Chapter Text
Toralei counted exactly seven monsters glaring at her as she walked through the heavy school doors. There had been a time where this wouldn’t have bothered her, but now the stares felt like claws digging into her back. She pressed her own claws into the soft skin of her palm, allowing the pain to subdue the fury that built in her stomach and clambered up her throat, the need to lash out dwindling as the flame inside her began to flicker out. She had worked on this all summer, but a life of fighting to survive wasn’t easy to forget.
Toralei allowed the monsters to part before her, keeping her eyes trained ahead instead of on their wary, gory faces. After a summer spent with her enemy-turned-ghoulfriend Clawdeen Wolf, it was clear to her now how much she had hurt those in school. It had always been a means of living for her- climbing up ladders meant stepping on a few hands to get to the top, right? But that wasn’t the kind of ghoul she wanted to be. It wasn’t the kind of ghoul Clawdeen deserved.
A hand settled on her shoulder, and it took everything Toralei had to not turn around slashing. Her nerves settled when the twins came into view, their tails flicking back and forth lazily as they eyed their startled friend. Meowlody was the first to speak, her feline drawl snapping Toralei out of her panic-induced stupor. This, at least, was familiar.
”Mreow…What’s got you all riled up?”
Purrsephone came next, her voice triller, like the dying calls of a song-bird trapped in her jaws.
“Yeah, look at your tail— It’s swishing like crazy.”
Her tone, though smooth and pleasing to the ear, held a more sinister meaning hidden between drawn out syllables. Toralei could tell by the way they circled her like sharks, how each twin picked at something different, something softer about her.
”The spikes on your jacket are gone.”
”You’ve trimmed your claws.”
”Your hair is unusually long.”
Toralei gripped her tail between shaking hands, smoothing down the fur that stood on edge. The twins were right, of course. She was different: her mind was less consumed with tricks, focusing more on stolen kisses, hands held in the dead of night, soft whispers and promises of ‘doing better.’ Toralei straightened her back at the memories, allowing her tail to fall back to her ankles, letting it flick side to side as the twins continued to prod.
”Just what happened this summer?” Meowlody and Purrsephone swapped glances, a mischievous glint shining in their amber eyes.
“Purrhaps..” Purrsephone started.
”Purrhaps nothing.” Toralei said, finality in her tone. “Nothing happened. It’s our senior year, I just wanted some change I guess.”
The twins exchanged clipped giggles behind folded hands, though their incessant picking finally came to a stop, much to Toralei’s immediate relief. Yes, she might have been a liar, a thief, and a bully, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed hiding things from her beast-friends. And she was afraid that, if they kept prodding, everything that happened over the summer would come spilling out of her. Clawdeen had been clear with her request: She wanted to take things slow, and that meant keeping their relationship hidden.
The three continued walking down the halls of Monster High, headed for the rafters where they often skipped classes together. Every monster allowed them to pass without a word, slipping to the edge of the hallways, pressing their backs against haunted lockers whose tongues flicked out looking for books and papers. There was, of course, one group of ghouls who had never relented to Toralei and her friends. And there they were once more, clustered together beside the stairs leading up to the rafters.
Toralei paused, cleared her throat, and said
“Excuse me, ghouls, you’re in my way.” It came out like an insult rather than soft and sweet like she was originally going for. However, her words did their job. The ghouls turned around one by one, each of them leveling a glare— well, most of them.
Clawdeen stood at the back of the group, her curls pinned up in a hair clip the two of them had made together that summer, hidden by the overgrown trees and in the cover of night. She wasn’t quite smiling, per se, but her gaze was not one of hatred. Toralei tried not to stare, but finding the courage to look away was proving harder than it seemed. There was a crinkle in Clawdeen’s brow, one that urged the words to finally form on her tongue.
”How were your summers…ghouls?” Toralei smiled as best she could, trying to form the real, teeth-baring grin she had worn all summer. But based on the scoffing and eye-rolling she earned, it wasn’t working.
“What do you want, Toralei?” Cleo said, picking at one of her nails. Her eyes never found those of who she was talking to, opting instead for glancing around at other faces indifferently.
“I was just asking a question. Do you have bandages stuffed down your ears?” The taunt had come much too easily. Toralei felt her ears press against the back of her head, a flush building on her cheeks as she attempted to backtrack. “Are those new shoes? They’re gore-geous.”
Cleo’s eyes flicked upwards, taking in Toralei and her awkward, non-confident demeanor. Usually, she stood ready to pounce within a moment’s notice, but now she looked like a kitten with no claws. Toralei could feel the scrutiny in her gaze hot against her skin, which only made the inner ally-cat in her squirm. Hair bristling, she smoothed down her skirt and turned to the kindest of the ghouls- Draculaura.
“I heard you traveled to see Elissabat? I loved the new movie she was in.” It was one she had seen with Clawdeen right when they first got out of math camp, and had quickly become one of her favorites- if just for the memories it conjured with each watch.
Draculaura frowned, “Who told you that?”
“What, a ghoul can’t keep up with celebrity gossip?” Toralei dug her claws into the soft part of her elbow, allowing the pinch of pain to subdue the insults that rose to her sharp tongue. “I know all about the trouble the two of you got into: like when you crashed the castle and threw a monstrous party!”
Draculaura’s cheeks turned impossibly pink. She worked at her bottom lip with one of her fangs before she finally gained the courage to speak again.
“What is it that you want?”
Oh. Toralei was not expecting that reaction. Frustration, embarrassment, borderline anger. The call-back was supposed to entice friendly conversation, a back and forth about parties of her own, but it only sunk Toralei farther into the hole she had dug for herself throughout her high school career.
She now felt herself clawing at the sides, begging to be let out, only to come up with fistfuls of dirt. The only person reaching a hand down was Clawdeen, bathed in sunlight that haloed around her curls. A literal angel sent down from her own personal heaven. And, like the angel she was, Clawdeen chimed in.
“I think Toralei is trying to be nice.” She said tentatively. “Look, she’s even smiling.”
“Looks more like a snarl to me.” Cleo muttered. Toralei once again had to forcibly swallow down an insult.
“I’m trying to do better this year.” Her tail wrapped tightly around her ankle. “I promise.”
Ghoulia moaned something unintelligible to Toralei, but Cleo quickly nodded her head in agreement. “Ghoulia’s right, you haven’t kept good on your promises in the past.”
Steam, hot and fervid, rolled off Toralei in waves of embarrassment, coloring her tabby cheeks red. This was why she had never tried before. This was why becoming a better monster was a futile effort. Toralei pushed a strand of hair over her shoulder, pressed a claw to Cleo’s chest.
“Aren’t you a little too old to be acting like a brat? You’d think five-thousand years in a sarcophagus would do wonders- but they must have wrapped your bandages a little too tight around your brain!”
Cleo said nothing, though it was not her reaction that Toralei immediately caught.
Clawdeen’s golden eyes, often gleaming, grew glassy in what Toralei could only describe as disappointment. Her ears flattened against her hair, the piercings they had done together getting caught in the loose curls sitting in her claw-clip. Guilt, raw and unnerving, swarmed Toralei’s stomach.
Her tail swished furiously.
Toralei did what she always did. She ran. She ran as fast as she could, scampering on claw and foot, until she reached the confines of the only place in Monster High that had ever seen her cry; the largest stall in the math wing’s bathroom. She could never change.
After years of fending for herself on the street, it seemed her violence and quips were too far ingrained into her. She would always and forever be that stray kitten left abandoned in a dark alleyway.