkingly. “You know, you should hang out with Antha some more. You’d be amazed how quickly the charm of all that wears off.” Thorne might have felt differently about all that if he’d lost one or two of his own siblings to the folly of arcane, heretical rites.
Then again, maybe not. The Mayfairs were a strange crowd, their lineage soaked in carnage and cruelty. “Do you often do paintings of her, by the way? And does she know about it?” Rynn couldn’t decide whether Antha would think it was tacky or whether she’d want to hang them up in the house.
As for Holt’s invitation—Rynn glanced over to Liesse quickly, who was pretending that she hadn’t heard as she hung up her ‘painting’ on the drying rack alongside Thorne’s. “It is a school night, but I guess we could come out for a little while. Where’s it at?” His smile was forced, but the sentiment behind it was genuine—at least, until Tyler’s name was mentioned. It got a little more brittle after that. “Er—right. I don’t think that I know Miles, but I’m sure you’re more than adequately attractive for most. It’s a matter of taste, of course—I mean, you could take a poll in class, here, but remember that these are people who just watched you enthusiastically paint an incredibly bloody murder scene…and that…tends to be a little off-putting. Anyways, are you suggesting that you’d even want a sloppy drunken make out session with Tyler?”  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Holt didn’t give his answer much thought, only how to phrase it, quietly pursing his lips. “No…” he muttered lowly, giving a shifty gaze, and then added sharply---the crux of the discussion, “But I’d like to be considered. I mean I’m not as pretty as Alistair or…well, you, but it hurts me not to be noticed at all.”
“You totally want to make out with him,” Thorne said with utter conviction.
But Holt wasn’t paying him any attention, instead giving Rynn a distinctly uncomfortable side-eye. His reaction to his joke bothered him and, after a few moments of consideration, he murmured uncertainly, “You really…I mean, you two aren’t…like, you would tell us if…right?” Unusually, Holt blushed. Thorne had never even seen it before, and he stared at the boy as he awkwardly scratched his nose and hastily muttered, “Nevermind, it’s none of my business.” Alistair had passed his earlier show off rather easily as a joke, but suddenly Holt wasn’t so sure. Certainly he and Rynn were different with each other than with everyone else; Rynn was simultaneously more comfortable and more tense around him, while Alistair was always gravitating subtly around Rynn---protecting him, saving him, possessively claiming him when someone else seemed to be getting too close. He’d never paid it any attention before, it came off so naturally, but now that he’d noticed, he couldn’t not notice.
When he’d scampered off to store his work to dry, Thorne hummed to himself, sharp-eyed, noticing everything but saying nothing. Instead he glanced at his painting, answering Rynn quietly now that no one else was in earshot. “You know Antha used to babysit me, right? My mother was never home and technically my brother was supposed to do it, but he was always…compromised. Antha came over to watch me because she was younger, she wasn’t into partying yet. She was…scarier, back then. Way, way, way scarier. Everything was black and white with her---if someone pissed her off, her mind went straight to murder. If I cried, she locked me in the closet to show me it was futile. If I asked for food, she threw me out in the yard with a hunting knife. If I said I thought there was a monster under my bed, she put one there to desensitize me. She absolutely tortured me. She wasn’t the only one, Pierce nearly drowned me twice and Courtland burned off all of my hair, but Antha was the worst by leagues.” He would never say it, but Antha was the reason he talked so rarely and slept so often. It had been his defense mechanisms. “The Antha now, the one who knows she's crazy, who differentiates between who should be tortured and who shouldn’t…she’s a piece of cake. Because she is a psychopath, there’s no way around that, but she knows how to direct it. And there is a charm in that…in someone realizing their flaws and turning them around, utilizing them. Say what you will about Antha, she knows what she is and she owns it.” Rustling around in his bag, he retrieved a pen and yanked the cap off with his teeth, scribbling his name and the title of the work across the back of the canvas for his grade. “And I don’t, usually. Malakai’s the one who likes to paint her. She makes a nice model, y’know? And I wanted to paint Julien getting murdered. She would be the one to do it, don’t you think?” He shrugged, relinquishing his work to the rack, and set about tidying himself back up just in time for the bell to ring.
He paused, hauling his backpack onto his shoulder, and pursed his lips, looking Rynn plainly in the eye. “But don’t you think…” He thought to himself for another moment. Thorne knew most things, but he didn’t always know how to actually say them. “You and Antha have some kind of weird history, and I know you annoy the ******** out of each other…but don’t you think you’ll regret it later if you don’t make up with her? Like in five years, when your niece and nephew are asking you about their mother, don’t you think you’ll regret that all you two did was snap at each other and then she died horribly?” He shrugged again---Thorne was practically made out of careless shrugs and sighs---his eyes giving a brief, all-knowing gleam. "Besides…it would make Airi happy.” Returning to his normal voice from the secretive murmur, he departed with the advice, “Don’t let Geoff bully you, alright? See you at lunch.”
