Chapter Text
On the way-too-early morning of her first day of freshman year, Luz lingers in front of her full-length mirror and struggles to tie her uniform tie while wrestling down the twisting nerves making her stomach churn.
As she carefully regulates her breathing, she glances over her appearance and tries to get used to the look of it. The black blazer and stiff grey long pants look strange on her, she thinks as her eye pauses on the Hexside symbol emblazoned on her jacket. At least she got to keep her sneakers. She’s never gone to a school with a uniform before. She’s never had to know how to tie a tie before, and she’s regretting not learning how before now because her fingers are fumbling uselessly within what might be but probably isn’t a knot. Everyone else probably knows how to tie their ties, and she’s going to show up with this mess on her chest looking like an idiot and --
“Mija?”
Luz startles. She hadn’t heard the door open behind her. A forced smile sprints onto her face as she locks eyes with her mother’s concerned face through the reflection. She’s wearing her sky blue nurse scrubs, Luz notices. She’ll be going to work soon. “Mami! Morning!”
“I didn’t expect you to be up so early, estrellita,” Camila says, stepping fully into Luz’s room. “Eda won’t be here to pick you up for another hour or so. It’s still dark outside.”
Luz knows that. She’d just given up hope on getting any sort of sleep and figured that she might as well get a headstart on putting herself together. “Oh! Well, y’know! I’m just…”
“Nervous?” Luz feels her mother’s gentle hands land on both her shoulders and turn her around so that they’re facing each other.
Very.
“Course not!” Luz says instead, directing the manufactured smile up at Camila’s face in desperate hopes of easing the worried lines around her eyes. She even does a tiny bounce on the back of her heels to sell it a little better. “I’m excited!”
A tired and mirthful little breath huffs out of mother’s nose as she moves her hands to Luz’s chest, nudging her fumbling fingers off of the piece of cloth giving her so much trouble. As Luz sputters, Camila expertly weaves the yellow tie into a proper shape in a few quick movements. It’s done in what feels like a blink.
“How the --?!” Luz gapes at the necktie in awe, then at her mother, who just smiles at her wryly. “I watched… so many tutorials trying to learn how to -- and you just? What?”
This time, Camila’s laugh has more substance as she pats Luz’s cheek. The sound eases her nerves a little. “Practice, mija.”
Camila doesn’t bring her hand away from her daughter's face, just stays cupping it as she takes in the sight of Luz all dressed up for her first day at her new school. The curve of her brow is fretful, but the dim light of her eyes is warm. She always looked like that, Luz thinks as she feels her chest ache with guilt. So worried about her. “Have a good day for me, okay? Make some friends.”
It's impossible for Luz to promise that and she can’t be more sorry about it. “I’ll try.”
Her mother leans in to brush her lips against Luz’s forehead, and Luz closes her eyes and leans into the touch, soaks in the familiar comfort, like if she tries hard enough she’ll be able to keep the feeling the affection gives her with her and let it carry her through the whole day.
With that, Camila pulls away from her with one last once over to make sure she looks alright, before she reluctantly turns and leaves the room.
Luz stands there and listens to the sound of Camila finishing her morning business, the beep of the coffee maker and the jingle of her keys, then the opening and final closing of the front door.
She feels her loss acutely.
Then she takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and gets ready to waste time pacing around the house until Eda pulls up in her driveway.
(She very carefully does not think about the box underneath her bed.)
Sunrise comes just as Eda arrives.
“Gooood morning, kid!” Eda grins at her toothily from the driver’s seat when Luz opens the passenger side door, long fingers loose around the steering wheel. “Hop in.”
“Morning, Eda!” Luz climbs into the front seat and is immediately forced to fold her long legs to her chest with how close the chair is to the dashboard. Her messenger bag is sandwiched between her thighs and her middle. “Oof. Uh,” Luz wheezes, blindly reaching for the lever to adjust the seat. “Was King sitting up here?”
“Oh! Yeah, he was. Hah.” Eda snorts. “Took him around the neighborhood a couple times last night to help him sleep. Rides knock him out like nothing else. Speaking of…” She juts her thumb at the back seat while she moves the stick shift out of park and into drive. “Check it out.”
Luz fixes her seat so that she can actually move, puts on her seatbelt, then leans over to look in the back and coos at what she sees. In his booster seat sits Kingsley (or King, as he prefers to be called), a little boy with dark skin mottled with pale patches (complete with a strange and endearingly skull shaped pattern on his face) and short, wild dark hair, hunched over and fast asleep. A little bit of drool drips off his lip.
It’s hard to muffle her giggles behind her hands, but Luz manages it from how much she wants to avoid waking him. She’d never get over how cute he could be, though the boy himself was loath to admit it.
“He’s been sleeping like that the whole drive,” Eda says, chuckling as Luz turns forward in her seat again, this time with a grin on her face. “May have to wake up a couple hours earlier than usual, but at least he gets to nap to make up for it.”
