Fate always had the power to screw you over.
And Alexandra always thought that she had everything she could ask for: a caring family, a best friend and an attentive boyfriend. That is until she discovered the latter two alone in a car together.
Sin...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Menopolis Academy.
The name alone made me feel cold and abandoned. I had the sudden urge to duck behind one of the many clusters of bushes scattered around the terrain. Any cheerfulness and tranquillity I'd felt before seemed to have disappeared, and I wondered if it had been there at all.
Everywhere I looked there were teenagers, assembled into unambiguous groups, talking and laughing and possibly gossiping.
What if they're talking about me?
I gripped my elbows as I pulled my arms closer to my body. Of course they weren't. How could they know that a new girl, a Hybrid, had just enrolled at their academy? An academy that was unquestionably more like a mansion than a school. There was no impression of spiteful teachers and their bored, sterile lectures. The place appeared elegant, somewhere you wouldn't find a jock stuffing a nerd in a dumpster or a crowd egging on a cat fight.
This was a place redolent of something even more bewildering, more intimidating than being the new girl at an ordinary school. These students, teenagers, looked civilised.
I was feeling awfully exposed in the open, lost like a puppy. I wished I were a puppy; people wouldn't mock a puppy. There was nothing too different about the academy from any other school, except that maybe the Academy looked more appealing than any school I'd seen. There were still those giggly girls that made no secret that they were checking out the small crowd of boys by a particular patch of trees. The boys were slouching against the trees as if they didn't have a care in the world. A small amount of them was actually attempting to make conversation. Then there were the less noisy teenagers who were actually communicating effortlessly. Some were even talking enthusiastically, gesturing wildly as they spoke, those around them listening quietly, with an occasional nod or shake of a head. An even more isolated cluster was smoking, several already smothering their finished cigarettes on a tree. Instead of throwing it casually on the ground like other people–humans–might do, they took the effort to walk to a brick structure I assumed were for trash. Then they would return to their tree and pull out yet another cigarette.
The group of girls I'd first detected laughed again, and I found my gaze drawn to them. One of the girls was leaving the group. Her friends were pushing at her and were gripped in a fit of giggles when the girl started towards the little crowd of bored boys. I didn't want to be caught staring by anyone, especially not the ridiculously boisterous girls, but I was too transfixed by the girl's confident steps–lively yet outlandishly graceful.
Even from this distance, I could see her chocolate brown hair as if it were a blinking neon light. I couldn't detect what about her made her so conspicuous, sticking out like a blond within a sea of brunettes, even though she was a brunette herself.
