Flipping her shades on as protection from the harsh fluorescent lights, Tiffany wondered how Chelsea's date was going. She was not sure whether it might even be called a date, seeing as all Chelsea had worn was another flannel. (seriously, does she have anything in that closet of hers except for flannels? Oh wait, never mind) She opens her camera app and gets herself ready for a selfie when she notices someone standing behind her. Ooh, maybe Taylor? Nope, just the creepy neighbor girl.
She sighs, "Hello, no I do not know where my brother is." Riley stares, "I was going to tell you that your shoelaces are untied but alright," she looks around warily, "I think River skipped school today." Tiffany gives her a curious look, "He skips school everyday, only attends Mr. Mondays' classes because-"
"Because I'm in them too?" Riley asks excitedly. Tiffany does not look up from tying her shoelaces when responding, "I'm sorry but I do not know or wish to know the reason behind everything my brother does," Rising from the ground, she flashes a blinding smile at Riley, "And besides, it's probably because Mr Mondays is the only teacher with enough patience to handle his tomfoolery."
Looking somewhat disappointed, Riley waves her goodbye and heads off in the direction of Mr. Mondays next class. Tiffany shakes her head in amusement as she walks to her locker, hoping not to run into any other strange characters her school contained.
The first thing that catches Tiffany's eye when she swings her locker door open is not the giant bouquet of roses, but a gleaming envelope with badly drawn hearts decorating the outside. She scrunches up her face in confusion, the letters she received from her regular suitors did not look so, well, different. Bringing the envelope up to her nose, she sniffed. It smelled like paper, cigarettes and also were those cloves? To say the least, Tiffany was intrigued.
Opening the envelope, she found a piece of paper torn out from a ruled notebook and hastily folded into a tiny square. Its contents were as follows:
Dear Tiffany,
I like ur boobs
they r very hot
all your previous lovers were noobs
im the best u ever got
your neck is very pretty
it really turns me on
my teeth do the gritty
your mouth tastes like corn
your legs are so cute
and i like the way you smile
when you look at fruit
it makes me stop and stare for a while
you're like an angel descended upon the sinner that is me
don't leave me darling pls hold me close
i like ur boobs
they r very hot
-Taylor
She's barely even processed the words in front of her before her locker door is slammed shut and she is backed against it. Taylor's arm is 2cm away from her head and he's panting, looking deep into her eyes with his own crystalline orbs.
"Tiffany," his cinnamon-scented breath fans out on her face, "I've got something I need to-"
"Why are you panting?" Tiffany questions tilting her chin up and looking directly into his eyes so she'd know if he was lying. Taylor coughs, withdrawing his hand from the locker and looking away, "Well- I ran here because as I was saying before I was not so kindly interrupted, I have something I need to tell you."
Catching sight of the letter held in Tiffany's hands, his face brightens. "I see you've got my message." He nods seriously and then draws close enough that their noses are touching and says, "Tiffany, my dear, my darling, you're the hottest girl in school, even hotter than the really mean girl in my math class. I've got something very important to ask you-"
He gets down on one knee. Tiffany gasps. "-would you make out with me in the janitor's closet?" She falls into his arms with all the stability of a boiled noodle, "Anything for you, Taylor" she pets his cheek as he carries her in her arms away from the horrified faces of a few students and one teacher and towards freedom. "Goodbye Mr. Mondays!" Tiffany calls out as her final goodbye to the human world.
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River woke from a fitful sleep on the grass in the backyard with a terrible headache and a missing sock. For once, he did remember the events of the night before that led to him waking up in such strange circumstances. He'd rather not explain it to his parents and/or Mr. Mondays, besides, it was too late to go to school anyway. How did he know this, you ask? Most werewolf- vampire-human hybrids have the most accurate internal clock, one of the pros of being such a creature, the many cons being: diarrhea, migraines, utter dislike of clothing, bloodshot eyes at any time of day, and many more that would take ages to list.
Groaning, he lifted himself off the ground and took note of his surroundings. He spots the garden band at the end of the backyard, he walks up to them and greets them cheerily. They stare at him vacantly while chomping on their rat burritos, offering him some.
"Oh, thanks!" he takes the burrito, picks up his discarded hide of animal fur in which he carried his essentials: his favourite baseball cap and his platinum credit card. Also chopped innards with vegetables because, lunch. He looks up at the sky, it seemed like he had enough time to wander around today. It was much too late for school anyway and walking out of his property, he wondered how he ended up sprawled out on his garden again.
