moody teens -theo-

Nat was back at school, unfortunately. She had like a mountain of homework to make up, most of which she probably wouldn't end up bothering with. Rather than work on any of it, she decided to get out for a bit and take a walk around campus. She had promised her dad she would try not to get suspended again this semester, which to her didn't mean not sneaking out, but rather not getting caught. She was looking around for ideas for short cuts and hiding spots that security wouldn't find.

As she poked around at the edge of some woods on campus, she happened to spot one of her two friends a distance. Theo was chilling under a tree, notebook in hand. Nat had nearly forgotten he was coming to Redfern this year, and she felt some excitement build up in her belly. She hadn't had a chance to see him before now, due to her suspension.

"Theo!" she called out, running over. She grinned and sat down across from him. "I can't believe you're really here at Redfern. Welcome to the worst place ever."

She was so glad Jack had finally let him come to Redfern. Although she couldn't understand why the hell Theo would want to be here, she was happy to be able to hang out with him more.

Jack wrote again. I didn't bother reading it, I'm sure it's just more of the same. I shouldn't have opened the first one, honestly. It just makes me mad every time I think about it. "Do your best" and all that nonsense. I've never needed anyone to tell me what to do--what makes him think I need him of all clio, and now?

Theo sat his pencil down and leaned his back against the tree. What he'd written had been the truth--just thinking about that letter made him furious, and now he had that too familiar feeling of hate balled up in his stomach.

Calm down, would ya? Panda asked from the tree. She swung down from a branch in the form of a black lemur and looked at him upside down as she hung from her tail. We're not opening any of the others, so who cares? We're here now!

"You're right," Theo muttered aloud. The teachers and rules here were annoying, but they seemed so anonymous and nonthreatening compared to living in that house with Jack back in Earalas. They wanted him to get good grades, but none of the teachers had left a real impression on Theo that they cared if he actually got them or not. The tension in his jaw slacked a little as he calmed.

Just as he was about to touch his pencil back to the paper, he heard a familiar voice shout his name. He looked over and saw Nat, a giant grin on her face, running over to him. Theo braced himself for the uncomfortable feeling he got whenever someone from Earalas tried to interact with him, but was pleasantly surprised when it didn't come. He did want Redfern to be a new start, and had sort of written off any talk with the Sterlings or the cousin-things in the two weeks he'd been here, but he had to admit that part of him felt a little happy that Nat had spotted him. She'd always been the most tolerable of the bunch, and to be honest she'd grown on him over the past two years.

"Hey, Nat," he said, hastily closing his notebook on his pencil and placing it beside him in the grass. He even offered her half of a joking smile when she commented on her (well-known) hatred of Redfern. "What brings you to this neck of the woods (lol)?" he asked, raising his arms and giving a small gesture at the cluster of trees he'd tried to conceal himself in.

Nat was glad when Theo smiled back at her. She felt like he never smiled for anyone else, and it made her feel a little special. At the same time though, she did wish he'd be nicer to Jack, but she hadn't said that to him yet. She knew it would make him push her away, the way he pushed everyone else away. It had taken two years to even gain a little bit of his trust, and she wasn't about to throw that away.

"Oh, you know," she said, glancing around. "I promised Dad I wouldn't get suspended again this semester. So I'm looking for some places to hide from the security guards." Maybe Theo would want to come out with her and Kinley sometime.

Theo raised an eyebrow. "You've already been suspended?" he asked. "Isn't it, like, the third week of school?" This was mostly said in jest--Theo's educational career had been peppered with his own suspensions (among other punishments)--but he was also a little surprised.

"You think this would be a good spot?" he asked, looking around. Maybe not, since Nat had been able to spot him. He scooped up his journal and tucked it into his backpack. "I bet if we went a little further in it'd be more secure."

Nat shrugged. "All we did was go to the music hall at night," she said. Who had they been hurting, by sneaking into the music hall? No one. The curfew was a stupid rule, and Nat didn't follow stupid rules.

Theo Beo wrote:"You think this would be a good spot?"

"Mm...maybe at night," Nat said, looking around. "Unless the guard is in Deilig..."

Theo Meo wrote:"I bet if we went a little further in it'd be more secure."

"You think so?" Nat asked, following him into the trees. "Or I could climb one of these." She laughed a little at the idea of climbing a tree to escape the school security guards. "Do you know Kinley Sommers?"

Theo picked his way through the trees and whatever underbrush there was and thought about sneaking out at night to come here. "If we got in here before a guard saw us, I think we could hide back here easy enough."

He looked up when she mentioned climbing the trees and laughed. Panda was still in her lemur form, and she dropped down from the trees onto his shoulder. "I used to climb trees all the time when I was at this one house," he told Nat, thinking back to the months he'd spent in the outskirts of Dahlin. He'd already forgotten the details of the family he'd stayed with, except that there had been another foster boy his age that he used to explore with. "Tried to make a tree house." It'd fallen apart as they climbed in it, and Theo's friend had broken his leg.

