how long has it been since the last update? 3 weeks? I'm so so so sorry for that, my schedule is unfathomably tight and it's even a miracle I managed to squeeze in this chapter today. Hopefully this sort of delay won't happen again, but I'm afraid I'm not in the position to call the shots so early. :) enjoy the chapter, and please do put in your votes❤️❤️

MIT LADEN and Aimee Griffiths were like two parallel lines: always nearby but somehow never crossing.

Mit lived in a small town on the edge of Chicago, and so most of the people she went to school with have been around since elementary, or even as far as pre k, taking away a couple of leakages and giving in several influxes into the cycle.

The first time that Mit had crossed Aimee happened five years ago in the second week of sixth grade middle school, when she had asked Aimee if she could copy off of her math homework and Aimee refuted. Then and there, Mit had decided that she didn't like Aimee at all, and now, half a decade later, she realized that nothing has really changed yet; she was still the awkward Arab-American girl and Aimee was still a modern day Marilyn Monroe, one who had refused to give out her maths homework answers and who had eventually taken away Mit's friend from her.

And she still disliked Aimee.

Now, they crossed again, defying the laws of mathematics once more, a pair of overlapping, discordant lines.

Aimee was leaning against the locker next to Mit's lazily, a small smirk playing on her painted lips. She stayed there for a while, unmoving, save for the times she blinked and tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear, simply watching, studying, observing.

Mit thought it stupid as she continued to look into her locker, ignoring Aimee, that is, until she remembered that that was always what lions did before ambushing their prey.

They watched, they studied, they observed, and then they stroke.

Mit tried to swallow a wad of saliva, but finding her tongue as dry as a strip of sandpaper, she let out a puff of air instead. A cross between a sigh and a grunt left her lips, the lips of a metaphorical antelope at the mercy of an intimidating lion.

"Melon," Aimee finally said, unfolding her arms.

"What do you want?" Unconsciously, Mit let a dribble of venom dip into her voice, and then she realized, a little too late, that Aimee Griffiths was not a person to challenge.

Aimee seemed to notice too, because her eyes narrowed, her lips curling at the tips in an uncomfortable sneer. She had the oddest of eyes colored with an uncommon shade of indigo that variated between bluish and purplish and blackish, depending on her mood—whether happy or devious or angry.

They were dark now, a looming caliginous hue similar to that of the gentian violet paint in the nurses office.

"Paris wants to see you after school. She was going to text you later, but I was on my way to my sixth period class and I thought I'd just let you know," the blonde informed, tightening her frail, thin arms back into a fold below her chest. She was wearing her cheerleader kit for reasons unbeknownst to Mit, except maybe as a mark of superiority or a loophole to break the dress code.

"Why?" Mit asked, sombre this time, trying to divide her attention between Aimee and removing her biology textbooks from her locker.

"We're going to the mall. You said you wanted to change, didn't you?"

The brunette paused then, breath freezing in her throat, brain interpreting static white noise, bile stirring in her gall bladder. She blinked then, and slowly closed her locker, casting full attention to Aimee just as the bell rang.

The blonde smirked impishly, and Mit could almost swear that her eyes flasheda bright shade of purple in the quickest of moments. "Yes, Melon. It's finally happening."

The mall was about a half hour drive away from the school, or a twenty minute drive that is, if you were a passenger of Paris Holland's offensively speedy BMW.

It soared across the highway at speeds between 60mph or 70mph, and Mit clutched at the car's upholstery firmly, craving to scream recklessly like the characters of Clueless had done whilst they drove on a similar freeway. Instead, though, she slouched in her seat, so far until she was sure that Paris couldn't see her through the rear view mirror, and it was ironic that she wanted to be invisible only to the person she trusted to make her visible. At least if Paris couldn't see her, she couldn't judge her. She might have had a faint idea of Mit, and fill in her own preferred details—maybe of a girl with long, flaxen hair and even longer legs, not a social reject.

"Is Tuesday coming?" Mit asked suddenly, immediately regretting it when Aimee craned her neck to look at her.

There had always been something frightening about Aimee that Mit never seemed to put her finger on. She wasn't frightening in the way of a fire-breathing dragon or a ravenous lion, but instead, poison. A sweet tasting kind, thick and cloying, like honey or melting molasses—sweet in all the ways that poison shouldn't be. An insidious kind that creeped slowly through your bloodstream unbeknownst to you, up until it seized your heart in a shackled grip and squeezed it imperviously until it finally stopped.

"What's it to you?" Aimee queried after a moment's hesitation, and from the car windows Mit could see that Paris was pulling into the mall parking lot.

"I just want to know."

Aimee's eyes slitted imperceptibly, and Mit mentally prepared herself for any verbal ammo that the blonde was about to throw her way, because she knew that Aimee's eyes specifically narrowed whenever she was upset or put off about something. But surprisingly, her lips remained clamped, hand positioned on the door handle just as the vehicle slowed to a stop.

Paris looked at Aimee fleetingly, a small slice of action squeezed in-between turning the car off and pulling her keys out of the ignition, but it was so quick that Mit wasn't able to make out anything that may have passed between the both of them.

Two doors opened simultaneously, and then they were both clambering out of the BMW at the same time, closing the doors just as easily, just as breezily, as if nothing was out of place.

And maybe nothing was, except the simple fact of Mit's 'so flawed' existence that they never seized to remind her of.

She followed suit hastily, anxious to not be left behind, and as her feet planted firmly on the asphalt, she was startled to find Aimee right in front of her, the darkness of her pupils stretching toward the irises of her eyes, that they almost seemed cavernous; she was angry.

"Listen," the blonde said quietly, her voice deceivingly mellow, like the kind a little girl would use to greet her favourite teacher on the first day of school.

Mit had learned about mensuration from the geometry class she took the previous year, one she would definitely never be able to forget, because she kept confusing the formulas between finding the surface area of a solid figure or its volume.

This time however, there was nothing to be confused about. Aimee Griffiths' surface area was distinct from her volume; she was like the ocean, with one half that the world could see being clean, and the other polluted beyond recognition; with several meters of clear, bright water that slowly dwindled to kilometers of heavy, empty darkness underneath.

Mit felt her eyebrows furrow indignantly, and she knew that she looked livid, but didn't care all the same. She was tired, of belittlement, of exploitation, of never being good enough, no matter how hard she tried. The anger had left from Aimee's eyes and entered Mit's.

"Tuesday's not your friend, Melon; none of us are. Don't forget that."