Chapter Text
Her bruises could have been hidden if she would just let her hair down, but she continued to wear those taupe-colored strands in her signature pigtails. Soul stared at the marks, trying to think back to the last time he saw similar discoloration on her skin.
‘It was just a couple weeks ago wasn’t it?’ He recalled, realizing how accustomed to the sight he had gotten, and that worried him.
“Soul Evans, I suggest you keep your eyes on your own paper,” ordered a voice. Soul snapped out of his thoughts to meet the eyes, well more like the reflective glasses, of his teacher. “You know how I get when I catch kids trying to cheat,” the professor continued as he pushed up his glasses to reveal a lethal glare.
Shivers were sent up and down Soul’s spine, and he immediately glued his eyes back on his own paper. While scribbling nonsense on his sheet, he glanced up at the clock, ‘Shit! Two minutes left?’ He hastened his pace only to be interrupted by the school bell shortly after.
His peers stood at the sound and began walking around his desk as he continued to check off his last few multiple-choice questions. Filling in the last bubble, a big slap to his back forced his hand to write a massive pencil streak through the entire page.
“How’d the exam go, Soul?” shouted a loud voice that was followed by a raspy laugh.
Soul slammed his desk, “What the hell was that for?” He panicked to erase the mark until he felt a shadow hovering above him.
“Time’s up, Soul.” The student looked up to see his teacher’s looming figure staring down at him. The professor snatched the paper from under his own hands and walked back to stack it along with the rest of his pile.
“Uh, sorry pal--”
The blue-haired kid’s apology was interrupted by the thud of Soul’s head banging on the desk. A prolonged “ugh” was followed by a whispered “fuck me” before he got up, grabbed his backpack and left the room.
He made his way through the hallway when his eyes were caught, once again, by the sight of that girl. ‘You’d think that staring at a nerd woulda given me a better shot at the test instead of leaving me with two fucking minutes of panic. How uncool.’
He pulled his eyes away to the floor, ashamed of his own selfishness.
“So, Soul, now that that’s out of the way. Can we go get food off campus again?”
Soul turned to glare, but ended up sighing in defeat, “What, so you can ride on my motorcycle again?”
“I mean,” the boy’s eyes searched for a better excuse. “Well, yeah. But I’m also sick of this school’s food.”
Soul scoffed and turned in the opposite direction.
“What? Your new motorcycle is sick! I can’t believe your parents bought that for you.”
“They didn’t buy it for me,” Soul corrected. “It was Wes’s old one. They bought him a new convertible this time.” He added in his head, ‘for being so fucking perfect.’
“Yeah, but a cool motorcycle is a cool motorcycle, am I right?” he chuckled.
Soul sighed and waved lazily as he walked away to his next period, “Sure, Blackstar. I’ll see you later.”
Despite Soul’s accusations of Blackstar freeloading off of his ride and gas, he ended up agreeing to go out for food anyways. Once the bell rang for lunch, that’s when Soul decided to take a shortcut through the library to the parking lot. Walking at a brisk pace, the boy weaved through the aisles of books towards the opposite end’s door.
He felt his phone buzzing in his backpack. ‘Damn it, that’s probably Blackstar wondering where my bike is again.’ The boy swung his backpack around to dig around in his bag. He continued at his pace with his head buried in search. With a few aisles to go, he finally snatched his phone only to drop it as he crashed straight into another student. Soul yelled as he fell onto his poor victim.
Struggling to get back on his feet, the boy grunted as he tried to untangle his arms from his backpack. Soul could hear the body beneath him breathing heavily as it struggled to get him off in an anxious manner. He heard a whimper emerge as he caught a pigtail between his hand and the ground. ‘Shit, I fell on a fucking girl! How uncool.’
At last, with the help of a surprisingly strong shove from the female beneath him, he managed to roll over and off of her. The girl shot up immediately with panicked eyes and clenched fists. Soul froze on the ground as he watched the sheer terror radiate from the girl’s tense and defensive figure. It was her.
From the ground, the boy apologized, “I am so sorry, Maka. I wasn’t paying attention and I--” He remembered his phone. He sat up to look around for it through the pile of books the girl must have been carrying before he crashed into her.
In the corner of his eye he saw Maka holding out an object, “It looks like you cracked the screen.”
He thanked her as he took the phone from her slightly shaky hand. The term cracked was an understatement to the unfortunate sight of shattered glass that Soul’s phone now bore. “Fuck!” he shouted. A few shushes sounded from the corners of the library.
As though she were in a rush, Maka had already finished picking up the rest of her books by the time Soul was finished sulking on the ground. He looked up again, this time speaking in a more library-appropriate tone, “Shit, Maka, I’m sorry. Is there--”
BOOM! The spine of a book came crashing down right on his head. Soul yelled in pain with more shushes to follow. “The hell--”
“Watch where you’re going next time,” she scolded as she spun around to walk away with her stack of books (more like weapons).
Soul rubbed his head as Maka turned down one of the aisles. ‘Yeesh, I don’t understand women at all. One moment they’re all innocent and shit and the next moment they turn into some fearless fucking demon.’
He finally got up after he had gathered all the items that had fallen from his backpack and shoved them back into the bag. He glanced back to where the girl had disappeared, wondering why she had appeared so frightened despite the minimally scary situation.
The boy brushed off his questions and opened his phone to answer Blackstar. Through his shattered screen, Soul read that his notifications were actually from his mother. Although reluctant to open them, he figured that crashing into Maka couldn’t have been for nothing.
The messages turned out to be just as Soul had predicted; it was just a bunch of scolding as usual. He sighed as his eyes skimmed through the paragraphs about his grades and how crucial it was for him to have done well on Professor Stein’s test. After many sentences in all upper case letters and multiple exclamation points, Soul came upon a word that left a foul taste in his mouth. It was the word “compare.”
You know Wes had an A in this class! And I expect you to have an A too!! Your grades are dreadful compared to your brother’s…
The phone’s screen turned black with the push of the power button. Soul got the gist as he had read similar texts all too often.
With a bowed head, he slid the device into his back pocket. The boy was no longer in the mood to go out with Blackstar. Nevertheless, he made his way out the door and into the parking lot.
When he arrived at his motorcycle, Soul found a person waiting for him. However, it was not the blue-haired idiot he had expected.