Then it comes back to him. Taylor, his best bro, who had promised him they'd hunt through the night and skip school while deboning fawns. But now that traitor had left him to be around people who enjoy rat carcasses and had gone to school. Probably because Tiffany was at school. He felt his trust was misplaced, but he could not bring himself to give it a second thought. He wondered if Jump's new edition would be out by now and if it was worth travelling 200km for.
He's about to head out with this pleasant thought in mind when he hears someone calling out to him. He turns around, hoping it was not the garden boys.
"River," Chad is running up to him, a blue towel wrapped around his hair. He stops before River, panting wildly before handing him a credit card and a long piece of paper, with things written on it. "Your mother," he pants. This guy was very out of shape. "She wants you to buy these things."
"Grocery shopping?" River asks, unsurprised. "Why can't you go?"
Chad points squarely at his wrapped hair. "My hair is very evidently not prepared to be going out in public. What do you think of me?"
"Fine. I'll be a while though," River sighs before heaving up his sack of animal hide before grudging toward the road. The road of life that extended onward uncertainly. This day seemed like a chore already.
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Sean Mondays truly wishes he had not chosen to defy against his father's wishes and follow a career path that offered him enough daily income to not starve to death but not enough for him to purchase an eye mask that would prevent him from seeing the honestly, just weird things he has bore witness to too often in these angst-ridden hallways.
Riley peers into each classroom carefully before stepping into Mr. Mondays' class, skillfully dodging a gallivanting couple. The aforementioned teacher was perched at the end of his desk, sighing exasperatedly while marking the attendance.
"Mr. Mondays," Riley chirps in her permanently high pitched voice. The teacher sighs again, "Riley, I've told you. I'm not making Jared switch seats permanently just so you can sit with River." Riley glares at him, "River has not shown up for tutoring two days in a row and I haven't even seen him in school today."
"And you're telling this to me because?" he prompts, unconcerned of the whereabouts of the strange rich kid. "Because," Riley huffs, annoyed, "you are an authority figure in this school and what if he was kidnapped by a rival gang in the next town over? What if they sent him to prison for indecent exposure?" Mr. Mondays frowns at her, unimpressed and politely asks her to take a seat unless she wanted to join the couple that was currently humping in the janitor's closet in detention.
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River stands at the frozen foods aisle, staring confusedly at the two types of caviar they provided. Both of them looked fake and not like the actual fish eggs he was used to eating with bread and mayo in his childhood. He decided that he would go by the freshwater lake and deprive families of their newborn by his own hand instead.
He's about to pick up the fondue cheese instead where he notices a commotion on the other side of the glass panes of the grocery store. The park that faced the store was usually empty around this time but now there was an angry teenage girl chasing off a crow from an old man's head with a rolled-up ball of flannel. He watches, amused as the crow pecks the girl on the head and she chases it down the path before she runs into another figure. River is leaning on the glass at this point, so he decides that's enough of drama for today.
Towing his cart to the cashier's desk, he taps away at his phone. 57 unread texts from an unknown number.
He creases his brow before handing the cashier his card and proceeding to forward all saved memes to Taylor though he knew he was probably in the janitor's closet doing some tomfoolery. Surprisingly he gets a reply back and they're going back and forth sending each other posts from the nuts of the grandfather.
"Sir?" the cashier calls out to him for the third time, sounding a little bit concerned.
"Uh, no sorry," River stifles his laughter. "What is it? I can give you a $200 tip, thanks."
"Actually your card just declined."
"My what."
In all 18 years of his unremarkable life, he had never heard these two things together. Cards he'd heard Chad mutter bitterly many times while walking past the basement. Declining he'd heard his mother speak about his dad's hairline in hushed tones. A card declining? What did this mean now?
River did not know and he was feeling a certain sense of doom thinking about it. Fuck, he thinks, too bad Taylor isn't bro enough to bail him out of this one.
Chuckling awkwardly, he briefly considers using his werewolf- vampire powers to stun the cashier and escaping with the groceries, but the low-wage workers had enough on their plate without some supernatural creature stealing their groceries.
He attempts to flirt his way out of the situation, but the cashier seems dead set on receiving the payment. Rifling through the empty gum wrappers and dust in his pockets, he finally comes out with exactly one coin. The cashier raises an eyebrow. River makes a run for it.
After dashing through the aisles, he peeks through the condiments to make sure no one was chasing him. Suspiciously, the bored cashier was nowhere in his sight. He furrows his eyebrows. He forgot the fucking groceries. It's alright, not like he was actually planning on stealing them anyway.
