Page 19 of Raven's Dawn
Jake hadn’t been the one that I’d considered a classmate, either. Rain had been. She came home from school each day, and we sat down with some textbooks, and she regurgitated what she had learned in class.
Still, I let him tell the story. Even if it was one I wasn’t proud to be a part of.
“It was my senior prank.” After taking a gulp from Amara’s flask, Jake gestured around the fire. “You guys know about that? Senior pranks?”
Most of the others had retreated to their tents. All that remained around the campfire were me, Jeremy, Luci, Amara, and Jake. Aside from the sound of the ocean crashing in the distance, the only sounds that carried were our laughs. Jeremy and Luci didn’t laugh as much as we did, but they listened.
And I had to admit, this was one thing I missed dearly. Sitting around a campfire in the dead of night was a regular occurrence here. At home, it was a special occasion. This was just the norm on the Fae Realm. Someone would play guitar, and someone else was singing, and we would talk, and we would laugh, and it just felt right.
“I’m from Earth,” Jeremy said. “So yeah, I know what a senior prank is.”
“I’ve watched enough television,” Luci said.
“Well, there was this teacher I hated. Total cunt.”
That much, I remembered. Even if, now that I was older, I didn’t appreciate the language.
“Anyway. I had the genius idea to bring a few cows into her classroom. I took it from a farmer down the road. Her class was on the highest floor, so I knew it was gonna be a hell of a time to get the cows back down, right? But I didn’t just want the cows there to slow down the start of class.”
This… I did not remember.
“So I did some research in the library, and I found out that this food for sheep gives cows diarrhea. So I gave it to all of them after we finished bringing them upstairs. It was a disaster by the time class started. We ended up getting to skip that day.”
For a few heartbeats, I stared at him in disbelief.
He just kept laughing, and we all just kept staring.
“Did you clean it up?” Jeremy asked. “Or pay the vet bill?”
“Hell no. They would’ve known I did it, and I wouldn’t’ve gotten to graduate.”
“Jesus, dude,” I said under my breath, shaking my head at him.
He cocked his head to the side and opened his mouth to speak, but Jeremy spoke first.
“I broke into a cosmetic animal testing facility and got caught freeing them all. The shit we do as kids,” Jeremy said. Ever so slightly, he narrowed his eyes at Jake. “Good thing we’re older and wiser now, huh?”
I saw what he was doing there and respected it. “Eh, I don’t know. I’m not so opposed to what you did there.”
“The cops weren’t too happy.” A bare smile. “But you live, you learn. Now I know how to not get caught.”
We all laughed, except for Jake. He sat there, obviously going over what he just confessed to. Just barely, his shoulders slumped. As if he was only now understanding why that was a horrible prank.
A quiet giggle sounded from the tent behind me, slightly to the left. My tent, where Rain, Warren, and Ezra were. I glanced that way but paid it no mind. Just grabbed my backpack off the ground and lifted out a granola bar.
As I chomped into it, Jake looked at me questioningly. “That really doesn’t bother you?”
“I’ve been dying to ask the same thing,” Amara said.
Chewing, I made out a vague, “Hmm?”
“You know.” Jake nodded toward the tent. “Hearing them in there. Knowing what they’re doing, or what they were doing.”
I snorted a laugh. “Because they were fucking?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Jake said, pale cheeks flushing. “Isn’t that weird for you?”
“Not really, no.”