Us Against The World

When I was first fostered by the Firths, I thought it would pretty much be plain sailing when it came to curfews - i.e. None at all. As long as homework was done, then Stephen would be fairly complacent with anything that I wanted to do. Melanie may have buckled down a little on more extreme things, but lighten up a bit with a little persuasion from Stephen and yours truly.

However, as Stephen dumped a bowl of soggy-looking cereal down onto the table in front of me, I came to realise that that was not necessarily the case as he sternly frowned. "Absolutely not."

"But why?"

"Eva, we've talked about this before and my reasons still haven't changed. You are not going to that damn festival with no adult supervision."

For the past week, the cause being Ceri's persistent texts, I had been trying persuade Stephen to let me go to the PMFest, sadly with unsuccessful results. "Which is why I'm saying that you should come with us."

Pulling out the chair opposite me, he sat down, clutching his early morning coffee-fix between his hands. I simply picked up a spoon and gave my gunk-serving-as-food a prod, to see if it would come to life, you understand. "I'm too old for that type of thing."

"Pah," I scoffed, even though I did semi-agree with him. "You're not that old. You said that you went a few years ago."

"Yes, back when it was still about music." He lifted his mug to his lips to take a sip, which was when I darted in to argue.

"And it still is-"

"To some extent, maybe. However, you know as well as I do that it's become a bit of a drug scene nowadays, hence why I want someone responsible with you-"

"I'm really not so stupid as to take drugs, how could you even-"

"And these boys which you're planning on camping with - you haven't even met them." He calmly continued, voicing over my complaints.

"Ceri has."

"And I'm not too reliant upon Ceri's judgement. You're two teenage girls - I'm certainly not going to let you stay with a group of adolescent boys."

"Oh come off it." I couldn't help but roll my eyes. "I don't want to go simply to sleep with Ceri's boyfriend's mates."

"I wasn't implying that." He raised a bemused eyebrow. "I was merely stating that you will not be going alone to stay with a bunch of hormone-controlled boys."

"They're not going to try anything. Besides, Emerson will be with us."

"Emerson is a weed - he'd be no good as a bodyguard." I couldn't help but laugh at that, despite how argumentative I was trying to be - it was so true. "Besides, I'm not too trusting of him either."

"Stevie, if I'm honest, I have my concerns that Em's gay. He's not a threat."

He merely chuckled at that shaking his head. "I'm not going to argue with you over that. However, you are not going to the concert and that is final. Now, eat your breakfast."

I frowned, giving it another prod. "I don't have a great interest in eating rabbit food. Is there anything else?"

"Muesli is good for you." He merely retorted, not bothering to look up from the newspaper which he had spread out over the tabletop. "But there's toast if you want it."

"I do." He didn't even remotely move from his place of reading the sports sections, so I thought that maybe he'd suddenly become deaf. "I said that I do."

"Make it yourself, you lazy tyke." With a gentle swing of his leg, he lightly kicked me under the table. Perhaps I had become too complacent with people running around for me whilst being ill, but I still thought that my 'father' should have made me breakfast. I voiced these complaints as I stood up, over-dramatically rubbing my shin, where his socked foot had come into contact.

As I slotted the bread into the toaster and pushed the switch down, I still wasn't ready to give up. "You know, I thought that you and Mel were cool. I wouldn't have let you foster me if I'd known the truth."

"I wouldn't have wanted to foster you if I'd known you were so whiny." He jokingly retorted, chuckling suddenly at something he had just read.

"But what about Mel? I'm sure she'd love to go."

"If you could get her to, I would come along as well. But currently, there is a higher chance of pigs flying than that happening. Believe me when I say that."

"You're both so boring." I couldn't help but grumble as I opened the fridge door, hoping to find a pot of peanut butter, my search being successful. "What ever happened to living young, as you liked to do only a few months ago?"

"I was given responsibility," He nonchalantly replied, turning a page of his paper whilst taking a drink. "and forced to grow up."

"No, you became boring."

"They sadly coincide."