Luz winces. “Have we thanked you for that yet? Driving an hour up from Bonesborough and then back down another just to get me to school…”
“Only a million times already,” Eda rolls her eyes as she pulls the car out of the Noceda driveway and into the road. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s really no problem, Luz. I’ve spent more gas money on less, even I know how good of a school Hexside is and there’s no way I’m letting you miss out on a scholarship there because their stupid rich bus routes don’t go to your neighborhood, King basically started bouncing off the walls when I told him we’d be seeing you in the morning every day, yadda yadda yadda.” Her coach-but-technically-not-her-coach-anymore-really reaches over to ruffle her hair without taking her eyes off the road. “Now quit feeling weird and guilty and zone out at your phone, or whatever weird thing you teens do.”
How did she always do so much for them then act like it wasn’t even a big deal? “Mmm…” Luz hums as she pats her curly hair back down into its proper messy but like, on purpose about it, style. She still wants to make up somehow, as much as she can. “Can I zone out at your phone instead? I could help you beat that Candy Crush level you’re stuck on.”
Eda gasps, sitting up ramrod straight in her seat with sparkling eyes like a dog that’s just had a treat waved in front of it. Luz could almost see the wagging tail.
She swallows down a laugh. Yeah, that’s what she thought. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she says, taking Eda’s phone out of the cup holder and putting in the code. It’s 0927, her mom’s birthday. Honestly, it was a wonder she still hadn’t realized Eda had a crush on her -- even Luz knew. Even King knew! … Come to think of it, how sad Camila had looked at the thought of her missing out on the opportunity to go to Hexside because she couldn’t reliably drive her was probably a huge factor towards how quickly Eda offered the idea that led them here. Pfft.
Thinking about her mother’s love life is much, much preferable to thinking about how nervous she is.
Eda very kindly doesn’t comment on how much Luz’s hands shake as her fingers fly across the glass screen. She just turns on the radio, lets it play a soft song at a low volume, and allows Luz to listen to that and the sound of King’s snoring rather than drowning in her own thoughts.
There isn’t anyone outside the school when Eda pulls up to the front gate. Luz gives King, still asleep, a kiss on the forehead goodbye and Eda a hug for good luck, then gets out of the car and meanders up the stone path.
Luz is used to school buildings that are one huge brick the same color as the mystery meat they serve in the cafeteria. Hexside isn’t like that at all. It’s -- big, in a word, and it’s opulent presence only makes it seem to tower even taller over her as she walks into its shadow. The building is all expensive-looking white stone and tall, squarish steeples, and Luz thinks she can pretty comfortably describe it as gothic, in atmosphere if nothing else.
The entrance doors are made of a richly colored dark wood that she has to climb a set of grand ivory stairs to get to, and there are actual real-life marble columns holding up the roof. She feels like she’s walking into a really fancy museum rather than the place that she’s going to be complaining about math homework inside for the next four years.
Her feet stop in front of the door and don’t let her go any further. Now that she’s standing here, she can’t muster up enough force to strangle the pure anxiety rolling through her like a storm -- it’s hard to think.
What thoughts she can manage boil down to this: she really can’t afford to mess this up, this time. Her mother let her move to an entirely different district just so that she could have another chance, so she has to make this work, it has to be worth the trouble, and she can't be loud or talkative in class or so weird that it makes everyone hate her on the spot like she always did by being herself.
So she’s not going to! She won’t be herself. She’ll be someone better. Goodbye to the old Luz Noceda because there’s someone new in town, and she’s definitely not thinking about how much she feels like a slice of life anime protagonist right now!
It’s going to be alright. She has to believe that or she can’t move forward.
Luz takes a deep, shuddering breath, and then does what she always does when she’s facing something frightening. Determination furrowing her brow, she grabs the door handle, rips it open, and walks straight into the opening hall.
The first thing she notices is how high the ceilings are -- and really, they’re like a million feet off the ground, what kind of school needed ceilings that high? Her sneakers squeak against the ruddy tile floor, and Luz has to stop gape at the hall -- the floors gleam like someone actually bothered to clean them, walls of shiny red lockers are interspersed with more grey stone pillars, and it doesn’t even smell like -- like old dusty cheese, or some other Teen Body Odor. It’s like... It smells like lemons, actually.
Luz doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to this.
The second thing she notices is that the inside is just as empty as the front yard, instead of full of kids running around and talking and laughing with their friends (and maybe turning to sneer at her as soon as she walked through the door -- no, no one knew her here it wouldn’t be like that it wouldn’t--) like she expected.
Is she… late? She just got here, but she didn’t hear a bell ring or anything.
Luz takes a couple hesitant steps forward. Reaches into her pocket and pulls out her schedule, squints at it. She doesn’t know where her first class is.
“Hey!”
The scratchy voice pulls her attention to the side, and she spots someone, a girl with her brown hair pulled into a messy bun and a purposeful edge to her stride walking down the hallway towards her.
