Evading The Dark

Chapter 4

The next morning came far too quickly. I flung my hand around looking for the alarm clock so I could put a stop to that insistent chirping. Once that was successfully accomplished, I sat up on my elbows and looked through the chaotic mess that was my hair. Ugh, six AM. Clocks shouldn't even give you the option to get up that early in my opinion. But I had no choice in the matter, Cedric and I had History this morning. Although I'm by no means an early riser, I actually enjoyed this subject, so there was no way I was going to cut.

The slight brushing sound of someone rolling in their sleep drew my eyes over the side of my bed. Oh crap! Cedric! I quickly leaned over the bottom of the bed where Cedric was still asleep on the mountain of pillows and rugs on the floor. Dammit!

He should have been up already. The breakfast bell was going to ring in less than an hour and then the paths would be filled with students, making it impossible not to be caught coming out of my room together.

"Ced!" I shouted, throwing my pillow at his head. "Ced, get up!"

A bunch of unknown sounds were sent my direction after hitting him for the third time. But finally, in what seemed like slow motion, he got up.

"You are evil," he said, glaring at me like it was my fault the universe made teenagers go to class this early.

"Come on!" I yelled to him from the bathroom as I tried to make myself presentable for the day. My long, chocolate brown hair was stuck in a bird nest shape, my baggy sleep clothes were twisted and hung off my slim frame, and I really needed to find my bra.

"I swear to Luthos, if you don't hurry up," I threatened. "We still got to sneak you out of here and manage to get to the cafeteria before all the chocolate chips are gone, again."

He rolled his eyes. "You and your chocolate chips."

"There's no other way to eat a waffle, Ced, honestly."

Believe it or not, sneaking a boy into my room was a hell of a lot easier than trying to sneak him out. We ran a little later than usual, so the path was swarming with students as we snuck out. We were forced to hide behind a tree and try to inconspicuously merge into the crowd one by one and then meet up again further down. I knew we were in the clear when we left the dorms behind and entered the main building. The line in the cafeteria wasn't that long when we arrived.

I managed to grab a waffle and a small bowl full of chocolate chips. I took my chocolatey prize over to our usual spot, a small booth on the back wall near the windows. It was close enough to the other tables so Cedric could still chat with his other friends while sitting with me, but it was far enough away that no one raised a fuss about me sitting near them. It's messed up, I know. Cedric's other friends already knew he wouldn't leave me sitting alone just to sit with them. The one time he did I was left exposed to more teasing and taunts, and he refused to let that happen again, no matter how many times I told him I'd be okay.

I concentrated on putting a little chip into each of the small squares on the waffle. This made it so that I would have a mouth full of chocolate with each bite. I then rolled my waffle up like a tortilla and took my first mouthful just as Cedric set his tray down.

"Hey, so I just saw our dinner menu for tonight, and wait for it, we shall be dinning on the ancient delicacy, sloppy joe-fu."

I almost spit out my bite of waffle, almost. "Seriously? Tofu again?"

For some reason, probably a computer glitch, the school ordered way too much tofu for the semester, and now the kitchen was stuck with the task of finding creative ways to get us to eat it all. Their latest concoction apparently was sloppy joe-fu, a mutated combination of the classic sloppy joe and our never ending supply of tofu.