The ping of my toast popping up was joined with a creak from the annex stairs, along with the appearance of the now ever-present Cyrus. He was dressed back in more formal suit wear that being with, much to my amusement, a pink pin-striped shirt. It was all about getting in touch with his feminine side.

As I spread butter upon my slightly over-cooked toast, he could only raise an eyebrow at Stephen and say "What's all the complaining about?"

"She wants to go the PMFest with Ceri and Emerson - by themselves, and I'm putting my foot down when it comes to no supervision."

"Why don't you go?" He leant over the table and picked up my cup of tea, taking a sip of it.

"Hey, that's mine!" I could only exclaim, making my way back over to the table, grumpily sitting down.

Simply wrinkling his nose, he placed it back down, saying "It needs more sugar, anyway." before turning expectantly back to Stephen for his answer.

"You know why." They exchanged a look, the meaning of which I had no idea of.

"Oh, right." Cyrus slowly nodded for a moment. "By the way, I just heard Melanie through the wall a few minutes ago. You may want to go and check up on her."

With a groan, Stephen stood up, folding his paper down and placing his cup in the dishwasher as he left. Meanwhile, Cyrus pulled out one of the spare chairs, a look of disdain crossing his face as he was met with the sight of a large ginger tabby sitting on it. No matter how many times we had placed it outside, it had somehow always found its way back in - having taken to the place as its new home. Eventually, Stephen took it to the vets, where it was deduced as a boy and scanned for a microchip. After not finding one and the local missing pet database being checked, he was officially labelled a stray. Stephen, being a total wuss and all, couldn't bare the thought of him maybe being euthanized in a shelter and had brought him back as the new family pet, much to Cyrus' chagrin. Their relationship was very much one of both love and hate - often ranging from one extreme to the next. After finding him cautiously making his way across the keys of the piano in the dining room, he was furthermore christened as Mozart. (The cat that is, not Cyrus. He just got rather peeved that the name of 'Mozart' was apparently being blasphemed.)

Anyhow, Cyrus now pulled the chair upright, tipping a sleepy and now pissed Mozart onto the floor, before placing it back on four legs and sitting down. After a moment's thought, he reached over and pulled my discarded bowl over to him, taking a curious sniff before obviously deeming it okay to eat and scooping up a mouthful. How he could bare to do so was entirely beyond me. After swallowing the food which I had deemed to probably taste like cardboard, I apparently became the centre of his interest. "Why aren't you dressed?"

"It's only seven fifteen - school doesn't start for over an hour. I think a better question would be asking why you are dressed."

"I have work to catch up on before lessons actually start." Well, someone was rather preppy for our first day back, weren't they? Glancing down at his watch, he chewed just that little bit faster before continuing. "I was going to offer you a lift, but seeing as you're lazy, I guess it's the urine-smelling bus for you."

"I guess so. But I'm thinking about putting up a school boycott until Stephen lets me go to the festival."

"He won't back down - he's as stubborn as a mule when he's decided upon something. Rather like you, actually."

"Thank you for saying that - I really do appreciate it."

"You're very welcome." He nodded, wearing one of his usual amused half-smiles. "I could continue my nice streak, if you wished me do so."

"I'm not very sure if we're still being sarcastic."

With a raised eyebrow, he took my drink again. I'd already given up on chastising him for it. "I've stopped, if that helps."

"Mhm... I'm still not sure though."

He merely chuckled, quickly glancing over to the door, where a harassed-looking Stephen had reappeared. "I'll offer anyway - I'd be your supervising companion at the festival."

"Really?" Contrary to most beliefs, it was Stephen who said that, not I.

"Of course." Cyrus nodded, leaning back and relaxing into his chair slightly. "You know that I usually head down there."

"Yes, but by yourself. Would you be willing to go with a bunch of kids? You hate kids."

"In case you haven't noticed, I am a teacher now. I deal with then often. Besides, I'd only be responsible for Evangeline, not the other two."

I, somewhat hesitantly made my own point then. "You'd still be around Ceri."

