didn't know you were cold ('til you felt my fire) // JENLISA AU

Chapter 1

It started simply enough, with Lisa failing French.

It's not completely her fault she failed. She hadn't realized that she needed a language to graduate and wasted her early years on fluff classes she could easily skip. So she ended up stuck in an intermediate class with a bunch of other kids who have been speaking French for most of their lives and she couldn't figure out why the fucking adjectives have gender. (She still can't)

She did try to switch out. The school also has a German course, and German at least has some words that sound closer to English, and Lisa's pretty sure that as long as she gets half the words right she can just say some angry-sounding gibberish in between and pass. But her transfer request was denied, the class is full and she tried to switch too late in the semester, she's told, so she'd better stop focusing on how to get out of it and focus instead on improving herself. Principal Yang was entirely too pleased with himself when telling her that, and Lisa knows he could help her if he really wanted to, but he fucking hates her guts.

Feeling's very fucking mutual, by the way.

So Lisa failed French, and then she forgot all about making it up for the year she's away, because honestly she was a little busy, and when she came back the next year it had completely slipped her mind that she needed that credit still until one dinner, mid October.

*

"Got a call from your school today," Dad said at the dinner table. All four teens stopped eating and looked up from their plates, three of them wide eyed. Lisa was frowning.

"Uh, for who?" Bambam asked, his fork still halfway up to his mouth, pasta sauce dripping from it. His eyes darted to the other three, as they all tried to quickly and silently decipher which kid was being spoken to.

"Li," Dad clarified, and three sighs of relief are exhaled over the table.

Bambam's demeanour changed immediately, happily shoving the food into his mouth as his bony shoulders shook in a chuckle. "Aw, yeah?" He said around a mouthful of penne, "what'd she do now?"

Lisa kicked him under the table, prompting a loud and obvious 'hey ow!' from her foster brother as he glared over their plates at the older girl. Lisa sneered back at him, a curl at the upper corner of her mouth. Lucas, beside Bambam, ignored them both beyond carefully moving his water glass to the other side of his plate.

"Li," Dad repeated, carefully. It's not angry, but they all know that tone means it's not angry -yet. Lisa just made another face towards Bambam and turned to look at the head of the table.

"What'd they say?" She asked, cautiously. She hadn't done anything worthy of a call this time, no fights or drug busts, had been careful to space out which classes she's skipping so it doesn't look like a pattern or obvious enough hole in the records. She'd been, all things considered, good. So she's as much in the dark about why school would be calling as her siblings.

And she's not holding her breath that the call would be about something positive.

Dad let out his signature tragic sigh and looked over at his eldest child. Lisa swallowed but tried to stay cool as the older man lowered his utensils to rest on the plate.

"It was Ms Chaerin Lee," he starts and Lisa relaxed just slightly. Guidance Counsellor, not a teacher, a good start. If you ignore Dad's body language. "She had some bad news about your transcripts."

"Isn't that something to worry about later?" Lisa asked, eyebrows furrowed. She's been getting good grades. "School just started."

"You're supposed to start applying by like December." Ella chirped from the seat to Lisa's right, bent over her plate as she separated the green peppers in the sauce from the rest of her meal. Her blue hair, shabbily self-cut with two haphazard self-done braids sticking out under loose bangs, covered most of her expression.