Maka's heart plummets into her stomach when she sees her across the room, prancing around in a short, tight dress and high heeled boots. Unfortunately, it's her that sees Maka first, and she comes over, a paper bag rustling noisily in her hand.

"Maka! I'm sorry to disrupt you and your friends, but you forgot to get your lunch this morning and your father asked me to bring it to you." She beams.

"Blair, um," Maka says, taking it. The feeling the heat of her classmates' stares burns into her back. "Thanks."

"No problem!" she gushes. "He made it special for you, you know. Peanut butter and jelly with the crusts cut off. And those baby carrots! And-"

"Don't you need to get back to work?" Maka asks loudly with enough volume to make the onlookers look on.

"Oh, no, silly. I'm off today. Do you know if your father's here?"

"He works... in this building. I'm sure he's around. But he's busy, you know," Maka adds. "He might not have time to talk to you right now."

"Who said we'll be talking?" She winks one orange eye.

"Please keep your voice down," Maka begs.

"You need to take a chill pill." Blair rifles around in her bag and pulls out a lollipop, handing it to her like she's four years old again and needs help reaching the bathroom sink. "Don't worry, I'm outta here. Just as soon as I find that daddy-o of yours!" Her heels click all the way out of the cafeteria.

Just as suspected, she gets catcalls and hoots from half of the male population and does nothing to discourage them. Instead, she blows kisses. A quarter of the male population now sport head injuries from falling on the floor.

"Who was that, Maka? Your mommy?"

"She can be my mommy anyday!"

"Yeah, I just wanna play house with that!"

Stop objectifying women, you actual swine is what she wants to say, even if the woman in question is the person who's ruining her life. Instead, she sits numbly, hands clutching the paper bag, as her schoolmates holler after Blair and frantically ask Maka for her number.

Black Star pats her hand awkwardly, trying to be of reassurance. But when he opens his mouth to speak, it's not some wise fortune cookie advice.

"Can I have your lollipop?"

Maka runs out. Out of the cafeteria, out of the school, almost out of the property until she realizes that would be considered skipping. Skipping. The word tingles in her mouth, tastes like excitement. It sounds like something worth trying. But she doesn't know how. Who knows how?

She finds Soul.

He turns with a start when he hears his name, then relaxes, squinting a little. "Albarn?"

"I need to get out of here."

"Um. Like, out out?"

"Take me somewhere. It doesn't matter. Just get me the hell out of this place." She's wobbly in both her knees and her voice, so he rises from his spot and walks out to his bike. She tails him and clambers on with less grace than usual, and Soul has to bite his lip to keep from asking her what's wrong and immediately regrets it because now his mouth tastes metallic.

Best case scenario, she would just refuse to tell him. Worst case, she'd start bawling.

They drive. Soul feels moisture on his shoulder and almost turns around to see if she's crying, but he already knows the answer and doesn't want to risk crashing into another tree. He isn't a freshman anymore, this is a motorcycle instead of a golf cart, and there's nobody around to see the stunt even if he decides to pull it except for Maka, who would most likely scream at the top of her lungs that he's a psychopath and call the police to take him away.

He kind of wants to go to the local diner, a small burger joint with greasy checkered floors and arguably the best milkshakes around and waitresses with pastel aprons and beehive hairdos.

Hot, salty fries would taste great right now, and his breath probably reeks so it might comfort her if he isn't coughing tobacco into her face. Chain smoking at school is a bad habit that he knows he needs to stop, but sometimes stress and/or boredom gets to him and he ends up going through half a pack of Marlboros in one sitting. It's like the feeling you get after eating too much; you feel guilty and heavy and just bad. He feels like there's sticky tar weighing down his lungs, which there is, but it's damn right tangible when he tries to take in a breath and starts hacking like a cat with a hairball.

Maybe a large paper cup of Coke and a double cheeseburger would make Maka stop hiccuping.

"You wanna get something to eat?"