"Maybe I could accidentally trip her up into a large and very muddy puddle?"

"Be my guest with that one."

"Well," He shrugged, standing up. "have a think about it. It's not as if I'd be too hurt if you turned it down."

And that is what I did - considered it. On one hand, Stephen would have allowed me to go if Cyrus did - pretty much a big bonus. However, on the other side, it was highly probable that he'd be a complete and utter killjoy, as well as that I'd have to put up with his and Ceri's squabbling for an entire weekend. I wasn't too sure if my sanity could take it. It would have been more likely to survive if I had thrown it out to a bunch of wild coyotes. It was an option though – a very reliable option.

Anyhow, I spent the rest of my time before school in a bit of a tired daze – it really was ridiculous to have to get up so early. Cyrus had left far earlier than he really needed to, Melanie refused to come out of the bathroom for over an hour and Stephen constantly wore a concerned expression whenever he was upstairs. I simply thought it all as nonsense.

And so, I arrived rather late to school after Stephen had eventually realised that it was quarter past nine and that I was supposed to have been at school almost an hour earlier. We made the journey in record time – it may have involved a bit of swearing at annoyingly slow other drivers – and finally arrived half an hour into first period. Guess whose lesson that was.

The classroom was completely silent when I entered – exactly how you always want it to be when you're sneaking in late– and Cyrus was standing next to the board, marker in hand and giving me a look which spoke far more volumes than his simple sarcastic comment of "It's nice for you to finally join us, Miss Brooks."

"It's my pleasure." He merely raised an eyebrow in his usual fashion as I walked over to my desk, receiving a somewhat amused look from Ceri and an excitable wave from Em.

The husky voice predictably came. "Would you care to explain why you're so late?"

"It's a rather long story, I'm afraid."

"I have the time." His voice was suddenly cool as he placed the lid upon his pen, placing his pen down upon the rack before walking around to the front of his desk, leaning back against it and crossing his arms, over the priceless pink shirt.

I pulled out my chair, sitting down and mimicking his pose. "Well, you see, back in the day, when I was still a Shallax warrior-"

A faint look of alarm appeared in his calm complexion, quickly being covered. "Miss Brooks, if you don't give me an immediate and truthful reason as to why you are late, I won't hesitate in the slightest to put you in detention this afternoon." Oh, man. He was absolutely hilarious when trying to be all professional again. It was never going to happen after I'd seen him screaming like a five year-old girl after putting the aluminium butter pot in the microwave the previous week, to 'soften it up, so it spreads properly.', and almost achieving in setting the entire thing on fire.

"Okay, Sir." I put heavy emphasis on that. "It all started this morning, when this annoying man who sometimes lives with me came downstairs into the kitchen, dressed camply in pink, and stole my breakfast. My foster-mother then locked herself in the bathroom for over an hour, doing only heavens knows what, whilst my foster-father became increasingly worried that she'd somehow passed out. When she finally did come out and fostiedaddy calmed down enough to drive me to school, it was discovered that the pink prat had knocked over the dustbins at the front of the house whilst reversing his car out of the drive. It took quite a while to pick up all the scattered rubbish, so that our obese and slightly bi-polar cat wouldn't think of it as a good idea to carry some of the rubbish inside and make a nest out of it in the pink prat's bed, as he does have a tendency to do. Although, I may have left a few mouldy banana skins out, because the pink prat did deserve a bit of a punishment for making me late…" I paused, just for a dramatic ending. "And that, Dr Quince, is the end of my very interesting tale as to why I am late to your lesson."

There was a silence, only filled with a couple of snorts of laughter at his horrified expression, before he finally spoke, albeit sounding slightly strangled. "Detention, for the rest of the week."

"But that's unfair! You know it's true!" I couldn't help but shout. It had become a fine habit to do so at him.

"Do watch your tone, Miss Brooks. Whilst I may feel that your story is very likely to be true, I don't think that the pink prat particularly likes the idea of mouldy bananas in his bed."

