New School
Alec POV:
I woke up to the smell of a burning something. Probably whatever it was that Isabel, or Izzy as she prefers it, had decided to cook. Two seconds later, I became aware of my alarm going off, so I slammed my hand against one of the buttons-which one, I don’t know, and I didn’t care. I got up, put on what my siblings call my ‘signature’ outfit-a once black sweater full of holes and too baggy and long jeans, and stumbled out of my bedroom and down the stairs into the dining room. Izzy was pulling a cookie sheet out of the oven. The things on it, however, where circles burnt to the point of unrecognizable. My 16-year-old sister set the sheet on the counter before whirling around and clasping her hands together.
“Alec, brother, dear. Good to see that you’re awake! How are you? Are you excited for our first day at our new school? I know I am! Do you want to have breakfast? I made eggs benedict!” She said all of this super-fast all in one breath. She usually talks this way, fast and seemingly breathlessly.
“Terrible, no, and that’s not eggs benedict, that’s burnt bread and eggs baked in the oven. You don’t put eggs or bread in the oven, and it’s supposed to be cooked separately,” I said. True to my word, I got up and started the coffee, just as my brother, best friend, and ex-crush, Jonathan, also called Jace, came downstairs.
“Hey, Alec, what’s up?”
“School, I think...” I joked, wondering how he would react. I don’t joke too often. Especially in front of other people.
Jace laughed. “Honestly, that’s me some mornings. Oh, hey, coffee’s ready!” Jace went to get 3 mugs, one for Izzy, me, and himself. “Mother and Father gone yet?” They weren’t really his parents-he was adopted into the family when his mom died giving birth and his dad died working as a police when he was a year and a half old, so Mother and Father took him in since they were good friends of his parents-but he couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t parent figures to him. He took a sip of coffee and slid mine across the table, which I took with a nod.
“Yeah, they left at-”
“Hold on, Izzy. Do you actually expect us to eat that?” I interrupted. She was loading the burnt hunks onto some plates.
Izzy turned around. “Well, yes... I mean, it didn’t turn out like I had hoped it would, but it’s still edible, and I’m sure it’ll taste fine...”
“No, it’s not still edible, and I’m sure that if we didn’t have a garbage disposal and we tried to put that in the garbage, the garbage company would sue us or something for putting that in the garbage. Throw that away-now, Izzy-” She had started pouting-“and I’ll make us some eggs.”
“Fine,” she huffed, and dumped it down the sink and turned on the garbage disposal.
This is how most meals go: Izzy tries to make something and ends up screwing it up, so I have to get something simpler for all of us and throw away Izzy’s ‘food’. Either that, or, since I wake up earlier than anyone else in this house, I make food and Izzy tries to unintentionally poison us by making some poison-ahem, food, ahem, and I still make her throw it away. I would let Jace cook more often, but even though he’s two years younger than me, 15 years old, and my best friend, I still don’t trust him with enough responsibility to turn on the stove. He’d burn the house down. Then again, that’s what you can expect from someone who has the mental maturity level of a five year old. Surprise, surprise-our parents don’t trust him enough to buy him his own car.
After cooking breakfast, we had 45 minutes to get us to school, enough so that we’d have enough time to have 30 minutes until class, so we all piled into my car.
When we got to our new school-after Cassandra Clare Academy, I pulled into the parking lot and took the closest empty parking spot I could find, right next to a gold-and
sparkly-
Tesla. Who puts sparkles on their car, and especially one as expensive as this one?
I walked into the building, feeling small and insignificant by comparison. It was 3 or 4 stories high and took up a whole block. I’d been here before when we were registering for classes, but it had seemed big even than, and that was without all the extra students pouring through. Was this how big most high schools were? We’ve all always been home schooled.
One lady handed me my schedule and a five papers stapled together after I told her my name, making sure to keep my head down.
After I left the front office, I looked at my papers. Holy shit, the school is five stories high? After a little more investigation, I discovered that the lockers where on the right side of the building I was in, which was average sized, compared to the others.
I managed to find my locker, but not without excessive searching. Just as I was closing my locker, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Hey, you new here?” I whirled around to see who it was that had tapped me.
When I saw him, a too many different thoughts to count went through my head: Damn, he’s hot, was one of them. Another was, He’s probably the one that owns the glittery car. I also couldn’t help hoping that he was gay. Altough I don't have much of a 'gaydar.' Shut up, I mentally berated myself. If he was gay, which he probably was, he would never be into anyone like me-shy, socially awkward, with terrible taste in clothes, and not even remotely attractive. Not to mention that I was so far in the closet about being gay that I was practically in Narnia.
The man had a tight, electric blue v-neck shirt, which showed off more than I’m sure qualified for the dress code, skin tight deep purple jeans, slightly transparent at the bottom, with even darker swirly purple designs, 8-inch high-heeled boots that went up to mid-thigh, showing off his considerable height-taller than me, even if he hadn’t had the boots- gold fake nails, hair spiked up with hair gel, with blue, purple, green, yellow, and a slight amount of red glitter scattered all over his hair, so it looked like some sort of galaxy. He also had makeup: blue lipstick, green eye shadow, orange mascara, black eyeliner, and other stuff that I couldn’t identify.
Instead of settling for just that, however, he had completed the outfit with gold-green contacts with slit pupils, so they looked like cat eyes. Or, at least, I assumed they were contacts. They might have been a strange genetic disorder, or something.
I must have spent a moment too long taking the man in, because he raised one perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “You staring?”
I blushed and went back to what I usually did when talking to other people: staring at the ground. “Oh, um, n-no, I just-I mean-I w-wasn’t... Sorry.” Fuck. Real smooth, Lightwood. Good job.
He smiled wider and leaned closer. “What’s your name, darling?” It was right then that I realized how close he was. Too close.
I stumbled backward, so that my back was pressed against the wall. He leaned forward another inch and placed his left hand on one of the lockers behind me, and I pulled my books closer. The whole time, I thought, too close, too close, tooclosetooclosetooclose. “A-a-alec,” I said, half hoping that he would leave if I told him.
For a few seconds, I thought that he wasn’t going to move, but after a few moments, he pushed back and opened the locker to the right of mine. Great. I was going to have to see him every day. For the rest of the year.
I started to walk to the right, my head bent so that I could only see a few feet in front of me, but he stopped me. Crap. “You realize you’re going in the wrong direction, right?”
“I-I am?”
“Yeah. The hallway closes off on that end.”
I turned around to walk in the other direction, but he grabbed my wrist. “Hold on a minute.” I stood there, frozen, while he rummaged around in his locker, a bright, flashy, glittery mess. Finally, he pulled out a pen, black and sparkly, took my hand, and wrote something on the back of it, before flashing another flirtatious smile, a glittery wink, and whispered, “Hope I’ll see you around,” at me and walking away.
I looked down at my hand after a few dazed moments.
10 digits. A phone number.
What the hell just happened?
I shook it off for now. I had to get to class. I’d figure this out later.
