Like the army! Minus the camouflage!
“Gert. I am serious. You are absolutely not to talk to him.” Her mother holds Gert’s eyes for an eternally awkward long amount of time. Her father is already climbing up the front steps of the Wilders' house, juggling the car keys with his left hand, a nervous gesture. They are obviously anxious to finish with their charity business and get back to their antique smuggling or whatever they do in the basement.
“Yes, mother dearest,” she says with an eye roll, and her mother darts in with a dry and almost perfunctory cheek-kiss. Were Gert the understanding-child sort (and had her parents not dismissed the sudden disappearance of her pet pig three weeks earlier as “an accident”), she probably would have kept her pseudo-promise and avoided Chase for the evening’s proceedings.
Except . . . her parents have made Orwell the Pig mysteriously disappear, and Gert makes a point of never agreeing with her parents. So there goes the pseudo-promise.
“Mr. Stein, care to share with the rest of the class why my parents suddenly hate you?” Chase is slumped on the couch when she enters, his ratty knit hat pulled low over his brows, his elbows and knees taking up a truly insulting amount of space.
“Eh?” he asks, sliding a thumb under the hem of the hat and peeling it away from his eyes. They are blue and blink at her blearily for a few seconds. “Say what?”
Gert tosses her copy of Crime and Punishment onto the side table and takes a seat on the chair catty-corner to Chase. Nico has called her earlier to say that she and her parents will probably be a few minutes late because of a postponed cello lesson; Alex is curled around one of his usual comic books, the glare from the overhead lights reflecting off of his glasses and obscuring his eyes. She and Chase are relatively alone.
“My parents gave me strict orders to not even breathe in your direction,” she explains, folding her legs under her and scraping a bit of purple hair behind her ear. “Did you pick off a convenience store this weekend?”
Chase rolls his shoulder backwards and groans as though this conversation is exceedingly taxing; considering that he only has three functioning brain cells, Gert concedes that this exchange probably is difficult for him to follow. She dutifully simplifies her syntax. “Well?”
“Your parents are wack,” points out Chase, his voice scratchy and low. “Like they need an excuse to hate me.” He folds his arms across his chest, and the jock-muscles under his shirt ripple in a way that vaguely disgusts Gert. She hasn’t had more than a passing acquaintance with physical fitness in the past fourteen years, and she really sees no point in Chase’s primary attribute being that his biceps have more definition that the word like.
“Normally I would agree with you,” says Gert, “but they went slightly more than psychotic at the idea of me socializing with you tonight.”
Chase snorts at this. The hat has slid back down, and his eyes are closed, the lashes creating shadows on the top of his cheekbones. “Like we ever socialize, Gertrude.” There is a lima bean-shaped darkness along his cheek, a hint of a fading bruise.
“Like you have enough intelligence to keep up a conversation worthy of the term ‘socializing,’ moron,” she replies absently. There is nothing to him that hints as to why her parents are so distressed, except that he’s obviously hit the hash pipe some time in the past week. As Gert is strongly opposed to THC and the way it fries one’s brain cells, she really isn’t in danger of smoking pot by association. Besides, like Chase would share his precious stash.
“Isn’t this a conversation?” he says, but Gert has already gathered Crime and Punishment and a stubby pencil from her purse and is scribbling notes in the margin of the tome. She is in the midst of decimating one of Romanovich’s particularly idiotic trains of logic when she wonders if there is a connection between her parent’s warning and their awkward discussion last month about the birds and the bees in relation to older men.
She peeks at Chase over the top of her glasses. He has an arm across his forehead, blocking his face from view, and sitting as he is now he takes up almost half of the couch. He would be physically intimidating, except Gert slammed someone twice his size (and age) in the stomach with her sandwich board at a Greenpeace protest a few weeks ago.
Still. Chase? Attractive? She hums minor agreement in the back of her throat, before returning her attention to Dostoevsky. Being attractive doesn’t make talking to him any less of a chore, though, and the only interest she would have in him would be scientific; how many times can a person be hit in the head with a lacrosse stick before they lose motor functioning?
She snorts to herself at this witticism, and then puts all thoughts not directly related to the text out of her mind. The day she falls for Chase Stein is the day her parents have an appreciation for anything created after 1902, she decides. The apocalypse and glowing aliens will come first.