Well, this is convenient. “Hi!” Luz greets, trying to seem friendly but not too friendly because that’s weird. “Can you help me find --?”
“You’re a freshman, aren’t you?” The girl says.
What. How did she know that? Oh wait -- Luz glances down at the ID hanging around her neck and remembers that all of the different years had uniquely colored stripes blazed across them, with purple for the freshmen, then back up at her with her best friendly grin. Now that she’s looking she sees that the girl’s ID has the green stripe, marking her as a junior. “Yeah! Do you know where --”
“The auditorium is?” She finishes for her.
Luz blinks. “Why would I need to go to the auditorium?”
“For th -- for the freshman’s beginning of the year meeting thing? Did no one tell you?”
This was not covered in the brochure. “Nnnnnnnooo?”
“Oh my god,” The girl gripes, smacking her palm into her forehead then pushing the fringe of hair there back, exasperated. “Bump does this every freakin’ year, he doesn’t tell the newbies! Okay look, you gotta get to the auditorium for the meeting, it’s mandatory. You’re lucky I recognized that ‘I don’t know where the hell I’m going’ freshie look you’ve got on.”
Oh. Well. Okay. But she doesn’t know where the auditorium is. She’s been to Hexside a couple times before, once to take the scholarship aptitude exam and another to finalize the details of her admission once she passed, but neither times had she even heard anything about…. this. “Thank you? Uh, so how do I --”
This time it’s the bell that interrupts her, and to Luz’s surprise it sounds like an actual physical bell tolling rather than electric recording; she can feel the sound reverberating through her bones a little. It makes her jump but the junior, apparently used to it, doesn’t even flinch, just looks up and clicks her tongue.
“Crap. Okay, I’m late for class so I gotta head out, but I’ll see you around.” The junior strides past Luz with a hefty pat to her shoulder. “Welcome to Hexside, dude.”
“But where’s the -- !” Luz tries to ask, but the girl has already whisked around some lockers and disappeared. “... Auditorium... “
Well. Fantastic first day already. Wait, no, that’s pessimistic! Luz straightens and smacks her hands on both sides of her face to scold herself. It’d be okay! And besides, she met someone and, even though she left before Luz could get her name, she didn’t hate her immediately! The girl was even helpful! If a bit brusque.
Now that she’s already had a nice encounter, all she has to do is find the auditorium and the rest of her day will stay sailing smoothly. How hard could it be?
Apparently very, very hard.
It takes a good ten minutes of scurrying around silent and frustratingly labyrinthine halls (They didn’t even give her a map! ) before Luz finally stumbles across the doors to what she’s pretty sure is the auditorium, only to find that they’re locked when she tries to ease them open. Sounds are muffled through the wood, but Luz can still hear someone talking behind them. The presentation’s already started.
She allows herself exactly one second to despair before she picks up all her pieces and forces them back into the shape of a person. Maybe there’s a back entrance?
To her relief, walking all the way around does reveal another entrance, and this one is open. She cracks opens the door and is immediately hit with a wave of sound, the voice from before but clear and loud.
“--and I think that will be all for my portion of this year’s presentation,” announces what she thinks is Principal Bump, if she’s remembering how he sounded when he and her mother met to finalize the details of her scholarship correctly. “Now, I’ll turn this over to your freshmen prefect, Ms. Amity Blight!”
The crowd obligingly falls into applause as Luz slips into the dark room. Someone else begins to speak, a higher, steady and professional sounding voice, but Luz tunes out their words as she creeps away from her entrance point and further into the place she’s found herself in -- where is she?
Blinking to adjust her eyes to the dimness, Luz looks around. There are ropes hanging down from the ceiling, thick curtains too, she thinks, and a bunch of official-looking technology boards and as she moves towards the light she realizes that those are spotlights shining down on the -- oh dios mio, she’s backstage.
...Ha. Haha! She is… not supposed to be here!
But it’s fine! Because Luz is still hidden behind the curtains, and the girl on stage-- and it’s a girl speaking, Luz realizes, with painfully upright posture and a couple of note cards in her hands resting on the podium, hasn’t noticed her, and a peek through the curtains confirms that the crowd, Bump in the front row included, haven’t either. So it’s fine. It’s cool. It’s chill. All she has to do is find a way off stage and into an empty seat without anyone noticing her. Piece of cake.
Luz turns around, takes one step forward, and promptly gets her foot caught in some ropes piled on the floor.
A viciously bitten tongue prevents any noise from escaping her as she pinwheels her arms trying to catch her balance, but it doesn’t save her from falling backwards into one of those technology boards, her hand landing hard on something that clicked when her weight pressed down on it.
Luz freezes, eyes blown wide.
…
Oh. Well maybe it didn’t do anyth--
Every single light in the auditorium flashes off. A shocked murmur comes over the crowd, and the girl abruptly stops speaking, but the microphone sings an awkward static whine into the quiet but busy air.
