The Caesar Cipher

Chapter 2: Marlene Jacobs

Do you get déjà vu, huh?

"MARLENE!" Charlie (my twin sister) shrieked, covering her ear with her hand as she almost kicked me in the guts through the dirty white blanket before groaning and pulling it up over her face.

"Get your arse out of the bed! Mum's called you nine times!" I screamed back at her, throwing the party horn over her head which I had just creatively used to wake her up. I grabbed my bag, checked myself out in the dirty bathroom mirror, fixed my red woollen jacket and the white top underneath it, grabbed my bag and left our messy room as Charlie groaned out of her bed.

I walked down the stairs to the breakfast table while Celicity, our pet cat, meowed and followed me down, looking at me with her sapphire blue eyes and rubbing her white fur around my legs as I politely shooed her away.

"Did Charlie wake up?" My mum asked, wrapping and packing our sandwich.

I walked past her towards the fridge and took out the milk. "Yeah," I plainly replied, stepping towards the pantry and getting the cereals, the bowl and the spoon from a drawer, and finally sitting on the breakfast table.

"Mum, I have to...I have to tell you something..." Zoe (my little sister, the innocent menace of the house, who's seven years younger than me and is currently in primary school) faltered in her trebled voice.

My mum turned her head with the cereal bowl in her hand and squinted her eyes at her, "What is it?"

"I...you wouldn't get mad, right?", she sheepishly chuckled.

"Depends." My mum simply replied.

"We had to bring crepe paper for an activity today..." She revealed, nervously.

Mum looked at her with a deadpan annoyed face as she sighed, saying that she would buy some on the way to school and warned her not to do such stuff again for the fifth time this week.

I kept the lunch in my bag as I scrolled on my phone for a while, waiting for Charlie to walk down.

Dad had finished his morning coffee and left for work but she still hadn't come down-something which wasn't abnormal every morning. Noticing this, my mum let out a huge sigh grabbed Dad's belt and bolted upstairs after which Charlie finally came down horrified, her hair looking both like a pigeon's nest and an aesthetic art piece covered with a green beanie.

We bid goodbyes to Mum and strolled to school which was just a few streets away, during which Charlie met ten other kids. If she drank a shot every time she got to know someone new in a day, she'd be dead by the end.

And I had a sleep-deprived hallucination of a ghost poster-well...basically, as we were walking I saw a poster on a pole with some weird codes and phrases on it but when I looked back it wasn't there.

After reaching school and squeezing past the hallway that felt like was filled with the entire population of America, I finally reached my locker only to run away like hell as soon as I saw Lucien shrieking and rushing towards me with a smile as wide as Jeff the killer.

He always acts like we haven't met in millennia, which I am not going to lie I do find maybe a tiny bit wholesome as a part of me feels the same but the anxiety and embarrassment flush in and I horrifically push through the crowd before finally giving up and just rolling my eyes.

He whispered something still smiling like a fool.

"What?" I asked 'cause I wasn't able to hear a thing he said.