"Kinley Sommers?" Theo asked before shaking his head. "Nah, never heard of her. Who is it?"

"Oh yeah?" Nat asked, tilting her head slightly to one side as Theo talked about one of his old homes. He talked openly about the places he stayed, except for his original home, with his biological family. As curious as Nat was, she didn't ask about it. She wanted to. But she didn't. clio didn't usually ask her about her biological parents, and she liked it that way. "I used to want a tree house too, especially after we took this trip to Nadar."

"She's my best friend," Nat said. Her only friend besides Theo, honestly. But they were enough. "We hang out a lot, I think maybe you would like her too."

Theo had seen pictures of Nadarian (?) treehouses in a textbook once. Those were for actually living in, though, which Theo thought was kinda cool. "Was it cool there?" he asked.

Panda jumped off Theo's shoulder and onto a low hanging branch just as Theo lept off the ground and grabbed onto the branch, himself. He swung back and forth for a few seconds, thinking, and then jumped back down. "Maybe we can all hang out sometime," he said about Nat's best friend. He surprised both himself and Panda by saying that, but interestingly enough he was being genuine.

Even Nat, the most tolerable of the bunch, had slightly annoyed him in Earalas. No matter what he'd done, he felt like it was all contrived and forced there--nothing had ever been on his own terms. Here, at Redfern, it was up to him. And he decided, yeah, hanging out with Nat wasn't so bad at all. Maybe hanging out with this Kinley girl wouldn't be so bad, either.

"I thought it was cool. My parents don't really like it though," she said. They really only went if they had ~overloridian business~ there, which wasn't super often, because ladders, suspension bridges and unpaved trails were apparently really hard to navigate when you couldn't see or exclusively wore high heels like an idiot.

She jumped up and grabbed a low-hanging branch, then swung her legs up and hoisted herself onto it. Rio turned into a little monkey and easily climbed up several branches higher. "Maybe sometime the three of us could come here at night, climb up and look at the stars," she said, looking up the tree. It looked like it wouldn't be hard to climb all the way up.

Looking at the stars seemed a little lame to Theo, but the sneaking out and into the woods did not, so it sounded good to him. "We could do that," he said, picking up a fallen branch and swishing it around.

"I was wonderin'," he said as he continued to cut the air with his branch, "What do clio do around here for fun?" Theo'd never been to Martha's Vineyard before school started, and now that he was here he'd just spent the last two and a half weeks getting acquainted with the school and its campus.

"I know there's a beach around here someplace. What else?"

"Well there's the town," she said thoughtfully, standing up on her branch and grabbing one above her for support. She leaned back as far as she could without falling off. "It's fun I guess, if you don't mind the other clio. I like going to some of the live shows there." Kin was always telling her than she should try to get a gig at one of the bars or cafes in town, but Nat was too nervous for that. Maybe someday. "Some of the bars are settled only, but you can still get in if you're careful."

Theo had never actually attempted to get into a bar before, mostly because he avoided clio if at all possible and a bar seemed like the exact opposite of that. The live shows sounded a little interesting, though.

"You're into music or something, aren't you?" Theo asked. He tried to ignore Jack as much as possible, but he felt like he remembered him saying something about giving Nat lessons. "Do you go out to see the shows often?"

He dropped the fallen branch and jumped up to join Nat in the tree. He wanted to see how high he could get.

As Theo started to climb higher, so too did Nat. She figured she could probably get up higher than him, since she was so much smaller. "I love music," she told him. "It's the only thing I'm good at." Maybe if Theo was interested at all, she could try to teach him how to play something sometime. As soon as she had the thought she realized it was stupid, Theo would probably never agree to get involved with something Jack was into too.

"I see pretty much ever show I can," she said. It was the main reason she ever went out at all, unless Kin managed to convince her. "Sometimes they suck, but I've seen some really good ones."

"Cool," Theo said. He tried to think of something he was passionate about, but came up empty. "The only thing I'm good at is getting into trouble," he laughed. Once upon a time he thought he might like owning a business like his parents had, but that dream had faded as he aged.

"Let's do that sometime," he told her as they continued to climb higher. "See a show." He'd never actually seen something like that before, and it sounded interesting. He had a small fortune from Jack, money that the dad-thing kept throwing at him trying to buy his affection. It was both maddening and a little pathetic; especially since Theo didn't need money to do the stuff he wanted to do anyway. He wasn't sure how these show things worked, though, so if he needed to he could use some of the cash.

"Wow, these are some tall trees," he said, taking a second to look down. "This's gotta be, like, fifteen feet up or something." Some clio might be afraid of being this high, especially with no safety net, but it actually gave Theo a slight thrill. It was pretty awesome.

"Oh. I'm good at that, too." Nat laughed.

"Okay, let's do it," she agreed happily, when he said he wanted to see a show. She wondered if she should invite Kin too, or if he meant just her and him. "There's one next weekend, it's this band called Five Dead Guys."