A metallic kerchunk sounds from above. When Luz looks up she sees that it’s a panel sliding away on the ceiling above the audience to reveal a compartment, and as she watches a huge, glowing disco ball slowly drops down from it. Once the disco ball’s clicked into place two more panels open at its sides, and two… cannons (?!) plop down, pointing at the seats.
Okay, so it did... Something!
Before Luz can even begin to try to figure out how to undo the something, three things happen simultaneously: 1) All of the spotlights flash back on but instead of normal white light, they’re each a different color, red, blue, green and all the rest, and they automatically direct themselves at the now slowly spinning disco ball on the ceiling, making a kaleidoscope of rainbow light flash all around the room through the dark 2) the canons on the ceiling explode, fire lobby after lobby of confetti onto the now screaming swarm of students what the heck 3) every speaker in the room starts blasting hardcore electrical party music at full volume.
It’s like Luz’s been dropped on her head in the middle of the most scholarly underground rave in the world, the music is so loud it feels like drills in her ears -- and actually she’s pretty sure she’s used this exact song in one of her amvs-- no, focus ! Luz stares in mute horror past the curtain again and sees that the room has fallen into utter chaos, rows and rows of students laughing uproariously or grinning in confusion or just plain yelling as confetti rains down and covers them in prismatic paper and dots of disco lights streak across the room, all while Bump tries and fails to regain control over them, yelling something about how this display was supposed to be for this year’s graduation, why is it set up now?!
Hhhhyikes. Luz glances back at the girl on stage and feels like she’s been doused in ice water when she finds that the prefect is staring straight at her, her incredibly severe face scarlet all the way down to her ears with either fury or embarrassment or both. At least Luz is pretty sure it’s scarlet, it’s a little hard to tell with all the -- the flashing lights smearing over her expression.
Yikes! “Uh. Hi!” Judging by the way the girl's expression twists, the casual greeting either makes all this worse or she just can’t hear Luz at all over the blaring screech of music. “I got this!” Luz says anyways, and without breaking eye contact starts pressing buttons on the panel at random. Maybe one of them would turn this all off?
It does not turn it off! It only changes the music -- with each button there’s a rapid shift in tone, a song that would fit an elegant slow dance, the next befitting the somber, dark march of a funeral, then the grand rising tune of a graduation ceremony, then smooth jazz, then Cotton Eye Joe who MADE this playlist --
“What are you doing ?!” The girl shrieks at her, and starts to march off the stage towards Luz with murderous intent in her eyes.
Ah. So this is how Luz dies!
Not wanting to meet her fate, she tries to stumble away from the approaching girl and trips on another twist of rope. Why is there so much rope here? Luz careens backwards again, and instead of catching herself on the panel as she’d almost hoped, her flailing gets her a handful of rich, heavy cloth, and Luz feels the stage curtain jerk out of place from above.
With a muted ploomf a mountain of curtains spill down on her and flatten her like a weighted blanket just as she hits the chill floor, and both impacts knock all the wind out of her. For a moment Luz just sits there in her new cocoon, dazed.
Through the haze of the curtain, the music falls silent and all the lights, the regular ones this time, flash back on. Someone tugs on the edge of her blanket and Luz is ripped back into brilliant light.
She blinks to readjust her eyes, and once she gets used to the brightness she stills like a rabbit caught in the sights of a wolf, because she finds that the prefect is standing directly over her and glaring down at her with her face still a furious blush, and the cold emerald green of her eyes pin Luz to the floor. Everything about her face, her dignified nose and cheekbones and immaculately done make up, are all sharp edges. Her pale skin (the parts of it that aren’t red, anyways) is stark against her coal-black hair, done in a half updo. Perfectly done eyebrows drawn together and her mouth drawn into a snarl, the prefect is the very picture of unyielding and very, very angry.
It’s the worst time to be thinking this, but she’s as pretty as she is terrifying, and Luz’s heart skips a beat for more than one reason looking up at her.
A second passes with the girl just seething.
Uhhhhhhhh.
Principal Bump comes into view next, deeply exhausted as he leans over to peer at her. Confetti still flutters weightlessly through the air above him, and Luz can hear that the audience is still all abuzz.
Luz tries for a wide, nervous smile. Neither of their expressions change.
“Ms. Noceda,” Bump says, despairing. “ Why.”
Luz has to stay behind to get a to apologize to the prefect and receive a scolding for her tardiness and disruptiveness while the rest of her peers filter out through the double doors, giggling at her over their shoulders. She gets a good couple detentions, but she manages to escape the encounter without her mother being contacted, so she guesses that counts as a win.