~
Thoughts? I've just started the series, and am currently embroiled in the post-1907 craziness. Yeah, way behind . . . anyway . . .
“Yes, mother dearest,” she says with an eye roll, and her mother darts in with a dry and almost perfunctory cheek-kiss. Were Gert the understanding-child sort (and had her parents not dismissed the sudden disappearance of her pet pig three weeks earlier as “an accident”), she probably would have kept her pseudo-promise and avoided Chase for the evening’s proceedings.
Except . . . her parents have made Orwell the Pig mysteriously disappear, and Gert makes a point of never agreeing with her parents. So there goes the pseudo-promise.
“Mr. Stein, care to share with the rest of the class why my parents suddenly hate you?” Chase is slumped on the couch when she enters, his ratty knit hat pulled low over his brows, his elbows and knees taking up a truly insulting amount of space.
“Eh?” he asks, sliding a thumb under the hem of the hat and peeling it away from his eyes. They are blue and blink at her blearily for a few seconds. “Say what?”
Gert tosses her copy of Crime and Punishment onto the side table and takes a seat on the chair catty-corner to Chase. Nico has called her earlier to say that she and her parents will probably be a few minutes late because of a postponed cello lesson; Alex is curled around one of his usual comic books, the glare from the overhead lights reflecting off of his glasses and obscuring his eyes. She and Chase are relatively alone.
“My parents gave me strict orders to not even breathe in your direction,” she explains, folding her legs under her and scraping a bit of purple hair behind her ear. “Did you pick off a convenience store this weekend?”
Chase rolls his shoulder backwards and groans as though this conversation is exceedingly taxing; considering that he only has three functioning brain cells, Gert concedes that this exchange probably is difficult for him to follow. She dutifully simplifies her syntax. “Well?”
“Your parents are wack,” points out Chase, his voice scratchy and low. “Like they need an excuse to hate me.” He folds his arms across his chest, and the jock-muscles under his shirt ripple in a way that vaguely disgusts Gert. She hasn’t had more than a passing acquaintance with physical fitness in the past fourteen years, and she really sees no point in Chase’s primary attribute being that his biceps have more definition that the word like.
“Normally I would agree with you,” says Gert, “but they went slightly more than psychotic at the idea of me socializing with you tonight.”
Chase snorts at this. The hat has slid back down, and his eyes are closed, the lashes creating shadows on the top of his cheekbones. “Like we ever socialize, Gertrude.” There is a lima bean-shaped darkness along his cheek, a hint of a fading bruise.
“Like you have enough intelligence to keep up a conversation worthy of the term ‘socializing,’ moron,” she replies absently. There is nothing to him that hints as to why her parents are so distressed, except that he’s obviously hit the hash pipe some time in the past week. As Gert is strongly opposed to THC and the way it fries one’s brain cells, she really isn’t in danger of smoking pot by association. Besides, like Chase would share his precious stash.
“Isn’t this a conversation?” he says, but Gert has already gathered Crime and Punishment and a stubby pencil from her purse and is scribbling notes in the margin of the tome. She is in the midst of decimating one of Romanovich’s particularly idiotic trains of logic when she wonders if there is a connection between her parent’s warning and their awkward discussion last month about the birds and the bees in relation to older men.
She peeks at Chase over the top of her glasses. He has an arm across his forehead, blocking his face from view, and sitting as he is now he takes up almost half of the couch. He would be physically intimidating, except Gert slammed someone twice his size (and age) in the stomach with her sandwich board at a Greenpeace protest a few weeks ago.
Still. Chase? Attractive? She hums minor agreement in the back of her throat, before returning her attention to Dostoevsky. Being attractive doesn’t make talking to him any less of a chore, though, and the only interest she would have in him would be scientific; how many times can a person be hit in the head with a lacrosse stick before they lose motor functioning?
She snorts to herself at this witticism, and then puts all thoughts not directly related to the text out of her mind. The day she falls for Chase Stein is the day her parents have an appreciation for anything created after 1902, she decides. The apocalypse and glowing aliens will come first.
~
Thoughts? I've just started the series, and am currently embroiled in the post-1907 craziness. Yeah, way behind . . . anyway . . .