Before I could argue any further, he had turned back to the board, on which was drawn some sort of complex graph, the meaning of which I didn't even want to begin to decipher. Ceri, on the other hand, merely raised an eyebrow and leant over to whisper "Welcome to the dark side. Members get a complimentary cookie and an 'I hate Quince' badge."

"Is there a 'Quince severely antagonises me' badge? If so, I'd be more than willing to join."

She thought about it for a moment before leaning over to offer me a hand to shake. "Welcome aboard... Although with language like that, you may be turning slightly like him."

"And why would you say that?"

"Well, it's a fairly well-known fact that if you spend a lot of time with someone, some of their traits will rub off onto you. Namely, the use of fancy language."

"... 'Antagonise' is fancy?"

"I rest my case. If you can't even tell that you're being fancy, then you've turned into a Mini-Quince clone."

It was only then that I realised I had to rapidly backtrack. "What makes you think that I've been spending a lot of time with him?"

With the evil smirk which always made my heart sink, she leant back in her chair, stretching her arms above my head. "Where shall we start? The point when I had a delightful conversation with him upon your phone, when he actually smiled at you, or right back to the start, when I watched him stare at you for about twenty minutes in our first pleasant lesson all together?"

"The phone thing – he snatched… Wait, he stared at me for twenty minutes?"

"Oh, at least." She nonchalantly nodded, looking fairly amused by my predictably horrified expression. "Didn't you notice that? It led me to believe that you knew him from somewhere else, which was only confirmed by the lovely phone call. I can't understand why you didn't tell me, though."

"The first lesson? I didn't know him then!"

"I wouldn't have guessed that. When did you start sleeping together?"

"Sleeping together! We haven't slept together!" It was as I hissed that that I realised she had only been teasing me and I'd fallen straight into her trap as she snorted with laughter.

I was just about to kick her across the aisle when I noticed that there was silence throughout the rest of the room and everyone was staring at me. Crap. Most to my horror was Cyrus standing at the front of the classroom, not even a hint of humour upon his face. "Miss Brooks, I am so sorry that my lesson is so much of an inconvenience to your social life that you see the need to talk through it. Perhaps you would like the share with the rest of us the information which obviously cannot wait to be conversed over at break time, hm?"

Ceri, being ever the untrusting ally, could only smile sweetly at me. "Yes, Eva, why don't you tell everyone what we were talking about?"

As I sat there, met with many amused looks, I finally came to really, really wish that I had laser vision to zap people with. Not to name names, but Ceri and Cyrus would have been top of my list. However, the best I could do was to force a tight smile and simply say "No, Sir, it's quite alright. I doubt that anyone would particularly be interested in it."

"On the contrary. I feel that we're all quite intrigued."

"Really, it's fine."

With that secretly evil expression which I'd come to know quite well, he leant lightly against his desk. "I can quite easily extend your detention to two weeks. See me after class, both of you."

And with that, he turned back to the board. If he thought that a couple of banana skins were all that he would find in his bed later, he was very much mistaken. Maybe I would set Mozart on the task of earning his keep and try and get him to catch and half massacre a rat for me… and maybe lie under the cover in an anticipating wait as well. Anyhow, Ceri gave me a smirk before tearing a page of paper from her book, scribbling something on it before folding it and flicking it across to my desk.

I opened it with much doubt, both of the contents and also if I would actually be able to decipher her truly terrible writing. Very sadly, I could. 'Maybe if you offer to give him a blowjob, he'll let us both off ;)'

I wrote one back of my own. 'I hate you.'

'You know that doing him is illegal? I ALWAYS knew that you were secretly a she-devil.'

'Fuck you.'

'If you said that to Quince, I bet he'd jump at the chance :D'

Being on the verge of physically throttling her at this point, I was half-considering ignoring her on the written message front, when I suddenly found that the note was no longer in front of me. Rather, it was now in Quince's hand and being slid into his trouser pocket as he walked past, continuing with his explanation of… I actually had no idea. Fuck my life.

