Mark My Words

57 | Sisterhood

a/n: Long-ass chapter ahead. Make your tea now, take a bathroom break, DO WHATEVER YOU GOTTA DO. 

Joanna never worked in retail, but shelving denim jeans wasn't the first of her lies. Before her flight across the pond, Joanna Spencer wasn't the type to pick up wasted girls off of the bathroom floor, but rather, she was one. She had the sort of facade that made her a target for people like the girls at the top of Kaiserslautern's Fußball team.

Because the girls at the top used to be like her, but for real reasons. They smoked and drank to forget about everything while Joanna Spencer did it for the hell of it and because she could. It had nothing to do with her connections—she didn't have many of them, what with the Lieutenant Colonel being on the move constantly. She rarely spent more than a year in one place, and Kaiserslautern was an unlikely lull period where Joanna had connections that weren't a thousand miles away.

So she cut her ties with the United States and made new ones with Germany.

At Kaiserslautern, it wasn't hard to pick out the Fußball players. The social hierarchy depended on sports since most kids didn't stick around long enough to form a reputation on their own, but the sport teams remained a constant. The fact that sports were a prevalent factor in every location the Lieutenant's job took them to, Joanna craved it like any socially stunted teenager. If she couldn't make instant friends, she was at a loss, and she wasn't about to be classified as a military brat.

And, so, Fußball was the first thing she sought out at Kaiserslautern.

If it weren't for Fußball, she never would have had a reason to meet her ex. Perhaps if she wasn't such an adrenaline junkie, she could have avoided all of this and remained blissfully unaware of the background noise in society. She regretted ever falling so hard for the godforsaken sport. It was one of the few things she could let herself be disappointed in without pitching herself into a terrible spiral downwards.

There was one other thing she fell hard for, and it was inevitable. Even after everything, Joanna couldn't deny this femme fatale was nothing short of perfect. It was her perfection that made her a decoy, and she used it to her advantage.

The school gave Joanna instructions to meet with the coach before practice, and like every perfect specimen, the Devil was on time. The Devil was standing with the Fußball coach on the field outside of the school. Joanna couldn't get that damn picture out of her head. She wondered if it was even possible to convince her past self to turn away, even if she knew it was a trap.

She'd be lying if she said she hadn't noticed this girl before. On the first day of classes, Joanna was enthralled. The girl sat second row, closest to the door, and she looked like the type of girl who would own a pet snake unironically and named it Lucifer—in other words, Joanna's cup of tea. Her monochromatic color scheme went down to the exact shade of her pale skin to the black lipstick she wore day in and day out. It would have felt tacky had it not been so on brand for the star of Kaiserslautern's Fußball army. This girl's track record made her unapproachable to the general school population—Joanna knew this much after watching the girl stare blankly at a guy for having the nerve to talk to her. The guy gave up when one of the defenders on the Fußball team slugged him in the arm.

For practice that day, the girl had her bleached hair French-braided back, so that the dark strands at her roots wove into a greying pattern down the sides. Joanna sucked in every curse she had at the tip of her tongue as she approached the girl—and the coach.

Joanna pried her eyes away from the girl to hand the office slip to the coach. "I'm here for practice," she explained.

She knew what any average public school would say in the United States. She was late to the team. She missed tryouts. The season had already started and would be ending before you knew it, so it wasn't worth the try.