Monster High: A New Start (Male Reader)

Insidious Interviews

The final bell bwooped. It was over. She’d survived.

Day three of school without friends was just like day two, which was exactly like day one. Inconceivable! Social extinction wasn’t something Cleo had ever anticipated. What next? Clawdeen needing hair plugs? Draculaura buying steak knives? Lagoona summering in the Sahara?

Now, faced with the unimaginable, she was forced to make the best of a bad situation and embrace the afterlife…or at least make everyone think she had.

Thank Geb for Deuce. He’d stuck to her like liquid resin. But after seventy-two hours of basketball recaps, sunglass shopping, gossip-free lunches, and noxious guy smells, Cleo was starting to unravel.

Deuce: My game starts in forty.

He was holding the double doors open with the flat of his Varvatos high-tops.

Deuce: Wanna grab a slice first?

Cleo saw herself in the lenses of his brown Carrera aviators. An overcast October sky behind her…a lackluster black turtleneck...expressionless eyes. She sighed. Sports and slices, is that what her life had become?

All around her, Monsters and Ghouls spilled from the pink and purple-colored building. Friends connecting like magnets, anxious to share the details of their afternoon before racing home to text. It was the loneliest part of her exile. The time she dreaded most.

Cleo: I don’t get it. Why would anyone choose teen rogue over Teen Morgue?

Deuce: Their loss.

Deuce was absent-mindedly answering while slapping a fellow baller five and promising to see him on the court in a few.

Cleo, pretending not to be irritated by the interruption, gripped Deuce’s elbow. Ready to begin a death-defying descent down the school’s front steps while teetering in three-inch python mules.

Cleo: You think they’ll change their minds?

Deuce: Can they?

He nodded hello to another casketball buddy.

Cleo: They’d better. The shoot is thirteen days away.

Deuce: Wait, I thought they bailed.

Cleo: I haven’t exactly told the editors about the whole ‘bailed’ thing yet.

Deuce: Nice.

Deuce lifted his palm for a high five.

Deuce: Who said mummies don’t have guts?

Cleo lowered his hand.

Cleo: I thought they would have come crawling back by now.

Just then, Clawdeen, Lagoona, and Draculaura hurried by, giggling and swinging their bags like it was the last day of classes, you among them telling them the time you went to Atlantis and was almost forced to marry the prince. They could have swung them right into Cleo’s heart. It wouldn’t have broken any more.
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Deuce ate his slice of pizza while Cleo picked at hers with a plastic fork. Currently, she was pretending that it was Frankie and that she was undoing her stitch by disgusting stich. Deuce watched her for a moment before he swallowed his food.

Deuce: Maybe you should talk to them.

Cleo: And say what?

Cleo dropped his elbow.

Cleo: "Sorry for giving you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to wear Aunt Nefertiti’s priceless collection"? Or "Will you ever forgive me for getting you into a top magazine"? How about "My bad for vouching that you’d be professional"!