FRIENDS ➳ jean kirstein

016. WISHFUL THINKING

Charlie - November 16, 2020
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Charlie pretended to be asleep when her mom and Paul returned from their trip on Sunday evening, even if it had only been around seven-thirty. She was determined to avoid them on Monday morning too, planning to sneak out of the house silently and unnoticed, and miraculously, her plan was a success.

This happened to be one of the mornings where she, Armin and Jean would be taking the bus to school, because according to Armin, their mom needed the car. Begrudgingly, Charlie made her way through the neighbourhood towards the bus stop, walking ahead of Armin and Jean to avoid an awkward conversation with both of them. All the way to the bus stop, Charlie wondered what Armin was thinking. She could almost feel his inner conflict as he battled with whether or not to give her the talk on not doing drugs, just incase she happened to be one of Eren's supposed stoner friends.

Thankfully, Armin didn't say anything, which came as a great relief for Charlie. She may have been a fantastic liar, but so was Armin, and they knew each other's tells like the backs of their own hands. Deceiving him would be an almost impossible challenge for her.

They weren't long waiting at the bus stop in tense and awkward silence before the obnoxiously yellow vehicle pulled up. Charlie, Armin and Jean clambered aboard, along with the few other freshmen, sophomores and juniors who were gathered at the stop. Charlie selected a seat as close to the back of the bus as she could find, and Armin and Jean sat with one of their friends from the basketball team further up. As he lowered himself into his seat, Jean glanced back at Charlie, who looked away from him at an unimaginable speed.

The bus would pull up in Eren's neighbourhood soon enough, but until it did, Charlie would put her earphones in and stare out the window, imagining that she was in a dramatic music video for a song about heartbreak or some shit.

She closed her eyes and rested her head against the window, feeling the panes rattle relentlessly as the bus made its unsteady way down the road. The Beach by The Neighbourhood hummed in her ears and, try as she might to focus on its lyrics, she couldn't stop her mind from wandering to yesterday, when Jean had thought it would be a good idea to kiss her.

She pondered every single decision she had ever made in her entire life, and how they all led to that kiss. The whole ordeal was so surreal to her, she was struggling to comprehend the fact that it had actually happened. If she had still been in the clouds at the time, she would have brushed it off as some weed-induced hallucination, but she knew well enough that she had come down from her high when Jean kissed her. It had most definitely happened.

Something knocked against her shoulder—or someone, to be more accurate. Snapping out of her thoughts, Charlie looked around, finding Eren grinning back at her. Smiling, she pulled out one earphone as he greeted her.

"Hey," he said. "Watcha listening to?"

"The Neighbourhood," Charlie answered, unplugging her earphones entirely and stuffing her phone inside the pocket of her jeans to give Eren her full attention. "So, did your mom kill you last night?"

"No, but she did ground me, which is arguably worse."

Charlie's mouth fell open in an expression of genuine shock. "She grounded you?" she all but gasped, and when Eren nodded, she added, "You're eighteen years old, she can't ground you."

"That's what I said," Eren told her. "But she used the whole, 'My house, my rules,' argument. So, I'm grounded."

"For how long?" Charlie inquired.

"A week," Eren replied. "Not that bad, I suppose. And she didn't notice that I was stoned, by the way. She's just pissed off that I snook out."

Charlie agreed that a week's grounding wasn't too awful of a punishment, even if Eren was technically an adult now, and the concept of grounding an eighteen year-old was completely ludicrous. But then a realisation struck her, and she sat up straight, looking at Eren with distress written all over her face.