Your Today Might Be My Tomorrow

Chapter 1

"Alright Jazz, I'll tell you how it goes. It's always like that for the new ones," my sister Melody told me.

My name is Jazmin, I'm 17 years old and I'm starting Uni in about 2 days. I'm too young to be starting Uni, but I started school early. It's never really affected me, as I'm pretty mature in my opinion.

But this time around, the story might change a little. I'm a minor, and everyone in Uni will be legal. That means I'll be the ugly little duckling. Not only will I be a new student, I'll also be the youngest of the young ones.

My sister finished Uni 3 years ago, she majored in English, wanting to be a teacher, but for now, she's only gotten herself some tutoring jobs; she's waiting for Treddington High, our local high school, to call her. She replaced one day though, I was still a student there and guys from my class all came telling me that they'd do my sister. Now I'm the little sister. Can't really be over-protective, can I? That's her roll to fill, not mine; therefore, I had just rolled my eyes to all the perverted comments made about my sister.

-

As I sat in the passenger seat of the car, my sister's hands on the steering wheel, my eyes just wandered around, taking in what would be my steady ground for the next years to come. The dorms, standing high and tall, were what scared me the most. Parties, bad roomate problems, everything just seemed so surreal, yet it was closer than ever.

Melody's humming brought me back of my thoughts to the soft rumbling of the car. The song she was humming was one I didn't know, but it had strong and tight harmonies. That being said, ironically, although her name suggested differently, Mel was far from being a good singer; I was the artist, the musician in the family. My parents, both immigrants and intellectuals, were a bit disappointed when I told them I wanted to pursue a music career, instead of majoring in Law, as planned.

Feeling the car slow down a tad bit, tyres screeching against the pavement, I looked in front of me to see what seemed like an abandonned factory. There were dirty containers next to a rusty old brick building's iron backdoor. On the other side, an endless mass of trees hid my eyes from prying too much.

"Mel, care to expla.." I slowly turned to face my sister, but she soon interrupted me: "I know, it's not how it looks," she quickly replied. "Just get out of the car, I'll tell you later. I need to do this first."

I arched my eyebrow but still clicked the door open, grabbing my backpack and shoving it over my shoulder. As I circled the car to reach the back of it, I noticed Mel was walking straight to the small door. "Wait, can you open the boot first so I can retrieve my suitcase?" I asked, still confused. My sister didn't even bothered turning around to answer. "Nope, you won't need it now," she said, "Stay close to me, we're not supposed to be here!" she whispered.

As we reached to the rusty door, Mel turned around quickly and said: "Before you see what you will see, I just want you to know that it's not exactly what it looks like, okay?" I lightly frowned; I had no idea what to make of all this.

My sister opened the door that led to a dark staircase, poorly illuminated. A red large "watch your head" sign fell from the ceiling. My sneakers caused me no problem in going down the stairs. Sadly, Melody's high heels had her going way slower than she wanted, and she was being much louder than she intended. She kept cussing all the way down.

Some muffled discussions reached my ears as we entered a rather small room. Despite the clear lack of space, two large sofas covered were aligned to two of the four walls enclosing the space. Apart from a small and coffee-stained table in the center of the room, some stuffed chairs were thrown around without a care in the world. The place smelled rancid and dirty, the furniture clearly had seen better days in the past. The only positive aspect of this room was the presence of a vintage piano in a corner. But then again, it was probably far out of tune due to its disappointing perishing state.

What was shocking was that such a tiny room held quite a crowded meeting. While three boys played cards on the filthy coffee table, a guy and a girl were fully making out, having their intimate moment being painted by one girl with her tubes of paint and a half-covered canvas, two guys were jamming on their guitars with a girl tracing patterns on each one's shoulders.

When someone actually ackowledged our presence, my sister looked at me apologetically before stepping in front of me as she murmured a name and a number to the tallest guy of the three of them playing cards. He had buzzcut dark brown hair that oddly matched his hazel eyes.

He seemed like the kind of guy that didn't have a care about everything that didn't concern him. Yet, he still interrupted his card game and with a quick head tilt, he silently told the other two to find anything else to do because Melody was requiring his full attention. He stood up to face my sister and as he dipped his head to reach her ear, his eyes fell on me. While he studied me closely, I heard him whisper to my sister: "And what about this lovely lady behind you?"

I couldn't see her face but by the tone of her voice, I knew Melody was blushing a little. "Don't worry about Jazz, she won't talk." I wanted to ask why they were talking about me in hushed voices but his eyes were still on me, intimidating me. Melody quickly handed him about a half-dozen of notes.

Restrained from talking, I sighed as I rolled my eyes. I wanted to leave. Before I could say or do anything, the boy resumed his previous position: cross-legged on the floor, facing the coffee table. He picked two cards from the deck. As uninteresting as it seemed, I let my eyes wander around the room again. No one seemed to have ceased their activities just because of Melody and me. Finding that the jamming boys were boring because they kept discussing the relevance of a chord in a song, I turned my gaze to the guy with the two cards.

Only thing was that wasn't playing with the cards anymore: he kept precisely sweeping one card on top of the other. I found his attitude rather odd, until I saw it. I knew I was young and it was the kind of stuff that you just saw in movies, but it was real and it was right in front of me. The white powder couldn't be mistaken, especially as the guy dumped a calculated amount of it in a small transparent bag, before handing it to my sister. I was speechless.

My sister had just bought cocaine on campus.

• • • •

New project, new ideas.

I don't intend to make this story too long, just about 10 chapters or so.

Let me know if you read this? You can vote too, that's pretty self-explanatory ;)

Anyway thanks a lot!

-Ladsfancier