(But the entire time -- the prefect girl had stood behind Bump as he lectured, expression as though she relished the fact that Luz was being punished and lectured. She even joined in with a few choice, biting words, her tone carrying such clear contempt and dislike that it made Luz kind of nauseous. She really hadn’t meant to ruin the girl’s speech at all, but neither of them cared much about that, and all Luz could do was sit there and take the treatment, shrink into herself, and wish she was anywhere but there.)
After she’s finally let go, she hurries to her first class of the day. As if being late to the meeting wasn’t bad enough, now she has to be late to math, too.
When she gets inside, her new teacher pauses lecturing to watch her awkwardly shuffle to an empty seat, posture hunched. “Ms. Noceda,” the tall, hawkish woman says, narrowing her eyes at Luz from behind oval glasses frames. “I should hope that you don’t have as much of a habit of interrupting as you seem to, or else I do not see you and I getting along this year.”
Some hushed snickers float through the air.
Luz sinks down into her seat and wishes that she could sink into the ground instead, cheeks burning with embarrassment. “No, ma’am,” she mutters, gaze locked on her desk. The teacher hmphs snootily and turns back to the whiteboard.
For the rest of the day, other than her first teacher’s snide comment, Luz is mostly ignored. On one hand it’s relieving to be just a part of the collective new wave of students pouring into the school. A couple people side-eye her, maybe point and mutter and giggle at most, but no one makes fun of her to her face.
(No one makes any effort at all to talk to her.)
After the display from that morning, Luz has lost her courage. She’s not going to be trying to bulldoze her way into friendships today, and maybe not tomorrow, either (Not trying so hard was part of her plan to not seem so weird, anyways, so it… it all worked out. But not holding a real conversation with anyone, it gnaws at her in the same way it has every day for the past few years of her life, draining her of all her energy. Time moves at an excruciating crawl, and it’s made worse by the fact that all she does in all her classes is listen to her teachers drone about their syllabuses, so there’s no real distraction from how alone she is.
Lunch is no better than class. Not because the food is bad -- Luz pokes at the meatloaf and it doesn’t even jiggle back (Private schools are so, so weird).
It’s just that she can barely hear the clatter of her tray on the plastic as she sits at an empty table in the corner of the room, so loud is the din of everyone talking in the cafeteria. Usually she doesn’t like the quiet very much, but she kind of wishes she were somewhere silent now, where she didn’t have to hear every single one of them speaking all at once. They all look so friendly with each other already. Luz suddenly realizes; Hexside’s a K-12 school so most of them had probably known each other since middle school, maybe even since their elementary years. All over again, she's the odd one out.
A boy behind her elbows his friend when they make a bad joke that leaves the table groaning, a group of girls at another table besides her chatter to each other as all they bow their heads over one phone, one girl passes her by with another riding on her back and playfully ordering her about with an evil cackle, and Luz has no choice but to notice all of it, can only let what feels like hundreds of voices and calls and jokes that aren’t for her crash over her like a tidal wave, and this is always the worst thing about having no friends.
Dark storm clouds tumble mercilessly over her shoulders, roaring with the cacophony of the lunchroom rather than regular lightning and thunder -- they press down on her like physical things and it's all she can do to just breathe and keep breathing beneath their weight.
It's just…
She's lonely. Luz swallows hard as her vision blurs with tears she can't afford to let fall. She's just really, really lonely, is all, and she’s made a mess of things already and no one wants to be her friend, and she can't do anything about it but sit and stare at her food, mind slipping away from her, spiraling down, down, into the worst parts of her mind. The kids around her disappear, become one colorful, lively mass that gives her and the dark chasm she sits in a terribly wide berth, that doesn’t even notice she’s there, the divide between them an invisible wall she can’t climb no matter how hard she tries.
Just eating where she’s supposed to always becomes nothing but a cruel reminder that no matter what, even when she’s surrounded by people, she’s completely alone.
And it's no wonder that she is after this morning. Who'd want to be seen with someone like her, who'd proven how huge of an idiot she was, what, twenty minutes after stepping into their lives?
Wait, no, it didn't do her any good to think like this. Luz shakes her head to clear her negative thoughts. It only dispels a couple of them, but -- what is she moping for? It’s not like she isn't used to this by now.
She should be, at least. Loneliness is her oldest and only friend. She’s walked with the hole of it yawning inside her for as long as she’s been old enough to realize it was there. It hurts, sure, but it always hurt, this choking pressure -- She’s been holding it in her lungs, trapped on the inhale, through every year of school she’s gone through her entire life.
… Anyways, it’s fine. Soon she'll be able to breathe out, because Hexside is going to be different. She promised herself it would. This day turned out a mess but it's just the first one, she'll be able to turn the next around. Tomorrow will be a better day.
(It’s so much harder to fix your problems when you’re on your own.)
Luz takes a deep breath that forces her eyes to dry, picks up her fork, and robotically starts to eat.
After lunch, Luz trudges to her next class. AP Literature. One of her few advanced ones (her mother worried about her taking too many and becoming overwhelmed), but the one she was looking forward to the most. Luz loves books! There’s no way she won’t enjoy a literature class, right?
