Galvanized Steel

Chapter 7

It was English class. Penelope, my seatmate, suddenly tapped my shoulder in the middle of note-taking.

"Achilla?"

I turned to face her. She handed me a piece of notebook paper which was folded multiple times. "From Hanna."

My hands trembled while I hesitantly took it. Hanna, an Unspeakable. What the fuck? It was an unlikely time for her to send me a note. A fucking note. I calmed myself down a bit, hoping that she'd just ask for a translation. Yes! A translation.. for our foreign language class! Yes... she might give me some text for me to rewrite and translate to Greek. It's totally gonna be a translation.

I was...

Wrong. I carefully opened it, making sure to not get it wet from the sweat of my palms. I unfolded every flap, keeping my hopes low. Much to my dismay, she didn't ask me to translate anything at all. Instead, something quite shocking was illegibly scribbled in the middle of the paper, making me want to throw up any minute now.

Jan 31st. Lunch break @ covered court. Let's talk.

The first thing in my mind: Avoid the covered court on the 31st. I don't want a fist fight. Well, at least I thought there would be a fist fight. But most likely there would be one. Those were the fucking Unspeakables. But I soon realized that this dumb idea of mine could possibly not work and they'd still end up finding me and giving me a crazy ambush attack like they always did to their precious victims. This got me overthinking throughout the whole period. Shit is about to get started.
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"Babe, you seriously need to get them cut. They're already below the tip of your nose!"

Pat, noticing the smallest details about me as usual, tugged at the blonde portion of my now long-overgrown bangs, desparate to cut them for me.

Odi, Bri, and Kio, on the other hand, broke into highly contagious laughter when they saw me look a bit worried as she pulled out her finest pair of scissors. We were literally in a public girls' bathroom (our school did consist of all girls) and I was aware of all the noise they were making. "Shut the fuck u-" I said no more as I joined in the laughter.

She slowly placed the scissors with my hair in between, ready to cut. "Wait!" I stopped her. "A- uh, are you sure you know what you're doing?"

"Of course I wouldn't mess up, dumbass," she said with a hint of pride. She rolled her eyes and started trimming. I furrowed my eyebrows at Odi, who tried her very best to keep in her laughter. "Hold still! Don't... move..." She grabbed my chin and turned it a bit to face her. My skin felt quite prickly as she did this.

"And... done!" I turned to the mirror and saw the tips of my hair resting on my eyelids. I played around with them and brushed the top of my head for a couple of times. "Looks great," I said.

Laughter erupted once again as Bri started slightly pinching my cheeks. "Yiee! You're so cute!" I blushed at the compliment. "Stay cute for her!" she chuckled. Yeah, I thought. Forever cute for her.

I faced Pat once more.

"Thanks, babe," I half-whispered, then lightly placed a kiss on her cheek. "Let's not waste our recess time and get out of here."

Kio made a somewhat freaky (pretend the font is there) suggestion. "We should lurk in the library and see some pics o–"

"Campus crushes in the yearbook. Yeah, they themselves even stay in the library," Odi intervened. "You do that all the time like it's the only thing you ever read."

She rolled her eyes at the nasty comment, and we got going– headed towards campus crushes at the library.
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Author's Note: im sorry if this is so short i cant think ab anything else but i hope yall still loved it :')