“We meet in the courtyard, a’ight?” Holt reminded them with a little wink as he headed for the door, dried clay still caked beneath his nails and in the crevices of his fingers.

The twins were some of the last arrivals to the lunch table two hours later. Gretchen was already scowling at something or another, Tyler seated languidly up on the tabletop with Alistair seated down between his legs, the former weaving little braids into the latter’s glossy scarlet curls. Airi himself had an even brighter, more sparkly aura around him than usual, the most chipper smile on his face as he sorted through the massive bag of assorted chocolates and cookies and tiny muffins in his arms, happily scarfing them all down. Holt, seated beside him, was pouting fiercely at the sweets.
Gretchen glanced up at Liesse and Rynn’s arrival, pointing at Alistair and sighing, “The home economics classes were all working on baking today. I swear he got every single thing that got made in that room today as a present.”
“And caramels,” the boy in question added brightly, chewing at a piece of chocolate held against his lips. He was starting to remind Gretchen a little of a chipmunk. It was infuriatingly adorable. “Want some?” he offered sweetly, holding the bag out to Liesse and Rynn.
Katie swatted lightly at his arm, shaking her head. “You can’t do that, those are special candies. They’re filled with those girls’ feelings for you!”
“And two guys,” Gretchen added, casually enough.
But Airi cocked his head, like he didn’t understand. “It’s just classwork,” he dismissed it easily.
“I’m telling you, it’s more than that!”
“He knows,” Thorne murmured, leaning heavily on his fist over the table, “He just wants to keep it all without guilt. Airi will lie through his teeth for sweets.” Alistair said nothing, just grinned guiltily and took up another piece of chocolate, remorseless.
“Oi, hold still,” Tyler told him sharply, his fingers stilling in his hair.
Alistair did no such thing, fully turning his head to look at Rynn and Liesse. “How were your classes?”
“Colby was hitting on Liesse in art,” Holt reported, nodding gravely to himself.
Tyler’s brows knitted. “Colby? Isn’t he still getting sued for paternity?”
“His dad’s lawyers got him off,” Holt scoffed.
Scowling hotly at her apple, Gretchen hissed, “Disgusting. This is why I hate you ******** rich kids, you’re too used to never taking responsibility.”
This drew Katie finally out of her textbook, over which she had been hastily scribbling notes. “I don’t think that’s true. I mean, look at…um…ahhh…” They all let her flounder for a moment in silence, letting her realize her mistake. “Well, Alistair’s pretty responsible, right?”
He looked at her over Tyler’s knee, curious for a split second and then beaming proudly as he corrected her, “I’m a monster.”
Katie startled at that, wide-eyed and flushed. Tyler and Holt cracked up, Gretchen snickering as she muttered, “You have the most disturbing way of saying terrible s**t so, so sweetly.” The boy just shrugged.
“More importantly,” Tyler cut in, excitedly changing the subject, “We have to get Rynn laid tonight.”
That caught Alistair’s attention, subtly. “Leave it, Ty. He doesn’t need help.”
But he shook his head, tugging lightly on a strand of his hair. “Come on, he’s gorgeous and all, but he’s socially inept and it’s bloody tragic to be a virgin.”
Gretchen, knowing better, attempted to smooth it over with the low warning of, “Ty…”
“He’s not,” Airi snapped before he could stop himself.
Mercifully, Tyler didn’t notice the brief glimmer of what Gretchen and Thorne instantly recognized as possessiveness in his sudden excitement. “Oi! Thornie bro, you lied.”
“Did not,” he muttered, but didn’t dare explain. Alistair was too terrifying to cross, particularly where Rynn was concerned.
“Have a brownie, Ty,” Alistair said, quickly but casually, nearly shoving it into his mouth, “I hate walnuts.”
“So this stupid dance Friday,” Gretchen began immediately, “Since I have to go---” She shot Katie her sharpest, nastiest glare, and the other girl hid sheepishly behind book and hair. “---should we all like, go together, or separately?”
“Together,” Tyler said firmly, slightly garbled with the food in his mouth, and then added with a wicked grin, “That way no one will notice you and Katiekins are going stag. Unless you’ve changed your mind?”
Gretchen scowled, but quickly recomposed herself, smirking tauntingly, “Go with you? Ha! Airi’s my date.”