The teacher, a young and serene looking woman in a swishy green dress and a plastic flower crown (It looks really pretty and Luz wonders where she bought it), holds the door open to the mostly empty classroom for her. “Welcome!” she chirps, smiling at Luz.
She can’t help but stare at her in shock, her head turning to keep the woman in her sights as she wanders inside. That was so -- so nice?! This lady’s the cheeriest person she’s met all day, and she’s Luz’s teacher? “T-Thank you!” Luz remembers to say over her shoulder once she recovers, managing to perk up a little.
Maybe this class really would be enj-- oh hi, prefect who’s speech she ruined earlier. “AH-haaaaaheeey, girl!” Luz blurts then tries to recover, instinctively rocking on her back foot and shooting finger guns as Amity Blight herself scowls at her from across the desk Luz had stumbled to a stop in front of. Amity gives her no answer. Luz laughs awkwardly. “How’s it hangin’?”
Amity’s scowl, somehow, deepens. “ Don’t talk to me,” she hisses, low and venomous.
Why is Luz cursed? She drops the finger guns. “Hahokay! Right!” Luz says, turning on her heel and skittering to her desk. She can feel Amity’s gaze burning into her back the whole way there.
“Isn’t that the freak from this morning?” Someone -- Luz doesn’t turn around to see who, just flops into a seat in the back of the room and starts rifling through her messenger bag for nothing but to look busy -- whispers. They may as well’ve shouted for how easily Luz can hear it.
“Ugh, don’t pay her any mind, Boscha. Bump already took care of her,” Amity says, and when Luz makes the mistake of chancing a glance at her she sees Amity looking back, and there’s that feeling from this morning again -- her stare forces Luz to still entirely, pinned beneath it. For a moment they just stay like that, emerald green boring into dark brown.
Then Amity looks away from her, inky hair falling over her face like a curtain, and the spell is broken.
“She’s just a nobody.”
The words ring distant and hollow in Luz’s ears. She puts her head on her desk and doesn’t raise it again until class begins.
After the rest of the kids file through the door and the bell rings, English turns out to be the same as her other classes, for the most part. Their teacher, who introduces herself as Mrs. Fay, explains the syllabus, general class rules -- that sort of thing, all the way up to when the time is drawing to an end.
“I know I must be boring you all, and I apologize for that,” Mrs. Fay starts, clicking off the Powerpoint and drifting to the front of the room. “But! I’m happy to inform you that we’re now upon what I think is the most interesting part of our class today! It’ll appeal to those who enjoy a good story --”
Luz lifts her head off her desk. Amity, she notices, straightens in her seat as well.
“-- and those looking for an easy extra credit opportunity.”
That makes the rest of the kids perk up.
Mrs. Fay, looking pleased to have restored their interest in class after nearly half an hour of mandatory droning, reaches over and grabs a book off her desk, then holds it up so that everyone can see the cover. Luz is too far back to read the title but from what she can see, the image on the front is of a fancy looking parchment paper that has hearts being drawn on it in red ink with a feather pen guided by the dark, vague silhouette of a person’s hand.
“Meet Lost Love Letter , our book for the semester! All the other Literature classes are reading Shakespeare, or To Kill A Mockingbird, or things like that, but I think this’ll be a lot more fun. It follows the story of two completely anonymous people falling in love through nothing but the letters they send each other -- they’ve never met, and don’t even know the other’s real name, only their pen names; Tabby and Wren.”
A hand shoots into the air.
Mrs. Fay points at the hand’s source, a girl with strawberry blonde hair who’s sitting right behind Amity. “Yes?”
“How are they supposed to fall in love if they’ve never even met? They don’t know anything about each other,” The girl asks, obnoxiously popping her bubble gum in her mouth.
“No chewing gum in my class, Boscha, dear.” Fay says with an indulgent smile. “But that is a wonderful question, and the exact sort I was hoping to inspire! Can you get to know a person without knowing them, in the traditional sense of the word? Lost Love Letter puts forward the idea that you can, and that you may even be able to become closer to someone that way than you would otherwise, with first impressions and assumptions forced out of the way. Words are the closest thing we have to putting our hearts on paper, and if you can know everything about someone’s heart before anything else about them…”
Boscha crosses her arms. “Pfft. I don’t buy it.”
Luz, on the other hand, is just about vibrating in her seat, stars glowing in her eyes. It’s a struggle to not make any disruptive noises like squeals but it’s just that the set up is so romantic! She wants to be reading this book yesterday!
“And I appreciate your point of view.” Mrs. Fay pauses to look meaningfully at Boscha. Boscha, taking the hint, gets up from her seat with a groan to go to the trash can and spit out her gum.