"Can you at least put them back?" The cashier calls out desperately. River walks over to him warily, apologizing. "I have a coin?" he offers, depositing it on the counter before the cashier refused him. The cashier glares. "Can you leave now?"
And so River leaves sadly, dispirited and hunched over to hide his problems but mostly because it was cold. Life was sometimes this way, he told himself. His problems were much too overwhelming to bear all of a sudden, the sun shone down on him much too warmly, almost cruelly. Just when he thought he would faint on the badly tarred asphalt, he saw a blur of yellow advancing towards him. He was about to dodge and run with his instincts when he was already attacked.
A small fluffy corgi tackled him to the ground, woofing along happily while soaking his face in dog saliva. He could faintly hear its owner yell in the distance, but he thought at this moment, it didn't matter if he was literally penniless and being trampled to death by a corgi. What a Monday.
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There are few things in life more disheartening than being stood up for a playground date. Especially one that isn't even a real playground date.
"Where did you get that from?" kids at the playground would marvel when ten-year-old Chelsea would flash her new Pokémon card. It would be one of the ultra rares again, the shiny evolution kind. No one knew where it came from but Chelsea would always find them every so often.
"You know you're good at finding these," Chelsea would tell her card collector at the end of the recess hour after all the other kids had finished their show of disbelief. Chelsea had a friend before Tiffany, or maybe it was after. She couldn't recollect when exactly they became friends because it seemed like they had somehow always known each other.
"Eh, the guy at the vending machine keeps dropping them." Darcy would give her a toothy smile. Darcy was one strange character to Chelsea, from her sand blonde hair to perpetually paint-stained suspenders to her glasses that looked like they were going to crack. They'd somehow found each other at the playground, amongst Pokémon card game duels.
"The guy at the vending machine?"
The next day they snuck out of the play area, the fence was much too high to climb but they found a way to sneak past the gates. Giggling and stumbling through the back alley they found the rusted vending machine, and as Darcy had said, there was a guy standing in front of it already. They quickly hid behind some bushes and motioned to each other with a finger to the mouth. They watched.
It was midday, kind of strange to have a high schooler standing vacantly in front of a vending machine at this hour. He wore a dumbass expression, glasses clad and looked like the kind of guy who was hiding a stack of porn right under his bed. As they watched on, he brought up a stack of Pokémon cards, and carefully inserted it into the slot on the machine. They watched him crumple up the card until it was fully gone, inside the machine. The machine stuttered, not registering the card.
The guy punches the machine suddenly then, letting out a pained sob when his abuse did not yield orange Lays. This continued for a while, before he gave up and left, a single Pokémon card fluttering out from his backpack and landing daintily on the sad pavement.
Chelsea did not know what to comment at this event when Darcy ran up and picked the card, beaming at her. So this was how they were obtained. This went on for a while, every day they tried to not laugh at this desolate mess of a teenager and collected more cards.
Soon came the last day of middle school, and Chelsea had made a collection out of the Pokémon cards they'd collected and she waited for Darcy at the playground, with flowers in her hands that she freshly plucked from Tiffany's garden just that morning. She waited around for a long time it seemed, till the day was over and Tiffany waved her over to walk home. Even River was waiting, for the first time. Chelsea felt like waiting for Darcy a bit longer.
Finally, when the sun was streaking away past the horizon, she stooped low like the wilted flowers in her hands and headed back. She checked on the Pokémon card collection she'd snuck into Darcy's locker earlier, to retrieve and give it to her later. It was gone. It seemed clear now to Chelsea, that for whatever reason Darcy had taken their year's worth of Pokémon junk but hadn't bothered to come back to her. A first lesson in the inherent bitterness of life it was for Chelsea.
Playgrounds had been a sour memory since then. It seemed like it would be so on this particular day as well, a playground date which was really a disguised Mormon volunteer activity, even this she was being stood up on. The thought was irrational because just as this thought left her and she chased away the crow bothering Mr. Michaelson, she ran face-first right into the girl who didn't run away.
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a/n: i dont know about you fuckers but topo is kind of fun. where there's a river there's a cause is a geography reference that absolutely no one will get. anyways, its NNN. have some restraint.
some strange things have been mentioned about taylor and river, use your shit for brains to figure out why. also, google "H.P. Lovecraft's cat" if you ever think life isnt treating you right.
anyways, remember, as always, she can't be all you need if she's 17 bro :/