The boy in question expectantly flashed his most innocent puppy dog eyes, the kind that no one ever had any hope of staying mad at, just as the corner of Tyler’s eye began to twitch. “She made me! She said she needed someone to keep the creepy guys off of her, I had no choice! It’s just good manners!”
“And I told James I’d go with him,” Katie added in a huff, offended that he assumed she couldn’t get a date.
Tyler was briefly put out, his eyebrows pinching into a deep ‘V’ as he considered the new situation. And then, abruptly, he swung one leg over Alistair’s head and spun around on the table, scooting forward until he sat cross-legged in front of Liesse with his chin in his hands, a smile on his face that promised he wanted something. “What about it, kitten?” he asked, so very sweetly, batting his eyelashes, “You and me? I’ll buy you a corsage and everything.” And then, glancing at Rynn, quickly added, “And I won’t even make a move on you.” He paused, breaking suddenly into a wolfish grin, and winked at her. “Unless you want me to.”
Gretchen punched him squarely in the ribs. “******** idiot…”
He ignored her, barely squirming away from her ever-ready fist, and grabbed up Liesse’s hand to squish pleadingly in his own. “Pleeeeeeease? Don’t make me go alone, I might legitimately die of loneliness.”
“But then who’s Rynn going to go with?” Katie mused with genuine concern, “He can’t be the only one going alone, that’s not right.”
“It’s not much worse than going with your sister,” Holt pointed out, “But you should decide quick, before Rowan realizes you don’t have a date.”
“Like Rynn’s going to have any problems getting a date,” Tyler scoffed, rolling his eyes and pinching both of Rynn’s cheeks, “With this face? Please. He could steal your date if he wanted.”
“Please don’t,” Holt said earnestly, pouting at Rynn, “It was hard work getting her to go with me. And she’s a sure thing. I need this.”
“Ah, give him a little credit,” Tyler laughed, patting the boy’s shoulder, “Just pick a girl and ask her, mate. Your chances are bloody brilliant with any of them.”
Carefully, Alistair made not a sound throughout the conversation. But Gretchen, glancing covertly at him, could just make out the sharp, murderous glimmer in his eyes. He was really a rabidly jealous little thing, ironically, and it amused her.  

[Okimiyage]

Rynn and Liesse were separated for the next two periods, which meant that he had more than adequate time to think on Thorne’s words—and more than adequate time to embarrass himself, at least where the academics were concerned. Rynn had always been prone to rely on his siblings for counsel and direction—they were to engineers as Rynn was to a nuclear power plant. While Aedan had calculated property tax and financial assets, Rynn only had to worry about the ancestors. He’d never pictured a day when he would have preferred to go back to a house full of ravenous spirits than deal with the next page of fractional division geometry or whatever this class was called.
Which meant he had plenty of attention to divert towards what Thorne had said in art class.
In a way, he was perplexed. Everyone, inside and out of the family, seemed to think that he and Antha had some kind of enormous, roiling undercurrent of animosity flowing between the two of them. Rynn wasn’t entirely certain where this perception came from; to his mind, the Calais and Mayfair scions were entirely square. He’d tried to kill her; she’d killed 3/4ths of his family in retribution. He’d forgiven her on account of the one that she’d brought back, but that didn’t mean they had to be bosom buddies afterwards. Besides, she was with Cian now, wedded and bedded and all that nonsense. Rynn…didn’t want to overstep his boundaries. There was no denying that there was some kind of strong connection between Antha and himself—Cian wouldn’t say it to Rynn, directly, but he’d heard his older brother’s thoughts, ‘They look at each other like they’re about a needle’s width away from either ******** killing each other or just plain ******** best way Rynn could describe it was ‘animal magnetism’, but it was a little too much like what others would have called ‘chemistry’ for his own comfort. Probably the kind of chemistry that blew up buildings, what did he know? But as much as he hated to admit it, Thorne was right. It would make Airi happy, wouldn’t it? And Cian, even. With that in mind, it seemed selfish to hold out…
Rynn didn’t quite know, himself, why he’d refused to make peace with Antha. Perhaps it was because it was what was expected, and Rynn hated the thought of duty for duty’s sake. Perhaps it was because he felt, quite strongly, that someone needed to say ‘no’ to her every once in a while. Antha was beautiful, rich and powerful—by all rights, she ought to have intimidated him into complacency, like anyone else in the house, the city, only—perhaps he was jealous, he couldn’t be sure—only sometimes, hearing stories about her, he couldn’t help but be reminded of a temperamental, cosseted child. Perhaps it was mere pettiness that made him want to resist her charms, to refuse to fall in love with her like everyone else had. Although he hadn’t done much better as far as finding an alternative—Alistair was pretty much as close as you could get to dating Antha without actually dating Antha. That was, if Rynn was willing to admit that he *was* in love…’falling’ for another man, no less…
He was still musing over the complexities of relationships when the bell rang for lunch. While the rest of the class all but bolted out of their seats, the Calais boy took his time shuffling his classwork back into its textbook (five out of forty problems completed in the last half-hour—pathetic) and stowing his pens safely away in his bag. For some reason, he wasn’t eager to get to the courtyard, but it was only when he reached it—it took a little time for him to find Liesse in the swarming hallways—that he realized why.