Mrs. Fay hums as the girl crosses in front of her, satisfied, and resumes. “Many students have trouble thinking that it’s possible, while others believe it with all their hearts. Which makes for some excellent discussions! However, discussing isn’t all we’re going to do, and this is where the extra credit portion comes in. We, my darlings, are going to experiment!”
Experiment? Luz leans forward, thoroughly enraptured. Experiment how?
“I’ll be assigning each and every one of you a letter writing partner of your own to speak with every day! They may be in this period sitting next to you, or in any of my other periods, but no one in the entire school except for me will have any way of knowing who they are. You can ask the sophomores who took my class last year, I keep this project, as the youth say, on lock. ” A couple kids groan, but Mrs. Fay just laughs brightly. “Here’s how it’ll work: You’ll choose a pen name, and each day at the beginning of class you’ll write your letter and put it in whichever of the many, many cubbies on the wall that I assign to you.” She gestures to the back and Luz looks over to her shoulder, noticing for the first time that the huge wooden shelf spanning the entire back wall held no books, and was instead pocketed with multiple beehive-like little spaces.
“When everyone is gone home for the day, I’ll take your letter out of your cubby and put it in your partner’s. The next day you can come in and take their response letter from your cubby, read it, and reply during the beginning of class. Rinse and repeat every day for the whole year. However!” Mrs. Fay claps, drawing their attention back to her again. “We do have some ground rules!”
“1.) Do not tell your partner who you are, because that takes the fun out of the whole experiment! If I find out that you’re trying to sleuth out your buddy, you won’t get the extra credit. 2.) Don’t steal anyone else’s letters. I won’t give you extra credit if you do that, either. 3.) Please don’t share anything inappropriate or illegal with your buddy.” For a moment Mrs. Fay looks pleading. “ I swear on my life I’ll never read these letters unless I’m forced to, but if you confess to, let’s say, a theft or assault or worse and your partner comes to me about it, I’ll legally have to look into it and no one wants that. Please.”
Silence falls over the room as she lets the message sink in.
Then Mrs. Fay smiles again, like the tone shift never even happened. “Other than that, have fun! It’s completely optional, if you want the credit but don’t want to make an effort all you have to do is scribble on your paper where I can see you for a couple minutes every day then put it in your cubby, but I advise you to take advantage of this opportunity! This is a chance to get to know one of your classmates with no one looking over your shoulder-- no one can judge you but a person who doesn’t ever have to know who you are, if you don’t want them to. Ah, if you both agree you want to meet at the end of the year I’ll help you set it up, but if one doesn’t want to then it’ll never happen. I’m granting you complete anonymity! It’s like a diary, but one that can hear you and respond!”
It’s a chance to make a real friend, Luz realizes, and a shock of pure longing lances through her so hard it leaves her breathless for a second. She blinks as she fully swallows the thought, lowering her chin onto her crossed arms while the room falls into anticipatory chatter. One that won’t be so easy to ruin -- her mouth can’t run faster than her brain in a letter, and she can’t mess something up for them or scare them off with her weird mannerisms, either.
Over the next ten minutes, everyone comes up with a pen name (with the promise that they can change it later, if they end up disliking it) that their teacher marks down on her clipboard, is assigned a cubby, and is given a piece of paper and an envelope to write their first letter.
Other than the deliberation over choosing her name, she doesn’t hesitate before she curls over her desk and begins to write.
To my partner,
Hi there! It’s really nice to meet you! Or I guess, not really meet you, but… to be able to talk to you? At least I hope I’ll be able to talk to you, and that you won’t just send me a bunch of scribbles every day for free extra credit at the end of the year.
It’s kind of hard to figure out ways to introduce yourself without saying your name or anything, huh? Uh... I'm a freshman, and I'm completely new to Hexside. Did you go here before now? Are the assignments always this fun? I've never done anything like this before! Uh… My favorite subject is English! I really like cats, and dogs too, and anim writi readi doing backflips and other super normal things like watching TV. I hope that I’ll be able to get to know you and I’m excited to read your letter tomorrow!
From, Azure
She sits up, giving her message a once over. Yeah, Luz’s chosen to call herself Azure. No relation to The Good Witch Azura! It’s just-- blue just so happens to be her favorite color. So it’s totally clever and works out and has no weird nerd implications at all.
Just as she finishes her last reread, the bell tolls and the period ends. Shoot! She hurriedly folds her short letter and packs it into the envelope, then gets up to deposit it in her new cubby on her way to hurry out of the room.
Heart pounding in her chest, she steps into the throng of students in the hall to head to chemistry. She takes a deep breath and lets it out, then marvels at the fact that she actually feels -- good. Her hopes rise and rise and won’t stop rising and she can’t do a thing about it, because this is a chance to have someone her age to talk with, and she’s never been able to have that before. This has to be a sign of her luck changing. Maybe today could end on a good note after all!
Luz takes one step into her chemistry class and halts in the doorway when she makes direct eye contact with Amity Blight, sitting at one of the tables.