The rest of the lesson was spent with me wanting to repetitively head-desk myself, ignoring Ceri's occasional snorts of laughter, and getting poked in the back from an inquiring Emerson, who had not a single clue about what was going on. When the bell finally rung, signalling the end of the double period, I more than just wanted to stuff everything into my bag and run out of the room along with everyone else, but Cyrus sadly predicted my moves and successfully blocked me from doing so. He waiting until everyone else, bar Ceri, had filtered out of the room before sitting down in his seat and smoothing out the crumpled piece of paper upon his desktop. Now, he was successfully doing the strict authority figure well - even Ceri looked even whiter than her usual pale self. He turned to her first, speaking in a cold voice which I'd only heard him use a handful of times. "Miss Manson, perhaps you would like to explain the meaning of this note to me?" She remained silent; that was a new personal record for her - all of thirty seconds. "You do realise that making such accusations, if only as a joke, endangers me in many ways - my job would be at a high risk, not to mention the problems with the law. What about you, Miss Brooks? Would you please enlighten me by telling me that this," He motioned towards the paper with a hand. "thankfully is not what it seems."

It was only when he turned to look at me that I saw the slight twinkle in his eyes. I could only groan then, motioning to mock-kick him in the shin. "Ceri, he's just fucking with us."

A low chuckle broke from him as he attempted to keep a straight face and protest at the same time. "No, I'm not. If this were to get into the wrong hands, you couldn't image the damage that it would ensure."

"Well, it's just as well that it didn't then, eh?" I reached over and picked it up, quickly ripping it up into unfixable shreds, finally crumpling them into a ball and throwing it into the waste bin.

Ceri, meanwhile, was still improving her silence record as Cyrus turned to her, again failing at hiding his amused smirk. "Do you really think that I'd condone bad behaviour in return for oral sex? Do I really seem that much like stereotypical male?"

"Shut up." I rolled my eyes at him, grabbing Ceri's wrist and dragging her towards the closed door. "You're making us late!"

"But I haven't decided upon your punishment!" He grinned, rocking back on his chain. "Oh, wait, I know! I'm definitely coming with you at the weekend!"

"No, you're not!"

"Ha! We'll see!" He called after us as the door swung shut and Ceri and I were finally alone in the deserted corridor.

It was only then that she seemed to find her voice, for she stubbornly stopped in her tracks and pushed my hand off her arm. "Alright, what the fuck is going on?"

"Um, we're going to Chemistry?" As always, my attempt at nonchalance failed.

"Uh, no. You owe me answers, number one being how the hell you and him are so cosy together!"

I groaned. "He's Stephen's best friend, apparently. I've had to spend the past three weeks cooped up alone with him because 'we had to keep an eye on each other'."

"Right," She paused to process this revelation. "And during such time, the two of you realised your true feelings for each other and shacked up?"

"Ew. Don't be stupid. He's more... My annoying older brother."

"Who has a slight infatuation with you." I started walking again, ignoring her. She must have stood still for a bit, because when she caught up with me, she was jogging slightly. "You've never actually realised that he watches you, have you? I'm not joking here - he often sits there and just looks... It's kinda creepy."

"It's a co-incidence. I'm probably just in his vision whilst he has his head at the most comfortable angle."

"I've never heard such long-winded bullshit. He stares at you, seriously. Less now than he used to, sure. It was worst the first few weeks."

I just shook my head as we began to climb the flight of stairs up to the science block. "You're paranoid. Anyway, why were you watching him watch me?"

"Because it's more interesting then cruddy work. Anyway, seeing as you're in denial and aren't going to come out of it anytime soon, what was that about the weekend?"

It took me a few seconds to realise what she meant. "Oh... Stephen won't let me go to the festival without adult supervision... And he may have offered to be that adult."

She stopped in her tracks as we finally came to the correct classroom, quite aptly liking as someone had slapped her around the face with a wet fish before screeching "Over my dead body is he coming with us!"

Well, she couldn't say that I didn't warn her.