"Um. No?" He's saddened by her response but understands after what she says next. "That's where everyone looks for the kids who skip."

"Kids who skip, huh? That would be us." He grins, but she doesn't say anything. "Don't you feel cool now? You're being so disobedient. You're on your way to becoming a real rebel. Fight the system. Disrespect teachers." She's still silent. "So, uh, where don't they look for the people who ditch? I mean, since you know so much about the subject."

"I don't know. Where do you go?"

Truthfully, he either hides out in the foresty area behind the school just to be able to say he is technically "at school" or drives around aimlessly. Back roads, country roads, freeways, through the city, past the city. Once he went to the next town over and spent the day there. Nothing much to do but wander around on foot, but no one questioned him because he wasn't the kind of person you would want to approach anyway, and there wasn't a high school or any sign of teenagers anywhere. Mostly retired folks and small businesses and little yappy dogs.

She's probably expecting him to go around partying during school or hooking up with twenty four year olds with self-administered facial piercings in a paint-splattered van or shooting up heroin in a dirty alley. He doesn't have the heart to tell her that he actually just plays with a lighter and takes naps. It's going to seem dull compared to whatever her mind is making up.

Then the weirdest thing happens.

Soul takes her to his house.

If she's being honest, Maka always pictured his house as a tiny, rundown shack in the middle of the not-so good area of the city with gangs and drug dealers and screaming neighbors, and is utterly stunned to see a completely ordinary place when they pull up in his driveway.

"There shouldn't be anyone home," he says, turning off the engine.

Maka takes a minute to marvel at the domesticality of it all. The house is a light powder blue, calm and comforting like the sky on a spring day. White trim, white door. The lawn is well kept. Bushes of pastel pink roses and periwinkle hydrangeas bloom wildly. She's still stunned when she sees this, because Soul doesn't seem like the gardening type and the yard looks like someone's been slaving over it for hours. There's no way it can look that good all by itself. Maybe his mom or dad has a green thumb.

"You can come in, you know."

She does.

The inside of the house is normal too. Almost… expensive-looking. There's granite countertops in the kitchen, plush couches, doilies. It's the doilies that catch her attention. A little patch of lace and the smell of day-old brownies sitting in a glass dish under plastic wrap. A clock shaped like a cat. A photo of a family behind polished glass; a young boy, an older boy, and two parents.

"You live with your grandmother, don't you?"

Soul freezes for a second, then looks back at her. "Yeah."

"What happened to your parents? They aren't… you know…"

"No, no. They're not dead or anything. Although they might as well be," he adds in an undertone.

"Where are they? Vacation or something?"

"They're up East. Other side of the country." After glancing at Maka, he continues. "We, um, don't keep in touch."

"That's horrible."

"Not really. We don't get along well. Put us in the same room and I promise you, someone's gonna die." He leads her down a flight of stairs. "I left with my grandma when I was fourteen. She agreed to take me with her when she moved here. She needed warmer weather and I needed out."

"Would it be nosy of me to ask why you left?"

Soul opens the door to his room and gives a half-shrug. "It was constricting. My parents are a couple of upper class asshats, and they were controlling as fuck towards me and my brother. Dress us up, feed us, tell us what to do and what not to do and how to act proper and pleasant all the time. It gets exhausting."

"You have a brother." Maka's surprised. She tries to picture him with a sibling.

"Yeah. Wes. He's still there. He prefers that life, anyway. Everyone worships him back home. He isn't the one who let everyone down and vanished."

"At least you got away from them."

Soul notices the sour expression on her face, and smiles in that crooked way of his. "Guess we both have shitty families, huh?"

Being in his room is like exploring a monster's lair. It's scary. Anything can pop out at you. You don't know what could be hiding in here.

Mostly it's just… stuff. Barely-touched textbooks, some band and movie posters (Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz artists, along with Kill Bill and Battle Royale), what looks to be a long overdue copy of Animal Farm from English class freshman year, clothes all over the floor, a messy bed, miscellaneous junk.

