Taint (Formerly Claimed) Dark Midnight 1

Chapter 23

*This chapter was pretty annoying to write (pretty much, because it's essential in what I plan for the future, but idk, this was really hard to iron out.  Therefore, some things might not make sense because I  tried my best to edit, so as always let me know and I'll do my best to fix it.  :)*

The day didn’t start out so bad. 

            Sure, she caught some odd looks on her way across the parking lot, but once she entered the school everything was business as usual; no one paid much attention to her.

She stopped by the front office to drop off some made-up absence excuse to a barely interested secretary. 

After that, first period flew by with little incident. The next few barely even registered as a blur in her memory. 

By Mrs. Clark’s math class, she’d forgotten all about the seizure the other day—along with pretty much everything else.

            Everything but him.

He dominated her thoughts. 

            Hell, he was all she could think about.

            The feel of his jacket around her was all she could focus on; nothing else made sense.

            To be fair, it was a really nice jacket.  The quality was something way beyond anything she could afford on her own; Italian made maybe. 

            Against the red of her dress the dark leather almost seemed to glow, and somehow, wearing it she didn’t feel quite so stupid for sporting a dumb dress in the middle of winter.

Oddly enough, no one else seemed to notice or care that she wore a priceless jacket over a Christmas dress, though—at least in fourth period math—mostly everyone seemed to be trying hard enough just not to look at her at all. 

            She could see them from the corner of her eye, the few times she managed to pay enough attention.  They’d peek and glance away quickly as if to just check that she was really there. 

            That she was real.

            Another time, the stares would have stung, but after a while she stopped even caring.  Her vision blurred around the edges as the teacher began to drone on about equations, and her mind started to wander again…

And the thoughts of Eliot drifted back.

            He was strange.

As the first period English teacher would say, he was a conundrum; a complicated, complex puzzle she couldn’t help but want to solve. 

            The guy had broken into her house because he thought she needed help. 

He didn’t know her from Eve, and yet he’d been concerned the moment she didn’t follow some predictable routine—the moment he’d sensed something was wrong.

            She wasn’t used to someone paying that much attention to her. 

          Call her old fashioned, but she liked to keep her distance from people—as if it wasn’t easy enough.  These days she was lucky to catch a second glance.

            From her father.

            From anyone. 

            It was a rare occurrence when someone just happened to remember her name, or managed to call her anything other than ‘the new girl,’ or worse, ‘that kid with epilepsy.’