“Ugh, you again?” Amity sneers, tone soaked in acidic disdain.
Luz throws up her hands. “Are you KIDDING me?!”
Chemistry is her last class of the day. Once it’s finished, she stumbles out to the car line and collapses into Eda’s old convertible.
“Hi, Eda,” Luz says into the leather, then pathetically peels her face off the seat to start sitting up like a normal person.
“Uhh… Hey, kid,” Eda greets hesitantly, raising an eyebrow at her. “How was your day?”
All too fresh memories hammer down on her and make her wince and moan like a dying animal as she squeezes her eyes shut, and Luz suddenly decides that she’d much rather curl into a little ball on the seat than sit up.
“Woof.” Eda reaches over to close Luz’s door behind her, then tucks a seat belt over the whimpering ball of high school kid. “That bad, huh. Would unhealthy and sugary food that I, as your gymnastics coach, should not be feeding you help?”
Luz makes a vaguely affirming noise. Eda nods sagely and starts pulling out of the parking lot.
“Luz!” Two tiny hands plap down on both her cheeks, and Luz opens her eyes to see King’s smiling, piebald face hovering over hers. Now that he's awake his brown eyes, alight with joy, are clear to see.
“King!” Luz sits up, surprised into returning his cheer. “Hi, cutiepie! What’re you doing here? Didn’t school end for you a couple hours ago?”
King draws back, embarrassed. “Uhhh…”
“He was sad he didn’t get to see you off this morning ‘cuz he was too sleepy,” Eda doesn’t take her eyes off the road, but she looks smug as King lets out a little nyeh! of protest. “He begged me to take him along when I picked you up and he’s been waiting on pins and needles for you to get out for hours.”
“I was not!” King shrills. “The King of Demons misses nobody!” He's called himself that, the King of Demons, ever since Luz met him when he was little a few years ago. She thinks it's his own version of having an imaginary friend. It's a little odd, and she adores him for it.
“Awww, buddy!” Luz undoes her seatbelt and climbs into the back with him to envelop the hissing boy in a tight hug, even as he half-heartedly tries to wriggle out of it. He's small for his age and Luz is no pushover in terms of strength, so she knows he knows there's no escape and is only doing it for the sake of his tiny pride. “I missed you too!”
King stops wriggling. “... Really?”
“Mhm!” Luz swoops down to plant a kiss on the top of his fluffy hair, making him giggle. “How was school? Make any friends?”
“No!” King sniffs primly, now wiggling to get comfortable in Luz’s lap as she pulls the seatbelt over the both of them. “The King of Demons has no need for friends.”
Luz holds back the urge to sigh. Still no luck for him either… The thought makes her a little sad. She doesn’t want King to grow up as lonely as she has. Well. He never really would be, not with her around determined to be there for him, but still.
King had paused, contemplating something as she thought, but now he speaks up again. “Someone pushed me on the playground today. An’ said my spots are weird.”
Luz gasps. “Oh no! Did you tell a teacher?”
“No,” King says, proud. “I put dirt in his sandwich at lunch instead.”
Eda cackles from the front seat. “That’s my boy!”
“Eda, don’t praise him for that!”
Eda stops to get them ice cream on the way home. King regales her of the tales of all the minions he’s collected (he stole someone’s plushie out of their backpack, and Luz spends most of her time in the car trying to convince him to leave it in the lost and found tomorrow) on his first day of second grade while spilling his treat all over his shirt. He sounds so triumphant it helps Luz forget how the majority of her day was a catastrophe.
Once they get to her house, they all say their goodbyes. Then she goes inside to drop her things all over the floor, change out of her uniform, and start making dinner.
She’s not the best at cooking, but she thinks she’s okay. Certainly good enough to make something edible for her mom after a long day at the hospital.
For some reason, she doesn’t turn on any music or anything as she works. Just stands in front of the stove and stares at the vegetables frying in the pan as the rice boils. She just… doesn’t feel like it. Even though it would probably make her feel better.
Darkness has fallen when her mother gets home from work. Luz hears her key turning in the doorknob and the door swing open just as she’s starting to set the table.
Dread seeps into her, just a little bit. Luz knows what her mom is going to ask her, and she doesn't have a good answer.
“Luz, baby, ¿estás en tu casa?”
”Estoy aqui, mami,” Luz calls softly from the kitchen, then turns her head and watches Camila walk inside.
Her mother rounds the table in a few quick strides and catches Luz in a hug, even though she must be so tired and her feet must hurt her so much and she must want nothing more than to sit down. She smells like antiseptic and home. Luz returns the embrace as her mother sighs a soft hello into her hair.
Then Camila pulls back with her hands still on Luz’s shoulders to look her in the eye, devastatingly hopeful. “Did you make any friends at school today?”
A crack splits her heart. “No, mami,” Luz has to tell her, hating the way that the answer makes her mother wilt, hating that she has nothing better for her than an unspoken apology, “Not today.”