She looked down too, when Theo mentioned how high up they were. Nat had never been afraid of heights. She loved climbing and being up in hot air balloons. Sometimes she thought she might choose Cuir when she settled. "Yeah. Don't fall," she said grinning.

Theo leaned against a branch so he could get a better view of the ground. "Splat," he said. He wondered, if they fell, if they'd be able to grab onto something before they crashed to the ground. There were a lot of branches to kinda break their fall.

"Five Dead Guys, huh?" Theo asked, looking back up at Nat. "What kind of a band name is that, anyway? Why is every band named something so fucking random?" Was it supposed to be poetic or something? It didn't make sense to him.

"I think it's so they stand out more," Nat said. She shook her head. "Like, to be successful, it's not enough to just be talented. Your band has to have like...an identity and personality. And charisma."

Charisma. That was what she didn't have, why as much as Kin and her family told her her music was great, she still didn't think she'd get anywhere. Who would want to watch her perform? What would make her stand out? Maybe she could come up with a weird stage name for herself.

Theo still didn't get it, so he just shrugged his shoulders. Seemed like an awful lot of work, honestly. Jack's band had an equally strange name, but he couldn't remember what it was. He almost asked if Nat knew what it was so he could make fun of it, but it looked like the conversation had made Nat think about something that bothered her. Instead of asking her about it, he looked away, back down at the ground.

"Bet I can beat you back to the ground," he told her, looking back up. Panda, still in her lemur form, dropped down a few branches, getting a head start on what she knew was about to be a loud, slightly dangerous journey down.

"Hey!" Nat yelled down at Theo as he got a head start. Monkey Rio leapt down from branch to branch as Nat scrambled to catch up (catch down?) to Theo. She had just gotten to be neck-and-neck with him near the bottom when a tiny branch snapped under her foot and she fell the rest of the way, landing flat on her back on the ground.

She lay there stunned for a second, the air somewhat knocked out of her, before raising her head with a slight groan to look at Theo. "I win."

Theo had too much momentum to pause when Nat slipped on a broken branch and fell to the ground, so he landed with a thud next to her before he was able to say, "Hey! You cheated!" She'd spoken, so he didn't check to see if she was alright or anything. Instead, he laid back onto the ground next to her and breathed deep, laughing.

"Wow, I haven't moved that fast since..." he struggled to think. "Oh, since I ditched those cops after me and Beau tagged that playground in Earalas." It had been a month or so since that happened, though. And Beau had just been one more "friend" Theo had written off in his life. "You ever do any street art?" he asked, turning his head so he could look at Nat.

Nat shifted a little as Theo laid down next to her. She felt a little banged up, but nothing serious. "Me? Nah. I'm not even good at art," she said. "Mollie's the artist."

She imagined Mollie doing "street art" and laughed out loud. "Not that Miss Perfect herself would ever dream of doing such a thing."

She did think it would be kinda cool to like, tag the side of a train or something. But her artistic skills were on the level of a five-year-old's, so there was no point.

"Pfft," Theo said as he thought about Mollie. He'd spent little time with her, but he knew exactly why Nat called her Miss Perfect. But you didn't need to be artsy to spray paint. Theo lifted his shoulders in a semi-shrug from his spot on the ground. "I'm not any artist either. Sometimes it just feels good to do it." Maybe it was dumb, but it felt good to make a mess sometimes. "And the way I feel running from the cops is as good a drug as any I've had before," he added. "Costs less, too."

He held a hand up in the air and closed one eye, looked at the silhouette of it against the tree branch-marred sky. Maybe he'd do that sometime, here. If he could find a good spot for it.

Nat thought about it. "You know the funny thing is, even if I did get caught doing something like that by the cops, it's not like they would do anything," she said. The absolute worst consequence she could imagine would be like, community service. Just like being suspended from school, it was such a non-consequence.

She turned her head and looked at Theo. She hated to admit it, but he was actually kind of...cute. Good looking. Objectively, of course. "Maybe I'd do it. But on a train car or something, not like someone's house."

You know, a train car is still someone's property, Rio pointed out. Yeah, but it was still different.

Theo hadn't thought about that before, but now that she mentioned it, with her dad being who he was, he figured Nat was pretty untouchable. Theo wasn't sure how he felt about that. It wasn't jealousy, like what some clio would feel, but something else. Disappointment, maybe? Like hanging out with a cop's kid, would this take some of the thrill and fun away from breaking the rules?

"I wouldn't mind going to work on some of those campus buildings," he told her, pocketing the thoughts about Nat's family. "Don't worry, I'll leave the music one alone," he added. He was just kidding, jabbing her about her passion. He actually thought it was cool, her music thing.

Nat was actually a little conflicted about whether or not she would tag a school building. It wasn't that she cared about the school itself. While she wasn't a fan of the teachers or security guards here, she actually did like some of the custodians, and they would be the ones who would have to clean it up if Nat and Theo didn't get caught.

"Some weekend we should go to the mainland," she said, changing the subject. "Go exploring. I get so bored on this stupid island."