Harbor | Jeremy Gilbert

Chapter Five~ The Age of Switch Blades and Poodle Skirts

In the Gilbert house laughter was coming from the kitchen. It was coming from Jenna and Lex. At the dining room table, Jeremy listened to his two out of three favorite girls getting along. His other favorite girl, Elena, was lying upstairs with her boyfriend.

A family dinner was happening tonight.

The doorbell suddenly rang loud and clear as Jeremy got up to answer it. It was obvious who had arrived when he showed a special bag.

They were having pizza tonight.

"Hey. It's gonna be $22." The man stated.

"Ok cool. Uh, here come in. Just put it on the table. I need to grab the money." He kindly explained to the delivery man before shouting up the stairs. "Elena, I need the money!" Jeremy then walked back into the dining room not noticing the man slowly put his foot in the door testing the threshold before stepping in.

Elena eventually makes her way down the staircase with her wallet in hand. She pays him, instructing him to keep the change as he steps back outside.

The man slowly puts a smile on his face. "Thank you. And you have yourself a good night."

Elena questionably smiles back at him, weakly, before shutting the door and locking it. She grabs the pizza off the table and walks into the kitchen to join her family, Lex, and Stefan, who had wandered down there, to have a somewhat nice family dinner.

What the brunette girl doesn't see is the pizza man putting up his hood as he leaves, proving he is the one who wrecked her car.

And he had been invited in.

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The next day at Mystic Falls High School, class was ending. The bell had rung inside Mr. Saltzman classroom, and students were packing up to leave.

You could see one Jeremy Gilbert trying to do the same as his peers, unfortunately the teacher had other plans.

An essay paper is thrown onto Jeremy's desk with a giant red letter on the front.

It was an A.

Jeremy was astonished.

"Surprised? It's a good essay. Your thoughts are clear, and your argument is well laid out." Alaric hesitates. "It's just, uh, you don't actually think there are vampires in Mystic Falls."

"No. I mean, I think statistically there's been more animal attacks, mysterious deaths, uh, people gone missing, more than any other place in the whole commonwealth of Virginia."

"It's conjecture, but creative, which is why you got the A. I just wouldn't get too, uh, caught up in the whole conspiracy theory of it all."

" Ah, I won't."

"And Jeremy I trust that this writing was all you. I understand the research assistance but I won't be happy if I learned that your blonde friend helped you write it."

"Nah man. All me. X just helped with the research."

"Good. And uh, Jeremy, the source that you cited for the 1860s tear down info, uh, Johnathan Gilbert...?"

"Oh, my ancestor's journal?"

"Yeah, I'd really like to see that sometime."

"Really?"

"A first-person account of the Civil War? That's like, uh, porn for a history teacher."

Jeremy ruffles through his bag to grab the journal.