Jazmin woke up the following morning. She peeled off her deliciously comfy blankets and shambled to the other bed, on which a lump softly snored. "Maeve, wake up. It's 6.30 a.m.," she softly said, rubbing the remnants of sleep from her eyes.
Maeve groaned and flipped to the other side, the blanket curling tighter around her slim figure. "Just...five more minutes...please..." her voice pleaded groggily, muffled and weak from beneath the heavy, blue fabric.
"Are you okay, Maeve?" Jazmin asked concernedly, making out the oddity in her voice.
"I...I just have a bad tummy ache. You can go without me. I'll catch up," Maeve explained, still swathed in the blanket, her face imperceptible.
"Okay, but I'm informing Emma of your ill health on my way out. Bye," Jazmin said.
"Okay, bye."
* * *
Jazmin, in her prim black-and-white uniform, entered a large building on the massive campus. She was lost, against her every expectation. She walked to a large desk behind which a bespectacled man(seemingly in his late thirties) was typing away on a computer.
"Excuse me, sir, do you know where the tuition block is? I'm new and..." Jazmin paused as the man looked up from his computer, his dark eyes were weak and swimmy behind the clear lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. His purple-tinged eyelids spoke volumes about the amount of sleep he got and the amount of alcohol he consumed. His voice was petulant.
"Do you know what time it is, girl?" he asked superciliously, anger flickering in his darkening gaze. Jazmin frowned and glanced at the clock above his desk. "7.40 am, sir," she answered, under her dry, morning breath.
"Yes, you're twenty minutes away from your first lesson, and you claim to be lost? And I assume you are clueless about where you are now as well...hah, from your face, I can already tell the waves you'll be causing whether or not I guide you. Be out of my sight right now!" the man ordered angrily.
Jazmin nodded with knitted brows, and stepped out of the building, baffled by the turn of events; what was it about her face that suggested she would 'make waves'?
She took a turn without looking and bumped into someone. Glancing up at the person, she apologized softly, "Uh, sorry for..." Her breath hitched in her throat, as her eyes interlocked with a pair of sultry green eyes that looked down on her, set on an appealing yet equally intimidating face. The distant sun rays spilling over the dewy grounds from the east, cast pale yellow light upon his sharp and kingly, yet hard, features.
"It's fine," the tall, young man—also in the school uniform—said, his green eyes glossing over her stunned face. His voice was as euphonic and entrancing as a nightingale's but also low and deep like the distant tremors from the dark unknown.
Jazmin cleared her throat, unimpressed by how her mind had suddenly blanked on seeing him — transforming her into William Shakespeare's protégé. Her mind doesn't just 'blank'; it never did. Not since she took her first gulp of acrid air and whined impudently in a gynecologist's tired arms.
'Oh yes, my hormones are finally doing their job after more than a decade of dormancy. Much cause for celebration, isn't it?' she thought, deciding to focus on the greener side of things, and settled her eyes on the young man who was two heads taller and looked like a Greek god who'd just fallen onto Earth and was masquerading as a high-schooler. She cleared her throat noisily.
"Excuse me, do you know where the tuition block is? I'm new," she uttered and his brow lifted slightly before falling. If he found her question hypocritical or odd, he did not show it as he responded flatly, "I'm on my way there right now. Would you like to join me?"
"Yes, thanks," she answered quickly before her knees buckled from the mere pressure of gazing at Adonis. 'Damn...that was...unexpectedly easy. I thought everyone in this school(except Maeve and Jason) would be a douchebag, but I guess Maeve had missed telling me that there are actually some good people around...'
She smiled gratefully. Jazmin fell in step beside him and studied their surroundings as they walked. Jazmin's stomach was horridly empty; she had, unfortunately, missed breakfast and now the effects were displaying themselves like a poisonous flower in bloom. Her belly growled loudly, like an angry mama bear whose cub had been stolen.
"Uh, sorry...I haven't eaten breakfast," she explained sheepishly, looking down at her dark shoes.
Just then, the young man's stomach also grumbled—even louder than hers, making Jazmin pause to stifle the laughter at her throat. The young man's lips pulled into a thin line as he looked down at his traitorous belly. He glanced at her amused face. "We'll make a pitstop at a restaurant then. I haven't had breakfast either," he said earnestly.
* * *
As Jazmin munched on a burrito and gulped down some yogurt, she was questioning what mischief her guardian angels were up to. She and the young man - whose name she was still plucking up the courage to request - were seated in a restaurant within the campus, she seated across him at a circular table at a corner of the relatively empty eatery.
Surely, there must have been some supernatural forces at work - all aimed at obstructing her academic success. She glanced at the wall-lock in the quiet eatery. It was 8.20 am. Sweat speckled her olive skin as she calculated the number of detentions she would procure - one, perhaps, from the subject teacher, another from the homeroom teacher, a massively incomparable one from the teacher-on-duty, and...
Meanwhile, the young man across her surveyed her paying face with a certain unfathomable distance to his expression.
There was a loud 'bang!' as the door to the eatery was whisked open, by what could have either been an escaped wild beast or a gust from a hurricane.
"Rowan! Rowan Barlowe! You little snitch! Our club is suffering, because of your sinister little schemes, while you're having tea with some nerd?" exclaimed a tan man in the student uniform. How odd, Jazmin thought as she glanced up at the burly individual who had barged into the place like an elephant, how odd that a student could look like a man in their mid-thirties.
Then her gaze traveled to the young man seated across her who was unfazed by the sudden angry outburst of such a big man. "So this is Rolan—uh, Rowan, I mean—the school council president and one of the three 'king bees' Maeve was telling me about...gosh, they should change that epithet to 'Greek gods Of Potterhouse'. 'King bees' sounds like the title for a beekeeper's business," Jazmin thought to herself and sipped her yogurt as drama ensued before her...well, sort of.
The burly man—a student who looked like a man, a very inebriated and livid one, that is—stomped towards their table, his eyes fixed on Rowan's unmoved face. Rowan gazed back at him calmly.
"Somehow, one day away from you made you look even more pesky to me," the stocky young man articulated, pulling his face closer to Rowan's. Rowan's green gaze darkened, sharpening into a distinct threat. He could distinctly smell the young man's pungent breath.
"Freddy, did you skip breakfast perhaps?" asked Rowan, his voice sonorous and beautiful like the rest of him, his chin balanced on his hard knuckles. Two ancient-looking, obsidian rings on his index finger and thumb glittered darkly as he spoke. His sharp and elegant features were devoid of the stormy emotions erupting in his scowling assailant.
"Heck, I was too busy figuring out how I was going to mangle your brains, after being told that you'd extrapolated my Body Fitness Club," the robust young man, Freddy, spat in Rowan's countenance, his breath hot and blistering from the tension of having to suppress his boiling anger.
"Exterminated," Jazmin piped up from the side and sipped her yogurt again.
"Huh?" Freddy shot her a puzzled look.
Jazmin rolled her eyes. This was the downfall of delinquents—even their threats couldn't be taken seriously by her once they erred grammatically. "It's 'exterminated', not 'extrapolated'. You got it wrong," she expounded gingerly. Freddy gave her the same perplexed look.
She sighed. "It's okay. Just ignore me and continue...well, with what you were doing. Uh...I'm done with my meal. Thanks, Rowan, and bye," she said conclusively and threw her satchel back on, dumping her empty yogurt into a dustbin.
Freddy was still wrapping his head around the girl's edit, as his eyes dazedly and subconsciously followed her languid steps. Rowan glanced at Jazmin's back as she left the restaurant without another word. 'Didn't she need directions?' he thought suddenly, but didn't pay the thought further mind.