Alistair was there.
The comparison to a prince didn’t seem so off, suddenly, the way the coterie had unconsciously arranged themselves around him, a bag stuffed full of sweets in his lap. He radiated amongst them, like a tiny, flame-headed sun, the rest of them caught in his orbit.
Liesse happily plopped down amongst the others, the stickers on her face winking in the light as her cheeks lifted with a grin. “Home Ec. got to make sweets today? Airi, what’d you make? Rynn wants to try some.”
“I don’t even like sweets.”
“Rynn, you have to help. Airi can’t eat all this by himself.”
Picking through the proffered bag, Liesse held out a caramel to her brother. “Here, put this in your jaw and stop fussing.”
Rynn glared and crossed his arms. With a shrug, Liesse popped the caramel into her own mouth, promptly gluing her jaw shut. Rynn had no recourse but to answer for both of them when Airi inquired about their classes. “It was alright,” he said with a shrug. “The math teacher thinks I’m cognitively impaired, but that’s fine, I think he is, too. I’ve already got acres of homework, though…”
Pulling out his lunch, he conscientiously focused on unpacking as Ty changed the subject with enthusiasm.
“Honestly, I don’t understand all of the hullaballoo over ‘getting laid’,” Rynn muttered, almost but not quite under his breath. “It’s not like anyone’s keeping score, you don’t get a prize for—for the number of notches in your bedpost or anything.”
“It’s a matter of ego,” Liesse said, matter-of-factly, unsticking her jaw with some effort. “Tyler’s got none, that’s why he has to seek out validation from the opposite sex.”
Liesse’s previous class had been Health, and she’s spent the period largely picking through the ‘psychology’ section in the course book.
She had some theories to test on Rynn, but that would have to wait. He needed his privacy—unlike Tyler, who seemed to thrive on making a spectacle of himself.
“Can’t,” Liesse said, with a small, slightly apologetic smile, yanking her hands out from underneath Tyler’s after his ludicrous proposal. “I’m going with Malakai. Wouldn’t be right to show up on another man’s arm.”
“Hang on,” Rynn interjected. “I thought Malakai was already graduated. Is that even allowed—“
“I’ll go with him in spirit, dammit.” Liesse’s fist slamming against the table in defiance made a very small, unimpressive thunk against the wood-grain. She winced. “…Look, it’s supposed to be a fairy-tale evening, alright? I couldn't even stand myself afterwards. Would you rather have Cinderella, or—or Swan Lake? If Odette shows up and—and the prince is dancing with Odile—well, we all know how that ends—“
Rynn put his chin in his hand and gave his sister a weary look. “I mean, I don’t, but I can sort of see what you’re getting at. So what about Tyler, though?”
“What about him?” Liesse raised her chin, making a valiant attempt at being cold-hearted and haughty for Malakai’s sake. “You two could always go together.”
Rynn had been about to take a sip from his thermos, but stopped swiftly before he could sputter and swallowed hard. “Uh, isn’t that against school policy or something?” He was very pointedly not looking at Alistair. “I mean, you’re not even sure if Malakai can go or not. I thought we’d just….”
“Rynn,” Liesse said, casting him a dour glance. “If I can’t go with Malakai, I’m going alone. You and Tyler might as well team up and decimate the female population of the school, right? You’ll be the life of the party.”
“I don’t want to be the life of the party, thank you very much, that’s why I have you.” He noticed the look that Liesse was giving him, finally. “Why don’t we just go as a threesome? A man for either arm?” he suggested, attempting compromise half-heartedly. Liesse shook her head, red hair cascading over her shoulders. "You think that wouldn't look even worse?"
"Well, I'm not going with a total stranger," Rynn said, stubbornly. "I don't want to break some random girl's heart over the punch bowl when I tell her that she's an utter bore and I had to bring a flask of whiskey with me in order to tolerate her company."