West Ark High

Shut Up, Don't Mess With Me

"Is it Wells again?" Monty asked when Clarke declined a phone call, making a sour face at the caller ID.

She glanced up from the textbook in her lap and nodded grimly. "Only the fourteenth time today."

After ignoring him for a week and a half in person, Clarke had assumed that Wells would have finally gotten the message through his thick skull that she wasn't interested in friendship. The bridge had been blasted by a nuclear bomb and no one, especially Wells, would be crossing it for a long time.

At first the phone calls were almost like a trophy in Clarke's opinion; it boosted her esteem to know that he was suffering over what he lost because she was suffering over what he had taken from her. But three and a half months was a long time to be nagged at and now it was just a hassle.

Clarke barely had enough time to eat most days without having to worry about Wells popping up from the bushes every three minutes. "I'm almost ready to change my number all together."

"What do you think he wants now?" Jasper barely looked up from the TV, apparently being too invested in sniping people from crumbling rooftops to even glance at his stepsister.

For some reason, Clarke didn't find it offensive the same way she might have a year ago. It just felt nice for things to finally slip back into it's natural routine. Packing up boxes with her dad in the house she spent most of her life in had been draining to her emotionally, and when he finally left in the middle of August she found herself developing an anti-social streak.

There was something about Jasper ignoring his responsibilities in favor of Ps4 games while she and Monty poured over the trig notes that made Clarke feel more at home than she had been for weeks. The familiarity of it all was enough for her to not let herself get too riled.

"Probably to tell me that he didn't mean for things to go down the way it did. Or whatever variation he's come up with this time."

"I honestly can't believe he can't take a hint," Monty said and Clarke appreciated his sympathy. "It's almost like a boulder at this point, even. I mean, he clearly knows that you don't want to associate with him anymore."

Clarke glanced up at the TV screen as Jasper grunted, "You know what I don't understand?" Either he asked rhetorically or they took too long to respond in the second he gave them because Jasper continued, "I don't understand how I keep dying. There's literally no vantage point to shoot me in the position I'm at. This game is glitched."

The change in conversation was impeccable. A minute longer dwelling on her ex-boyfriend and Clarke would have been ready to fling herself from the second story balcony.

"Or," she said, taking the controller from her brother's hands and watched as a perplexed frown took over his face, "there's a guy hiding beneath a beam that can get ya through that hole in the wall." She clicked a few buttons and then a character Jasper hadn't previously noticed flopped out from behind a collapsed wall with three bullet wounds and CGI blood spewing from his middle. Jasper's mouth dropped open. "Yeah, you should be good now." She pitched the controller back into Jasper's lap while Monty laughed.

Clarke laughed along with Monty, forcing herself to muffle her snorts with a pillow when Jasper dramatically face planted into his comforter, moaning about how stupid he was for missing the hole.

"At least you didn't have to start over from checkpoint." Monty returned his eyes to his book, but his smile wasn't fully wiped clean. He probably wasn't able to read with all of the distractions around them.

Distractions. Clarke seemed to need more distractions. At this point, the stupid shenanigans she found herself roped into by Monty and Jasper were the only things keeping the ticking time bomb in her stomach from reaching zero.