String of Fate

Chapter Twenty Five

I groaned as my alarm started playing in my room, the song blasting out loud enough that the couple living next door could probably hear it. I reached over to turn the snooze on but ended up knocking the phone off my bedside cabinet. I groaned, now wide awake already. Instead of hitting snooze on my phone, I got up and turned the alarm off. There wasn't going to be sleep again anyway. I pulled my clothes from my wardrobe and dressed for the day out that I had planned with my friends. The eight of us were going bowling for a couple of hours. I knew who'd win since Percy was stupidly good at bowling.

I checked the time and realised that I should be going, and I was slightly already running late, which was not a good sign. Downstairs, I pulled my warm coat on since it was a cold November morning and yelled a bye to my grandparents, who had raised me since I was five years old. My parents had died in a car accident not long after my fifth birthday. I remembered little bits about them, like my mother's perfume and my dad's favourite song, but that was about it. I had a lot of photos to remember them by, so, I didn't miss them much, and my grandparents always told me stories about them.

"Hey, stranger." Percy joked when he met me at the end of my street, which was in the opposite direction of his house. I was a little surprised to see him as we were meant to be meeting nearer the bowling alley, in a place where all our paths sort of met up.

"What are you doing here? I thought we were all meeting at the bowling place?" I questioned as he fell into step beside me. It was also strange to see him without his sister, Artemis. The twins were always close together, especially since they had grown up together.

"I thought I'd come and keep the birthday girl company as she walked to her party otherwise she would be walking alone, and that's just not fair." He replied, thrusting his hands deeply into his pocket as we walked next to each other. He needed to walk a lot slower than usual because I was the slowest one in the group. It must annoy him to walk slowly next to me but I was thankful that he had come to keep me company on the walk.

"You know my birthday isn't until tomorrow, Percy, and I thought we agreed that this wasn't anything to do with my birthday. You guys all knew that I didn't want a fuss for my birthday." I spoke, saying the same thing that I had said when we had organised the bowling afternoon, and they had all insisted that they were not having any birthday celebrations for me. "You can still go easy on me if you want, though."

"Not a chance, Eve." He answered with a big smile on his face as he looked at me. We turned down the side street in the direction of the meeting point. "Anyway, it'll be fun no matter who wins, and it won't be your birthday party because you don't want it to be."

"I know." I laughed. "You are still ridiculously good at bowling, though, so, please go easy on me. I know that this is nothing to do with my birthday, but call it a birthday present to me and let me win?"

We were the last to arrive at the meeting point, Artemis, Johnathan, Joanne-Jennifer, Natalie, Duncan, and Tom already sitting on the little wall that bordered a flower bed in the park where we were meeting. Percy's twin sister, Artemis, was extremely cold, shivering even in her big coat, hat and scarf. She was always cold, being the freezer of the group. It was strange because Percy was always considered the warm one, only wearing a slight jacket now even though it was due to snow. I wondered why Artemis hadn't come with Percy to walk with us but I didn't know if I really wanted to know the answer. JJ was glancing at posters outside of the cinema across the road, somehow managing to read those from where we all were. Tom and Duncan had brought a hand held games console to play a game together while they waited, and I wondered how long they had been here. It sounded like Duncan was winning, which Tom was not happy about. Johnathan and Natalie were talking about something to do with computers – spouting words I didn't think I would ever understand.