He stares at her menacingly but also a little nervously, like he's daring her to say something about the ceramic kittens in the bathroom, or the photos of what must be him on the fireplace mantel because no one else has that much fluffy white hair or fangs like a teething baby shark. He's like Jaws mixed with Jack Frost mixed with Count Dracula. In the pictures, he's sitting at a piano, standing next to a well-dressed family, crawling around on the ground with rolls of baby fat and a poofy diaper. Nothing says that this house belongs to a boy who terrorizes schoolchildren to the point of crying so hard they can't see straight.

Soul rummages through a box and pulls out a small bottle of something, and Maka moves her hand from its place on her cheek and looks at it warily. "What's that?"

He takes a swig after removing the cap and she wrinkles her nose. "You're drinking here?"

"Where do you want me to go, outside? I don't want neighbors spying and reporting it back to Grandma."

Maka finds this amusing for some reason. Every other time, he begs for attention from teachers until they're red in the face, but now he's afraid of an old woman?

Soul holds the bottle out to her. "It won't kill you."

"How do you know?"

He puts it in her hand. She visualizes it as a loaded gun. "Trust me."

He's been saying that a lot lately, and she's been trusting him a lot lately. Nothing bad has happened because of it yet, so she tips the contents into her mouth and coughs immediately after, the amber liquid burning like fire as it slides down her throat. A moment later, it warms her belly like breath from a dragon.

"You like?"

"I don't not like."

"You're a strange one, you know that?"

Maka gulps another mouthful and relishes the sizzling feeling in her chest.

"Slow down."

"No."

"Maka, I'm serious. Slow down."

"I do like, actually. I like very much."

They finish off the remainder of what's left in the bottle, and Maka's kind of sure that it was half full when he got it out, but it still seems like a lot. She moves from her spot on the floor to lay on his bed, and everything seems slowed down when she shakes her head from side to side like a dog with water in its ears. Soul might be talking, she can't exactly tell because she's staring at the ceiling and counting the little bumps in the plaster.

This makes her feel dangerous, edgy, like she could even fit in with Soul's crowd. Grown up and laid back. She's cool. Skipping an important test in calculus to sit around drinking with the school's trouble kid.

Wait, skipping a what?

Oh, no.

Maka no longer feels carefree. She feels sicker than she did when she had the stomach flu for a week and a half in the seventh grade.

Soul notices and frowns at her. "Everything okay?"

Her face changes from rosy pink to puke green, and when she claps a hand over her mouth, he quickly shoves a wastebasket under her face, seeing the telltale signs and reacting faster than a bolt of lightning. "Bathroom's on the left once you get upstairs." He gives her a look that says don't you dare throw up on the carpet and she wobbles up the steps clutching the bin with white knuckles.

He can hear her emptying her stomach all the way from his room and debates going up to help.

When he gets to her, she's mostly just dry heaving.

They sit against the bathroom cabinets under the sink. Maka's rubbing her eyes the way she does when there's tears she's trying to hide, and Soul mists the room with lemon-basil air freshener.

"I'm sorry," she says, sniffling. Her hands are limp at her sides, palm-up. "I don't know what I was expecting. I thought escaping with you again would help, but it didn't."

"No harm done. Besides you losing your breakfast."

"I have a really major test that I'm supposed to be taking right this minute, and instead I'm here with you and wishing I didn't hop on your stupid bike, and-"

"You can make up the test, right? And if it makes you feel better…"

Maka sniffs again. "What?"

"...You can't hold your liquor for shit."

The tears stop falling, and her shoulders quake when she laughs. "How is that supposed to make me feel better? Ya big jerk. It's your fault that you brought out the booze."

"It's supposed to discourage you from drinking, duh. You'll remember your first experience as totally horrible and never want to do it again."

"That's some sneaky psychology you got going on there." She waggles her finger, and he pushes her off of him when she starts to lean on his shoulder.

"I think you're still drunk."