Chapter Text
i. “Who knows, if I never showed up, what could’ve been. There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen; I had a marvelous time ruining everything.”
2002
If you ask, you might hear that Edie Lehnsherr is a nice girl. A girl with a little bit of a short temper, a smile a little on the sharp side, an average player on the soccer team (with German parents who screamed loudly at matches with their thick accents, much to the relative mortification of their daughter). Average grades, average-enough clothes, average friends. Part of the 98% of humans who are baseline. From the outside, nothing remarkable to speak of.
Really, you might not hear anything at all. You might be asked “who?”
Jakob Eisenhardt is much the same, average all around. Another face in the crowd of the generally average student population at their average high school in their small, mostly Jewish town in southwestern Pennsylvania. He’s a little bit spoiled, with a little bit more money than everyone else, but not close to being a rich kid. You might see him smoking in the back parking lot of the school during fourth period some Wednesdays, but that’s the closest he gets to being any kind of a bad boy.
It seemed natural enough to go to homecoming together, since their friends ran in the same circles, and neither of them had anyone else to go with. It didn’t have anything to do with feelings. But now, sitting on the roof of the school on a Friday night, three weeks after the dance, Edie wonders if she needs to rethink that position.
Jakob’s face is pale in the moonlight, hands catching the silver glow as he gesticulates wildly. The square set of his jaw is nice, Edie decides, and she likes the way he speaks of poetry and philosophy, reminiscent of a simpler time that she never lived, but has read of. On occasion. For English class.
Really, that’s a little bit of a lie; she never finished Romeo and Juliet. But Sarah Aarons was having a party the weekend she was supposed to, and she did well enough on the book report with some help from her friend Sam. But poetry is always more interesting when spoken by a living, breathing person.
Later that night, when Jakob leans in to kiss her, she meets him halfway. She may as well.
It could be interesting.