A Puppet's Revenge (Wattys 2015)

Chapter Eight

"Phase two is on schedule." Tasha's voice trilled down the phone, her excitement audible through the awful speaker quality on my mobile. The small vibration inside the top speaker was caused by one of my previous visits down the boy's toilets. Eugh, no matter how much you brush your teeth after you've had your head down the loo you will still taste that stagnant water for days afterwards. And apparently, so will your phone if it fell out of your jacket pocket.

"Phase Two? Already?" I mumbled in response, my enthusiasm curbed slightly by exhaustion. "Yes," She giggled "Lucy is on her way over to yours now to check up on you and give you all the details!"
It took my brain a bit longer than it should have to register the dull beep on the line, signifying Tash's absence.

" She hung up... " I said to my empty room, the darkness responding with only silence.

*********** 

Now usually, when someone tells you that you are about to get big time revenge on someone, you would imagine that you're going to try and ruin their lives in every possible way. Right? Well, I don't want to ruin my mate's life. Seeing as even though he's been a dick, I still think I want to have a part in his life.... later on. He needs training up at the minute.

However, when I walked into my form room two days after the ambiguous phone call from Tasha, I was faced with a rather confusing sight. In fact, it actually is slightly terrifying now I think about it more. Wielding brushes and powders and mascara wands, I came face to face with a cackling Lucy and a serious-faced Tasha, commanding all of the beauty and makeup course students into an orderly arrangement. 

A rather dark suspicion was drawn in my head that I was suddenly going to get a whole lot of attention very soon.

On the far left of the room were two very bored girls wielding straighteners, hair-clips, and tiny scissors and combs tucked into their pockets, tapping absently on their phones - clearly Tash was finished bossing them around, otherwise they wouldn't dare risk such vacancy if she weren't.

On the far right of the room sat another girl with several small bottles in front of her in varying different colours and what looked like a nail file, her blonde hair was swept up into a messy bun and she was smiling at one of the guys in the group in the middle of the room - who were occupying Tasha's attention. The guy was shorter than average but looked very sweet, his eyes constantly flicking between Tash and the nail polish girl. I couldn't tell what that group was there for but there was one other girl and guy, both looking seriously at Tash and nodding along with her words. "Makeup." Lucy cackled in my ear, "You're gonna get contoured."

"You mean I'm going to look more confused than I feel?" I quip.
There's a sudden sharp noise and I jump as Tasha calls my name, gesturing for me to go over to where she stood next to nail polish girl. "Just tell Scarlet what colour you want and sit still, m'kay?" Tash sighed as I approached her, sitting down slowly, guiltily eyeing my torn and dirty nails.

"Uh, I've not exactly got much nail to paint..." mumbling quietly I surrendered my hands to the girl, who eyed my short, skinny fingers with a critical eye and a raised brow. She looks a bit threatening but hopefully, that's just her thinking face. "You're right," Scarlet's voice was deeper than expected, but it somehow suited her. "I think that because they're so short it'd be better for you to have a lighter colour to make them look longer. What do you think?" She asked, releasing my hands.

"Uuuh, sure? I have no clue about colours but I like blue, I guess."

"Gotcha."

Scarlet made quick and neat work of my poorly treated nails, filing, buffing and polishing them to a pretty shade of light blue - bordering on lilac: 'Summer Blue' was its name. I liked it... When she finished applying the shiny lacquer to my nails, she pulled out a small pink thing that looked like a hole-punch but with lights. Noticing my curious stare, Scarlet grinned. "Nail dryer."