The Smell of Rebellion

Intermission. . .

A/N: This would take place after Chapter Eight; I hope you enjoy reading this while waiting for Chapter Twelve! I am sincerely thankful for almost 550 reads. I'll probably move this chapter around, or make a different story for Olivia (perhaps with Lila and Holly, too.) I think her character is pretty cool!

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Olivia Deverell reached her room, closing the door quietly and laying on the bed. She stared at the ceiling, lamenting what had happened that day in silence. She always had to be quiet, but to her, this buzzing peacefulness was very calming to her.

She changed into some more comfortable clothing, hanging up her prefect uniform and placing her book bag on the floor. Olivia didn't feel like hanging that up, either. She let her hair down, leaving the hair-tie in the drawer. She ran her fingers through her hair a few times to undo the tight, single braid down her back.

She walked to the bathroom to take off her coloured contacts in front of a mirror, revealing a startlingly blue eye on her left. It wasn't completely blue, though— it was a section of pale, icy blue covering half of her otherwise-brown iris. In her opinion, it made it even worse. If it was going to be blue, it should be blue! Not half-blue, or three-quarters blue. And if she was going to have blue (or brown) eyes, why didn't she just have a pair of the same coloured eyes?

She stared into her own reflection, not sure if she was supposed to feel disgust or awe at her multi-coloured eyes for the seeming thousandth time.

For sure, her parents were disgusted— they wanted her to cover it as soon as she was old enough for school. Plus, there was no way the Trunchbull would take well to a.... defect, in one of her students, especially on a prefect. Covering it up was the best thing to do, she was told.

In her opinion? It looked pretty bloody close to something a freakish monster would have. The doctors called it "heterochromia", and said that it wasn't at all harmful. Her parents didn't care. They handed her contacts as soon as she had the necessary motor skills— also when she started school— and ordered her to put them on.

Yes, it looked cool sometimes, when she wanted to pretend she had some cool powers, but for the most part it was hideous. Freakish.

She walked out of the bathroom, closing the door behind her as softly as she could. What was the point wallowing in her own misery?

Once she was done putting her stuff away and taking her contacts off, she let her natural slouch creep in. She sat down in her seat, picking up her pen and starting to work on her homework.

The definitions came easily to her, and she was saved from the endless flipping back-and-forth of pages. The words stuck firmly in her mind, and she remembered them as clearly as though she was reading them off the page.

Her peers always complimented her— well, before she became a prefect— on her memory, and Olivia always thought it was strange how she could pick up those tiny details and remember them to heart. It made it very easy for her to write stories or fill journals with pages of detail about her day.

Her homework wasn't much: finishing the review she missed out on and a maths sheet she hadn't been able to finish. The review was easy— The vocabulary was rather simple and stating definitions wasn't too difficult.

The maths sheet was an entirely different story. As good as her memory was, it was impossible for her to calculate anything past simple maths in her head. She had memorised the times-tables and the perfect squares, but when she was thrown against algebraic questions the letters and numbers put together didn't cooperate. She had spent too many nights trying to force herself to remember, through blurry tears, those stupid equations. Most of the memorization components of maths were drilled into her head by her parents, but when word problems reared their stupid head, any trace of her intelligence abandoned her.