Quinn and Adeline

Chapter One

She cared for little but herself, and she didn't care for that much either. She preferred to be alone. She never worked in group projects. She loved the rain. She was the sound the heavens made when lightning struck. She was a single note, she was a lullaby. She was a drop of water, she was streams pouring into the gutters. She was a disaster and a miracle. She was Quinn.

She strode through the halls with a sort of confidence that maybe she did have and maybe she didn't. Her clothes were stained brownish-red, and her eyes were different colors. She was scared of things she couldn't understand, but what she did understand, she ignored.

She had English next. It was the one class she sometimes attended, but today she really didn't want to. Weapons weren't allowed at school but she had a knife in her pocket, and she planned to use it soon.

Quinn scowled as she bumped into something. Someone.

"Watch where you're going," a voice floated into Quinn's consciousness.

She scowled again. "You watch where you're going."

Quinn shoved past the mysterious person, just after she caught a slight glimpse of the person's face.

She was blonde, with hair tied back into a long ponytail. She wore a T-shirt shredded in random places, and a black pair of sweatpants.

Quinn looked away as she headed to the exit of the school. She just wanted to get away today.

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Adeline sniffed. Rude, she thought.

The girl had had slightly different colored eyes – one black-brown and one green-brown – but that wasn't what had stood out to Adeline the most. She couldn't quite put her finger on it, and it bugged her all through-out fourth period.

As she slid into her seat in her French class, she turned around to wave to her friend.

"Hey, Polaris."

Polaris looked up. "Oh, hey, Adeline."

"How was class?"

"You know, the usual. The same shitbags were insulting the teacher again. Math was fun, though."

"Mm." As Adeline hummed in agreement, she thought about how they'd ever even become friends. Polaris and her were so different that if you'd care to write a list out, it would surely go on for hundreds of thousands of points.

Polaris wore mostly black. It was almost like they were unaware of the existence of any other color – but Adeline knew for a fact that Polaris' parents changed all of her clothes by a shade every week. Usually, by the spring, they were wearing gray, which drove Polaris crazy trying to understand how her clothes had magically lightened. Polaris enjoyed math, which Adeline privately hated. Adeline liked herbology – Polaris did not. Adeline enjoyed alternative rock – Polaris liked dark lullabies. In fact, one of the only things they agreed on was history, which they both enjoyed.

Adeline and Polaris sat in silence as everyone around them indulged in gossiping conversations that almost always ended with raucous laughter. They were both loners - another of the few things they shared in common.

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As Quinn slit her wrist again, she sighed and leaned back against the trunk of the big oak tree near the school. The birds twittered loudly, different ones calling to each other and back and again.

She couldn't decide whether the birdsong was pleasing or annoying.

Quinn pulled out her phone, which she only ever used for the time – she'd never had much friends.

The screen glared up at her, accusatory. Quinn sneered back at it.

English was over. So was Science. Was she going to skip the whole day? She might as well head home now.

She shoved her phone back into the endless void of a pocket in her black jeans and stood up, stretching. Some blood dripped on the grass. She ignored it.

She pulled out a box from yet another one of her pockets. It had but one thing in it – band-aids. She stuck one on her wrist, ignoring the fact that it immediately soaked red all the way through. She fixed her thin black hair that was cut choppily in random ways. She'd sliced it with scissors herself. Without a mirror. At 4 A.M.

Quinn didn't really care.

As she pushed the door open, unlocked her locker – 3, 17, 9 – she kept her mind perfectly blank. She grabbed her backpack, took the padlock off of it, and pedaled home in the middle of the school day.

If anyone saw her, they didn't try to stop her.

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"Home" is an obscure word. It's supposed to be somewhere safe. Maybe cozy. Somewhere you live. Somewhere someone takes care of you.

Well, the House of Gloom, as Quinn called it, wasn't safe. It wasn't cozy. Quinn didn't feel like she lived in it, either – rather she died a little more every minute she spent inside those thin walls. And the House of Gloom certainly didn't have anyone taking care of Quinn.

Quinn's mom had died when she was four. Her dad and her had never been close, so he gave her up and moved to Germany.

Her "caretakers," if she dared call them that, gave her $15 a week, to cover all personal expenses. Her cell phone was her mom's. So were a lot of her clothes.

She'd painstakingly saved up for her headphones, so she could listen to music. She mostly spent her money on band-aids, though.

Her adoptive parents had real kids, too. River was in college, while Richard "Richie" was a year below Quinn. Age didn't matter though, he loved to make fun of Quinn. Quinn didn't care, but she replaced his shampoo with black hair dye so that his golden locks turned jet black. It didn't go well with his freckles.

Quinn had never met River, so she couldn't say whether she was nice or not. But Quinn did know River's parents.

They couldn't be called great, or even good. From an outside perspective, Quinn thought they were horrible parents. All they really did was feed her – which they'd often forget to do – like she was some sort of household pet. They'd wanted a "nice" kid – Quinn couldn't comply. The Grays were thinking about giving her up. They'd only adopted her about a year and a half ago, when Quinn was fifteen – she was almost seventeen now. Before that, she'd moved from adoptive home to orphanage to adoptive home. She'd spent three years, the longest she'd been anywhere, in an orphanage right after her dad decided he didn't want kids. Reflecting, Quinn was pretty sure it'd been a midlife crisis.

She shoved her key in the keyhole of the door to the house. As she stepped inside, she didn't bother to take off her shoes, and walked up a sweeping staircase to the second floor, then up another, small squeaky staircase into the attic.

Quinn dumped her backpack on the floor by herbed and pointedly ignored it, and the homework inside it. Instead, she pulledout her phone and headphones and lost herself to the music.

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AN: Here's the first chapter (:

I'll try to update next Saturday!