#some things might not match up w my most-recent post bc this was written like. over a year ago.

[writingwoe]

omg i found all my old writing for PIC and i forgot how cute they are

Lauren still remembered the first time she saw him, in year 9 science when he’d come into her class to ask her teacher (a short man with a face like a startled sheep that they all called Shepherd) if his class could borrow the air-con remote because theirs wasn’t working. 

The class had been loud and full of chatter, some sort of paper war going on that meant Lauren had makeshift confetti caught in her hair when Shepherd had looked up with a smile and told someone to come in. Lauren ducked a paper ball aimed for her head and looked over her friend Tally to see a boy with a striped long-sleeve under his school shirt closing the door behind him, not pausing to look around as he’d headed straight for the desk at the front of the room. 

He had short brown hair, ruffled and sticking up in some places but flat in others like maybe he’d slept on it recently, and the kind of soft-sharp face that came with being 15. It was the smile he’d given to her when she’d scooched her chair in to make room for him to walk past that had made her heart stutter. 

His name was Lycan Rosewood, one of the younger members of a huge family that ran the town's oldest and best cafe-slash-bookstore-slash-library-slash-hardware store. His older sister had actually been the last captain of Lauren’s field hockey team before she’d graduated and moved states to go to university. Lauren was pretty sure every member of the Rosewood family had attended their highschool, and she couldn’t imagine the kind of pressure that would put on Lycan.

He seemed to take it in stride though, grin warm and affectionate whenever someone connected him to a past student, happily updating any questioning staff about his family's well being. Rumour had it, most of them lived in a big house just outside of town; grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole family. 

Lauren only lived with her sister and their dad. He was a writer with an ongoing fantasy series about magical pirates, and he was the sole reason she wasn’t failing english. 

After that fateful day in science class, she was suddenly noticing Lycan everywhere. Walking between classes, standing in line at the canteen, grabbing something off of a teacher or out of the printer, sitting in the library. She saw him all the time, but he never seemed to see her. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t know her, they were a reasonably close knit year group and they were in the same cooking and woodwork classes, it was just that he never seemed to notice her beyond “Lauren” or “that girl who plays sport”.

And then disaster struck in her Tuesday's 8th period: phys ed.

Distracted by Tally pulling faces from the sidelines, Lauren hadn't thought about where she was aiming and ended up nailing Lycan in the face so hard with a dodge-ball that he'd been knocked on his ass.

Safe to say, she'd spent the rest of the year hiding from him.