The promise. [Short Chapters]

Prologue.

Being seventeen is really difficult. You could say this to a million adults and I guarantee you about 95% of them would dispute this fact to their death. They'd whine that those were the "good ol' days" and then you'd be stuck listening to them blabber on for forever and a day about how they peaked in their teen years and their sad, pathetic lives just went downhill from there. But that's just the madness talking.

Every seventeen-year-old knows that this is the most damned age there is, especially when your crazy-ass hippie parents named you Lolita of all horrid and atrocious names, then gave you to your grandparents, who quickly sailed you away to boarding school the second you reached the right age.

Am I getting ahead of myself here?

I was five years old when my grandparents sent me off to Hamilton Academy, this stupid posh boarding school in London. It was a massive change for the suburban tomboy that I was at the time, and I had myself convinced that the school was the devil because I was required to wear a skirt and be roommates with Ella Gedder. Which is rather amusing to me because as I sit here, letting my brain do all its talking, I am wearing a dress and wondering what the fuck I'm going to do without Ella once we go to university.

...What am I drabbling on about again? Oh right, boarding school. You're probably thinking to yourself, What the hell kind of grandparents send a five-year-old off to boarding school?, or better yet, What the hell kind of boarding school even accepts five-year-olds? 

Well, firstly, if you're going to understand anything about my home life, it's that my grandparents are probably reincarnations of the devil himself. Secondly, Hamilton prided itself on being the most conservative piece of shit over on this side of the country, so my grandparents figured they'd "raise me right", you know, like in the good ol' days, traditional values, picket fence, grow-up-and-have-2.5-kids upbringing. That kind of bullshit.

Younger me took advice right from the pages of my hippie parents' metaphorical book of advice and rebelled against it, and somehow that's how I ended up with the five best friends I never thought I'd have.

I guess we were the kids that your parents warned you about, if your parents were the crazy orthodox Hamilton kind of parents. Really, we weren't even that bad. We drank and partied and snuck out, and Max and Ryan had the occasional cigarette, but it wasn't as if we were out committing murder or became drug dealers or some shit. In any other school, we would have been the norm, but nope. We had to go to shitty Hammy.

Our "group" started a few weeks after Year One began, around the time I realized that Ella was not the terror I thought she'd be, and she became my best friend. Then, when we were six years old, Max Helyer began to hang around with us, and with Max came his best friend, Josh Franceschi, who was to Max what I was to Ella.

For the longest time, we figured it would just be the four of us, until Isabelle Dawes stumbled into our Year Six maths class. She was french and had a lot of street smarts or some shit, and we needed street smarts. Two years later, Ryan Terner rounded out our group. He was new, extremely smart and somehow had the most of all the knowledge anyone would ever need. We didn't exactly mean to become a clique, it just sort of happened.

Our teachers tried to keep us apart during class time because we were allegedly nuisances, but with the headmaster's organized alphabetized seating charts and our small class sizes, it was quite difficult to split up the last names Dawes, Edison, Franceschi, Gedder, Helyer and Terner.

Which makes me realize that you're probably thinking, Edison? Who the fuck? and that I have not properly introduce myself. Lolita Arianne Edison. Yeah, what a name, right? Weird-pedophile-fetish Greek-mythological-character Normal-surname. Everyone calls me Lola, though, with the occasional Arianne thrown in by Josh because he's a goon. And that's all you really need to know about me for now, because I'm entirely sure you'll be learning a shit ton as this progresses.

So where am I? Right, crazy-ass hippies, boarding school, friends, dumb name, The promise. Oh God, The promise. I don't even want to talk about The promise right now, to be frank. I'll just say that The promise was broken three times during our last year at Hamilton, and with each break, our group, too, became a little more fractured. We all wanted to blame someone, so we blamed each other. And Max. Mostly Max. Max and his stupid 'promise' rule.

Being seventeen is really difficult.