Piper June.

Piper Fleming wasn’t as outgoing as most teenage girls.

She was subdued and shy—a quiet little girl with big blue eyes and blonde hair. She liked to do her own thing, wear her own kind of clothes, listen to her own kind of music. She liked to keep to herself. That's not to say she didn't have friends, because she did—they just weren't close friends, mostly because they were the kind of people that used her for their own devious purposes. Except for her neighbor and best friend of almost seven years, Jude Presley, a girl who was Piper's exact opposite. Both girls were pretty studious, but Piper was ranked first amongst all her fellow students—grade wise, at least, so it was safe to say that Piper June liked to study. I mean, a lot. It was kind of a problem. Well, not really. Not at first anyway, because what she lacked in social graces, she made up with her grades.

Piper liked to study so much, that, unlike most teenagers in her school, she actually had her course work done on (or usually before the dates they were due. She spent most of her time in her room, shutting herself away from the world behind a dusty book and a mug of hot chocolate. She read about anything that struck her fancy, anything from birds to the stars, from sea creatures to how butterfly wings worked.

Piper wasn't exactly the most conspicuous girl.

Besides her mildly irrational fear of social interaction with anyone besides Jude and her obsession with perfect grades, most would assume that she was a perfectly normal, albeit awkward, teenage girl. If anyone bothered to pay her, they might notice that she hardly ever wore shirts with short sleeves. They would notice that she tended to wear wooly sweaters—except for during the spring, when she chose to wear cardigans and skirts with tights. They might pick up on the fact that she never, ever showed off her legs—and she could have, because they were rather shapely—but instead stuck to things like skinny jeans or, like previously mentioned, skirts with tights. You would note that her hair was hardly ever worn up—but rather down, to the side, curly and waved because she didn't see the point in ironing it before school.

Before we continue, there are three things that you absolutely need to know about Piper: she only really feared a couple of things, like disorder, heights, and having some sort of serious affections for anyone.

Keep in mind that not everything is as it seems.



Ezra Finnely wasn’t your average teenage boy. He wore hats and blazers and shiny black dress shoes and crisp shirts with the sleeves rolled up to his tan elbows—and that was just for school. He wore sunglasses inside even though that stopped being cool a few years after The Breakfast Club came out and never hesitated to let others see how highly he thought of himself. He didn't care about what people had to say about him, because he was Ezra Finnely, and Ezra Finnely didn't care about anything or anyone.

(Well, before he met her, anyway.)

He liked to smoke light menthols, even though he knew it wasn't the best thing in the world for his health, and usually kept one tucked neatly behind his ear. He usually cut class after lunch or crafts, and when he didn't, he usually spent the rest of his classes asleep, face down on his desk as he ignored the lecture for the day. He usually skipped detention and had no qualms about lighting up right in the middle of the hallway, despite the fact that it usually got him suspended from school.

He wasn’t exactly an intellectual, but he wasn’t an idiot either.

Ezra Finnely just didn't care.

He was good-looking and he knew it. Therein lied the problem. His hair was thick and a dark shade of brown, sometimes curly, on odd days. He had blue grey eyes, was lanky and somewhat tall. He sure wasn't ugly. As much as he didn’t try to take advantage of his looks, sometimes he had to.

He wasn’t well off, like Piper. His mother had passed away a few weeks after his sister Elizabeth was born, so he was raised by his father and whoever his father happened to be seeing for the month. He didn’t have a great job, but it was enough to make ends meet and buy a couple of nice things here and there. Ezra was satisfied. All he really needed was a pack of cigarettes, his sunglasses, and his piano to really make him happy.

His best friend was Quinn Cleary, a skinny, brown-eyed, dirty blonde who swore like a sailor and had the biggest, most pathetic crush on Jude Presley but refused to admit it out loud. Ezra and Quinn were as thick as thieves, and it was rather difficult to find one without the other.

The only real difference between them was that while Quinn was (barely) passing his classes, Ezra wasn't, which brings me to my next point: contrary to popular belief, Ezra Finnely wasn't a complete idiot. He just didn't see the point in doing assignments and reading books and doing projects that wouldn't benefit him later on. He did pretty well in his music theory class, which was to be expected. He did great in Literature and History and was fairly decent at crafts. When it came to things like his math and science classes, it got pretty ugly.

Ezra didn’t know what he wanted to do with himself, but he knew that he’d know one day, and that was good enough. He was the type of person who floated through each and every day with little to no direction and he liked it that way. Knowing where you were going took the adventure and spontaneity out of life.

Ezra Finnely was a free spirit and would be damned if he was tied down to something as trivial as education.

Quinn and Ezra were dangerous. Everybody knew it. Those boys were trouble, and anyone could see it, just by looking at the way they dressed, the way they spoke, the way they carried themselves.

They screamed, "Danger, danger, stay away!"

Most people just didn't know better.